Dude Becomes a Lady

1/31/07 – Maybe I am the last man standing, but I do not believe in sex change operations. I do not believe that we can truly make a man into a woman, or vice versa. Medical science tells me otherwise, but I stubbornly will not listen.

If I yank a hood ornament off of a Jaguar and stick it on my Buick, it does not make my Buick a Jaguar. If I decide I would rather be black than Latino, putting on blackface does not make me so. Under the makeup and under the cosmetic changes, I am ultimately still the same person.

I grew up in the land of "sex" changes and alternative lifestyles--San Francisco, which I like to call "San Fransicko." A land where nothing is exactly what it is supposed to be. But even after spending 24 years there, nothing prepared me for the story of a 12-year-old German boy who convinced his parents that he was really a girl trapped in a boy's body. Instead of treating this as a mental illness, or at the very least a major identity crisis, the parents indulged him and allowed him to become the world's youngest sex change patient at age 14. How sad, how tragic--and how avoidable.


Very few of us get through adolescence without experiencing an identity crisis at some level. Parents need to stop indulging their children to such levels of excess. Doesn't it seem strange that we never saw such stories of this happening when we were kids? How about in our grandparents' generation? Where were all the sexually confused people then? Yes, androgyny has always been around. So has homosexuality. But doesn't it seem a little strange that the number of sexually confused people today seems to keep getting higher and higher? Do you think it has any to do with the fact that being confused is considered cool rather than a crisis? Does it have anything to do with the facts that colleges and communities have clubs and outreach programs telling us this is all normal behavior??

So now Tim is Kim. The German taxpayers have spent $40,000 to fund the
treatment. The child's identity now reflects the sex change. And I am the last stubborn man who will not stand and applaud.