A response to Cothran and his recent post mocking the notion of transgender, and mocking the transgendered.
I've had my disagreements with Martin Cothran over the years. He's a bigoted man, proud of teaching logic at a private school, yet utterly dependent on logical fallacies in his actual argumentation.
He wants creationism taught in public schools. He dislikes gay people and anyone else who challenges his notions of how sex and gender should work. He enjoys quoting Holocaust-denying racists like Pat Buchanan and cross-burning racists like Charles Murray. He celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday by listing the blog posts from 2009 he's most proud of. Sometimes he's basically harmless, as when he berates local universities for allowing students to undertake a sex education week, and claiming that fuzzy pink handcuffs are evidence of sexual abuse.
Other times, his bigotry is less adorable. Consider his recent post mocking the notion of transgender, and mocking the transgendered. He also seems to think he's the first to coin the notion of transhumanism.
Cothran has presumably been living under a rock for a while, having missed cultural phenomena like Jeffrey Eugenides' 2003 novel Middlesex, a meditation on the fuzzy cultural and physical boundaries around sex and gender. He's also apparently missed the debate surrounding Caster Semenya, the South African runner who has always thought of herself as a woman, and who has normal external female genitalia, but who turns out to have internal testes, and no ovaries or uterus.
Semenya and the 5-alpha-reductase deficient protagonist of Middlesex are not alone in complicating our understanding of gender as a necessary correlate of a specific genetic, biochemical, or anatomical status. Transgender individuals have the anatomy of one sex but identify with another. This identification starts early in life, and seems to be rooted in brain structure, among other things. The lives of transgendered children are incredibly difficult, and get no easier in college or later. The issue of transgender and intersex individuals in sports is especially fraught, as sporting is typically gender-segregated in ways that the rest of society is not.
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