Forgive the un-Christmas week post.
(Though some of our much-beloved Christmas stories — A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life — cover some grueling issues. Or carols about “No more let sins and sorrows grow/Nor thorns infest the ground/He comes to make His blessings flow/Far as the curse is found” or “Nails, spear shall pierce Him through.”)
I just started to read a piece on a website called Undark about “How the Texas Abortion Law Affects Transgender People.”
It begins:
SAMSON WINSOR MOVED across the country from Utah to Austin in 2019, hoping he would feel less out of place. The Texas capital city had creative opportunities and cheaper living costs than places like Los Angeles and New York City while still having a substantial population of transgender people to support his identity as a transgender man.
But Winsor said he’s still afraid. Weeks after having sex with someone, he noticed his menstrual period was late. While his hormone therapy affected the consistency of his periods, he worried about the possibility of being pregnant. Winsor anxiously awaited test results, recognizing how limited his options would be if he were pregnant.
He was overcome with relief when he learned he wasn’t.
“I didn’t want to be a pregnant man in Texas,” Winsor said. “It was terrifying for me because I realized, by the time I could even confirm I was pregnant, I didn’t know if I could even get somebody to look at me or even take me seriously walking in the door.”
Maybe it would have helped if doctors didn’t lie to you and actually told you about scientific helps to your confusion or legit gender dysphoria.
He is a man with a menstrual cycle. Okay. So I go to see what Undark is:
Undark is a non-profit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. It is published with generous funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, through its Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT.
Never mind about science at MIT? If presumably they are teaching — or allowing people to say — that men can have menstrual cycles?
Lord have mercy on us. People are hurting, and so many of our elite institutions are just hurting them more by lying to them and wanting us all to submit to the lie.
I’m reminded that Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human would be good for MIT students and everyone else who wants to be clear about what we’re dealing with in so much of public bioethics — and simple language and all kinds of societal pressures — to read. (I talked with Carter earlier this year here.)