As Nature Made Him

David Reimer (1965 - 2004) 

I stumbled across news of David Reimer’s suicide (Read full CBC News article here) on the Internet by accident when I was surfing the web this week and it both shocked and saddened me when I read of his passing away last month. He was 38.

Some of you, I know, will know who I am talking about, Reimer being a case study that has been (and unfortunately) studied and circulated among the psych and medical circle for many years and again when he came public with his story in 2000. For those of you who haven’t heard of David Reimer, he was the boy who got surgically reassigned as a female after a botched circumcision (using an unconventional method of circumcision) in the late 1960s left him with such a severely burned penis that it was surgically irreparable.

Left with a baby boy with testicles but no penis, his parents didn’t know what to do. They eventually happened to come across Dr John Money’s theories on sex and gender that it was nurture and not nature that determined a child’s gender, and that boys – when intercepted early enough – could be raised as girls, decided to investigate the option of raising David (or Bruce as he was originally named) as a girl. After considering the options, they decided it was better to raise Bruce as a girl and so, a few months before his second birthday, Bruce had his testicles removed and they took him home as a girl, and renamed him as Brenda.

Originally pronouncing the gender reassignment a success by Dr Money in an article published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour and known in the medical circle as the Joan/John case, the experiment starting coming undone when Bruce hit puberty and he found out about the truth of the botched circumcision. He attempted suicide three times, with the third attempt leaving him in a coma. But he eventually recovered, cut his hair, ditched his female clothing, renamed himself as David and aimed to live as normally as possible as a man, later marrying a woman. He eventually went public with his story in the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto, and in it, revealed his story of a childhood filled with confusion, misery and humiliation.

I couldn’t but help ponder about the tragedy of it all. I am saddened by his death – and of his twin brother’s death two years earlier as well. And I can only say a prayer for David as I type this – a man who lived, in my opinion, an extremely courageous life in circumstances that I cannot even begin to envisage myself in.

A Grassroots Gathering

I managed to find and turn up at this stranger’s house tonight having been told only the street name, no house number and that it had a tall gum tree in the front yard. I’d been invited to the second informal gathering of a group of Christians in their 20s (and possibly 30s) who want to do more in their lives to address issues relating to poverty and how it relates to their Christian faith.

I was the first to rock up and was greeted by the owner of the house and his university-aged son and Georgie their dog. Before long, other people started turning up. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. There were occupational therapists, law students, a plumber, fashion design student, an arts student, horticultural landscaper, speech pathologist and also a handful employed in the human services and mental health areas and also with youths. Oh, and, of course, a TV captioner too.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting myself into when I rocked up there tonight. I didn’t know anything about it other that it would be a night where some people come together on a very grassroots level to discuss about their thoughts and experiences on poverty and, in turn, on other related social justice issues and how that intersects with their faith. I will confess, however, that I have never been passionate about social justice issues and I also want to stress that it was NOT a social justice gathering tonight that I’d attended. And there was a consensus among us there tonight; we all felt it wasn’t a social justice gathering that we were coming to but rather something on how our common Christian faith intersected this issue. I went because I was curious to find out what other people feeling the same tension that I do about the poor and marginalised have to say.

The night was initiated and organised by two guys who’d gone on a TEAR Australia trip to India last summer and it was held in the house of one of the TEAR staff members. Commenting on the TEAR trip program, the staff member said that the purpose of those trips were to enable Christians particularly in our age group to go there and lose their (Christian) faith in order to find it again. I couldn’t help but break into a smile when I heard him say that.

The purpose of those trips, he said, was to enable these Christians to experience their Christian faith in a context that is so different to that which they’ve been brought up in and in staring at poverty in the face, challenge and ask themselves just exactly what it is that they believe in, what is important and what isn’t important and exactly how their faith can be integrated into the world around us. To strip their faith bare to the core and then rediscover it for themselves.

The premise underpinning the whole reason for gathering tonight was, without a doubt, God’s commandment to love our neighbour. And that encompasses looking out for the poor and bringing justice to where there is injustice. The convenor of the group threw out a question for us all to think – “What is the kingdom of God? What does it look like?” If we can answer that and if we can grasp the vision of what God’s kingdom looks like, then we can work towards it. God’s kingdom is not just solely the heaven that we get to when we die, it’s the here and now. And the kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of is already here and is in the present.

As the night progressed, people shared their various thoughts and experiences, including the tensions and dilemmas they had and the questions. Thoughts and issues we touched on briefly ranged from inequities of wealth in the world, the complexities of the multilayered aspects of poverty, of supply and demand, of God’s commandment to love your neighbour and what that meant, to issues of recycling, of being aware of how much we consume and what we consume, of sustainable energy resources, and materialism and consumer culture not only amongst the Christians of the developed nations but even also among the Christians of the developing countries.

Steve, the TEAR Australia staff member shared about how he bought a shirt on one occasion when he was in the US. Upon his return to Australia, he looked at the label and realised that it was actually made in Bangladesh and quite possibly by some poor person who was paid peanuts for making the shirt while the multinational pocketed the majority of the profit. However, on a recent trip to Bangladesh, he ended up meeting people there in aid programs that were equipping them with sewing skills in order to gain employment in those very same clothing factories! The pay may appear to be peanuts to us by our standards, but to these people, he said, the pay that they were earning at the clothing factory was far greater than what they would have otherwise been earning. One good thing about multinationals in developed countries, he continued, was that they are very susceptible to community pressure. And he encouraged us to exert pressure on multinationals to improve their act because when multinationals improve their work and pay conditions in countries like Bangladesh, other companies will eventually be pressured to follow suit in order to attract workers to work for them.

Warnings against becoming overly focused on the practicalities of social justice and losing our focus – God – was also pointed out. And even poor old Maslow’s hierarchy of needs got dragged into the discussion as well, somewhere during the night.

The night eventually ended with a consensus to meet up again on a regular monthly basis and to start addressing specific areas of concern for discussion in future meetings. As I walked to my car, I felt encouraged knowing that there were other Christians of my age out there with a similar burden. Incidentally, I'll be attending the UNOH Conference on the poor and marginalised this Saturday at the Swanston Street Church of Christ. And I am looking forward to meeting other Christians with this same tension in their lives and burden on their hearts.

Gay Marriages

Steve, a good mate of mine, rang me over the weekend and asked me if I’d seen the article by Dr Muriel Porter in The Age on June 14. I said I had but I hadn’t given it much thought since reading it until going over it again with him over the phone. In it, Dr Porter suggests that denying public recognition to long-term gay relationships simply promotes homophobia. I told him to wait while I went to get the newspaper clipping from my filing cabinet, only to return empty-handed. Clipping-less, Steve went on to read out an excerpt of it over the phone to me.

“The same people who want to deny gay couples any vestige of formal recognition for their union, are also the first to denounce the stereotypical gay lifestyle. They deplore the promiscuity presumed to be part and parcel of the world of gay bars and saunas.

“If gay people are denied proper public recognition of their partnerships, they are left with little other than the lifestyle offered by the gay community, which inevitably leaves them in a kind of shadowland. To the wider community, the myth of gay relationships as invariably short-lived and somehow degenerate, remains unchallenged.”

I responded with a sigh, one coupled with both frustration and a sense of weariness at the same time. The issue of homosexuality within the Church has always been like a bit of a Molotov cocktail to me, potentially highly explosive and volatile depending on who you talk to within the Christian community but yet also emotionally heart-wrenching, and sometimes, plain wearisome. These days, I think I’d much rather have a cocktail drink instead.

Dr Muriel Porter’s article, in my opinion, blurrs the boundary between Church and State. Generally speaking, I’m a believer in the separation of Church and State, with the Church acting more as a conscience to the State and to its people. However, any discussion of same-sex issues or same-sex marriage in this case, always inevitably leads to a plethora of other related issues - from semantics on the term ‘marriage’ to religious and social arguments for and against same-sex marriage and even queer politics. And I don’t intend to do quite just that, not in this post anyway.

But in that regard, concerning the separation of Church and State, political divisions, political debates and "wedge politics" over same-sex marriage should be understood for what they are, distinctively separate from the Church’s division, disagreements (or agreements, for that matter) on the same issue. The former approaches the subject with the concerns of the State behind it, and what they, the representatives of the State, feel ought to be in the best interests for its citizens. The latter approaches it more so with the concerns for the spiritual and moral well-being of its believers, and rightly or wrongly, also in the best interests of its believers and humanity at large.

Given that long-term de facto heterosexual relationships already receive some level of recognition by the State and also enjoy, to a certain degree, a level of legitimate status by the majority of society, it doesn’t make a strong case, in my opinion, to argue that denying formal public recognition to long-term same-sex relationships in the form of ‘marriage’ amounts to outright discrimination or homophobia. Just as two people in a cohabiting de facto relationship aren’t considered by most people to be ‘married’, it doesn’t mean that people therefore see either partner as being less significant or “relatively unimportant” to the other partner in the event of say, a crisis or death. One can still afford dignity and respect to individuals in a de facto relationship without necessarily calling them a ‘married’ couple or calling their lifestyle arrangement ‘marriage’ per se. And in some cases, some of these people are precisely in a de facto relationship because they have chosen not to get married.

Dr Porter also fails to mention that even within the gay community, there are differing views on same-sex marriage, with some even strongly opposed to the concept of same-sex marriage. For them, they see marriage as a heterosexual institution and they would want to have nothing to do with it. Then, there are also those who would like their relationships to be recognised by the State and Church as marriage. To assume that the gay community is united and is heading towards one similar direction on this issue would be nothing further from the truth.

This then brings me back to my original point about separating Church and State. Just exactly from who are those gay couples seeking recognition for ‘same-sex marriage’? From the State? From the Church? From society? From everyone? Is it mainly for the economic, taxation and superannuation benefits? The social recognition? Or is it for the formal legal recognition on paper? Or everything I’ve just mentioned? Quite frankly, I suspect that most people would agree that societal recognition of gay couples (at least in most Western countries) has long been accorded, even if informally and not institutionally enshrined as such. If it is a change in the taxation and superannuation benefits that they want (among other things), then I say, rightly seek that from the State.

Dr Porter’s suggestion that denying proper public recognition of same-sex partnerships leaves gay people with little options other than the lifestyles offered by the gay community - presumably those that are short-lived and somehow degenerate - is questionable. Same-sex couples like the late Australian author Patrick White (1912 - 1990) and his partner Manoly Lascaris (1912 - 2003) attest to the fact that long-term same-sex relationships are possible with or without being accorded ‘marriage’ status to it.

Taking Dr Porter’s suggestion, one would assume that in cities with large gay populations, like San Francisco, where there is a greater public acceptance and recognition of homosexuality and of homosexual couples, the number of short-lived relationships and the level of promiscuity would be significantly lower. And perhaps it is. I don’t know. I don’t have the statistics to say it isn’t so. However, why is it that I have a nagging feeling that that isn’t necessarily the case, in what is presumably a city with a much greater gay visibility, greater social acceptance and recognition of homosexuals and same-sex couples and relationships, even if not officially sanctioned as 'marriage'?

Or are those long-term same-sex relationships more to do with the dynamics of the individual couples and the lifestyle choices that they make rather than to do with whether society affords them a ‘marriage’ option or status for their relationship? I only wonder. But I’m certainly not confident about Dr Porter’s tacit assertion that public recognition of gay partnerships in the form of ‘marriage’ will be correlated with a decrease in promiscuity and, in turn, an increase in the numbers of long-term gay relationships.

Caritas vs Eros

I finished reading Andrew Sullivan’s Love Undetectable just over a year ago in between my solitude dips in the Indian Ocean at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Western Australia. I took a much-needed break away from Melbourne to think through some relationship issues that severely challenged my own spiritual relationship with God.

I deliberately chose to bring along Love Undetectable with me, partly because I was curious to see what Andrew Sullivan had to say about friendships. Love Undetectable was a memoir about life, humanity and survival. In it, he explores a few questions, but the one that I was most interested in was the question of whether friendship could be a substitute for love.

What I read surprised me. Here’s an excerpt from the book. Although I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, the sentiments he expresses in this excerpt gives food for thought, even if a bit extreme in some points.

“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship. And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God.

I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that institutionalised in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child.

I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialise our every existence.

The centrality of this love in our culture is so ingrained that it is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which it might not so. And this is strange in a society in which the delusions and dangers of such love are all around us: the wreckage of many modern marriages, the mass of unwanted pregnancies, the devastation of AIDS, the social ostracism of the single and the old. Even those sources of authority that might have once operated as a check on this extraordinary cultural pre-eminence have caved in to the propaganda of eros.

The Christian churches, which once wisely taught the primacy of caritas to eros, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs.

Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our society’s apotheosis of eros, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of eros properly conducted and achieved. We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for eros has acquired all the hallmarks of a cult. It has become our civil religion.”

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p194 &195 (Uncorrected proof version)

Family Values

 

Those of you residing in the Great South Land may or may not be aware of the above issue that's reared its head in the news lately. I wish I had something more to say on this subject but as such, I don't. And I don't know if I want to either. And so, this editorial article which appeared in yesterday's Age will have to do, if merely just to keep you up to date with the political observations of an impending Federal election?