In my experience, the trans community has already separated transgender from transexual. Historically, I’m not sure the two were ever the same except from the misunderstanding of non-trans people.

If there’s at least one thing good about English — it’s got no hesitation adapting, adopting, inventing or just plain thieving words from anywhere to better say what is meant.

“profil aérodynamique” still cracks me up.

(Thanks Bill — quite a statement in 1959, no doubt! Could have been worse…)

I decided to use the opportunity to practice my HS German on the drive home. It was a hot summer day, and even with the A/C going it was warm in the car. So at one point I glanced over at her and casually asked, “Sind Sie heiss?” which literally means “Are you hot?”

Well, from the look on her face, I could tell I’d said something wrong. When it became clear I wasn’t coming on to her, she explained that “Sind Sie heiss?” means “Are you sexually aroused?” Gasp!

If I were asking about her comfort, I should have asked, “Ist es Ihnen heiss?” or “Is it hot to you?” Makes sense.

There’s more to language than simple translation, that’s for sure. I don’t practice German much anymore.

“Because this is new, it therefore shouldn’t exist.”

That’s what the argument about “traditional marriage” boils down to, and it isn’t only silly on the face of it (didn’t they say that about railway travel?) we’ve seen it’s not even true: it isn’t new.

Are there any arguments left?

Of course like so much of this these are games of semantics and language, but when part of the “issue” is language, it is important to acknowledge these differences.

I think Stanton’s final argument was that what we don’t see in anthropology is homosexual homogendered marriages. And in this sense I think he is correct. However, one has to ask if that is a relevant argument when we have examples of homosexual marriages and of homogendered marriages. I think Stanton’s argument is that marriages have to have at least one “hetero-” component to them. But why that is an inherent necessity is a fair question to ask. I cannot help but think he is grasping at any straw to argue that “because this is new, it therefore shouldn’t exist”.

There is no evidence that homosexual marriages are harmful to society or children (“won’t someone please think of the children!” being the battle cry of Rev Lovejoy’s wife on the Simpsons). There is no evidence that homogendered marriages are harmful to society or children. All Focus on the Family is able to do to argue otherwise is ascribe to a double standard, as Glenn Stanton himself did. He was critical of my mention of Lamotrek same-sex marriages not causing harm to children (my mention is based on societal acceptance throughout the generations with no recorded evidence of harm), but then he used research that did not include adopted children in heterosexual families or children of same-sex parents to argue that children need parents of both sexes. It is very clear to me that same-sex parenting does not hurt children – well-known and legitimate studies on the subject do exist and given that Stanton does not reference them simply highlight that they do not support his argument: if they did one can be assured Focus on the Family would be mentioning them every chance they had. However, I noticed that Glenn did not address my comment that Focus on the Family’s efforts to deny same-sex couples the same rights and privileges opposite-sex couples get actually harms children because the couples do not get the important health benefits, etc. To me this signifies that Focus on the Family really doesn’t care about the children, or that they are willing to sacrifice some children in order to gain their political agenda.

I appreciated this discussion with Glenn and find him pleasant to interact with. However, I challenge him and the Focus on the Family organization to not base their arguments on double standards and outright lies. For the record, Focus on the Family has yet to issue a retraction and correction to its readers over its blatant lie suggesting that anthropologists support traditional marriage. They are supposed to be a Christian organization, right? Ultimately, I cannot help but think Focus on the Family is using children to achieve their political agenda; an agenda that is totally divorced from the teachings of Christ.

1. Please don’t say “transgenders”; say “transgender PEOPLE”. It’s an adjective, not a noun.

2. You don’t explicitly go into this either way, but to clarify for some readers (even within the LGB community there’s a fair amount of misunderstanding of trans people), unlike Indonesia’s bissu, calabai, and calalai, most American transgender people don’t identify as a “third gender”. Many actually identify within the binary, just not on the side of their biological sex. Others identify outside the binary, often feeling that they combine aspects of both genders.