THREE months ago, April Ashley of Liverpool died at the age of 86. She was a celebrity who once carried the name George Jamieson. In school, the boys mocked George and beat him up. At home, mother banged George’s head on the floor in fury and father, who detested George for his queerness, punched him often. Shamed by the family, George became ashamed of himself and attempted suicide twice but failed.
Then George went to Casablanca, and surgery turned him into a complete woman. Taking the name April Ashley, she won official recognition as a female only in 2005. Already past 60, she spent the remaining years of her life as a counsellor for thousands of despairing people.
Even as a child, George felt he was really a girl and not a boy. Much of the world, including Malaysia, does not recognise such feelings to be natural. But why did George persist in his feelings of being a girl despite the severe beatings he received? He was even raped once.
Discussion of transgenderism is so toxic that nations either condemn transpersons or give them full liberty.
In nations that condemn transpersons, we see tragedies unfold, with the denial of jobs and imposed social isolation. Transpersons also suffer brutal physical abuse and imprisonment, such as happened to Nisha Ayub some years ago.
Last year, Malaysia contemplated increasing the jail term for transpersons guilty of cross-dressing.
When the mere fact of being a transperson earns condemnation, hate crimes are spawned leading to violence. Four years ago, there were two reported cases of transgenders being set upon by groups of men in Seremban and Klang. The Klang victim died.
However, nations that practise social liberalisation, permitting unrestricted gay activities, have seen a huge upsurge in teenage children expressing gender dysphoria and going for biomedical gender reassignment through surgery and hormonal treatment.
Many of these teens are mere sympathisers who have been swayed by social influencers in friendship groups or through online contacts. Psychologically, troubled children may also resort to gender dysphoria as a way of coping with physical abuse. This is another tragedy when persons make a transition to another gender when they have not been born as a transperson, and later discover that they cannot reverse the effect.
Conservative religious authorities have worsened the problem. In 2015, a Syrian judge, while imposing capital punishment on a gay, told him that death would help cleanse him of his sin. In 2016, a California preacher praised a mass killer who shot 49 gays dead. In 2018, a religious leader in Kelantan declared that gays on an island in Indonesia had incurred God’s wrath and caused a tsunami.
Last year, a religious leader in Penang declared that transgender individuals were acting contrary to the laws of nature. But does anybody really know the laws of nature? In 2018, a pair of gay penguins in a Sydney aquarium successfully incubated a baby chick given to them by their keepers. In 2019, a zoo in Berlin had the same experience with two gay penguins. London Zoo once mounted a banner above its penguin beach with the words “Some penguins are gay”.
In 2015, scientists discovered that wild male lizards in Australia changed their gender to become female when the weather got too hot. Back home and a year earlier in 2014, scientific studies showed that Sarawak’s delicious Terubuk fish could change from male to female upon reaching maturity. New Scientist weekly reported in 2013 that virgin births are surprisingly common among vertebrate creatures in the wild. The list includes sharks, snakes and Komodo dragons.
An all-female species known as Ambystoma mole salamander has been swimming around for some five million years and is still thriving without males. Around 90 female-only species of fish, amphibians and reptiles have been discovered.
Scripture mentions the creation of male and female humans, without mentioning any transgender. On this basis, preachers assume that transgenderism is a creation of Satan, who tries to make people confused and unhappy. Religion gets discredited when preachers fail to interpret scriptures contextually.
Let us examine the context in one scripture. “...male and female, He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’...” (Book of Genesis). The emphasis is on human procreation for which you need to highlight male-female pairing. In its creation account, Genesis also does not mention viruses and bacteria. So, are these also Satanic beings?
Scriptures convey messages often in story form. If you take the story details as a complete description of the facts, it confirms you are literate in being able to read but you are not literary. You do not know how to interpret a story.
Every science tells us that life on earth is wholly interconnected, with nothing coming into being in pop-up fashion. Male and female genders do not just pop up like that, with males here and females there. They are part of a continuum. It is best to depict them as the two bulging ends of an hourglass. A short narrow stem in the middle connects them. That stem is the transgender.
Genuine transpeople number only between 0.25% and 0.5% of any human population. Never more than 0.5%. Social studies indicate that the number is usually capped at 0.3%. This means that if your school has 1,000 students, up to three may be transpersons. This number tallies with our personal experiences. If you had studied in a big school, you would have encountered at least one gay schoolmate.
Your genes decide whether you are assigned to be male, female or a trans. A team of DNA scientists in 2018 discovered that there was no single gay gene but that hundreds or thousands of genes each exercised some influence.
As early as the 1980s, scientists had already found that neither gender is completely male or female. The difference between the genders is in the degree of their development as males or females, not a matter of absolute separation.
Transgender gene orientations are vestiges of an ancient geological past, before the male and female genders crystallised into separate bubbles. Transgender persons suffer a lot, so let us not torment them further but leave them to be what they are.
At the same time, we must forbid gay promotional activities that could influence straight kids to think of changing their gender.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
