The Bleecker Street Chronicles
The Trouble with Tribbles
by Debora Black
Remember when the star ship Enterprise docked at Deep Space Station K7 to guard a shipment of grain, and Lieutenant Uhura brought a tribble back to the ship after taking shore leave? Once aboard the Enterprise, the tribble—a small, fury, purring creature—unexpectedly multiplied. The crew was delighted because the tribbles were adorable—even Spock agreed, which tells you everything. But the tribbles continued to multiple at an alarming rate and were soon occupying all of the nooks, halls, and rooms of the ship. They consumed large amounts of food. Worse, they ate the shipment of grain that Captain Kirk was supposed to protect, and by this time, their numbers were threatening to overload the Enterprise, entirely. Excess, it turned out, was not a good thing.
Excess can appear in any form. In seventh grade, I once ate so many olives that I threw-up. Once, I saw a guy being interviewed on television whose entire body was covered in creepy tattoos. He was complaining that people were afraid of him. Go figure. More recently, I met a man at work who said he got a divorce because the UPS truck showed up at his house every day with packages from his wife’s online shopping. He said he couldn’t keep up with it anymore.
It’s no secret that in recent years part of the trans community has been wrecking a lot of havoc, and when Dylan Mulvaney entered the mainstream scene, the country was already primed, and all assortment of chaos ensued again. I found the attacks on Dylan rather unfair, actually. But it seems that while the L, the G and the B’s are flourishing in the mainstream, the T’s, and the rest, are not. Maybe it has to do with the downside of excess. Maybe it has to do with misunderstanding. In any case, the situation is unfortunate, because a lot of people on the trans spectrum and general supporters of the LGBT community, such as myself, are very likely counting on transgender leadership to be inspiring and responsible instead of destructive and just plain weird.
It’s easy to come on too strong. Especially for young people who are so full of enthusiasm, passion, and energy. They often jump in with both feet before they bother to look around. Which causes problems. For instance, although it might have been well intentioned, to me it came across as destructive when a portion of the LGBT+ community created a new flag, when the original rainbow flag so finely represents the all-inclusive nature of the cause. By redesigning the flag, I felt the newcomers cast aside proper observance to the people who founded and grew the Pride movement, showing insufficient respect or gratitude toward the difficulty of those achievements. The redesign I had been noticing incorporates the rainbow flag and adds more—more stripes, more colors, more tiers of thought—but with all the extra stuff, what does it all even mean? When I went online to find out, it turns out that there are now a total of 23 Pride flags. 23! Each one represents a different subsection of the whole community, all based on a perceived scale of how male or female one is, how light or dark one’s skin tone is, the person’s sexual likes and dislikes—including what type of partner is preferred and the strength or weakness of one’s libido. Astonishingly, there is even a flag for me—the straight supporter of the LGBT+ community. You can see all of the flags and read about the meaning of each one here: https://www.health.com/mind-body/different-pride-flags-what-they-represent. While I do understand that finding one’s people and one’s place of belonging is a strong need and drive within all of us, the very idea of flying a flag outside my house or my workplace that summarizes the intimate—and by the way, Private—details of my physical, emotional, and sexual existence strikes me as kind of…odd. And self-absorbed. Maybe it is better just to be who we are without needing to announce it to everyone. I do, however, understand the desire to have a special flag to carry during a Pride parade, for example, to show all of the variety of people the rainbow flag represents. But overall, my observation is that a good bit of dignity takes us a long way with society and with ourselves. The original rainbow flag provides that dignity beautifully for all.
In addition to deserting the Pride flag, newcomers also renamed the group—multiple times, adding more and more letters. They demanded special pronouns and even reinvention of our language. E instead of he or she? Ridiculous. And that is why that specific move did not go over well across society. It doesn’t occur to a lot of the younger ones that their zeal for their own significance and individualism strikes others as, well, narcissistic. Honestly I stopped caring after T, not because I devalue the other letters or the distinctions, but because there seemed little point in publicly obsessing about such minutia of individuality. Certainly nobody cares about all of the nuances that make me, me. Nor should they. There are much more relevant topics to attend to in our world. Bottom line, gender and sexuality are far from distinct in many people. We get that.
Or do we? I concede that it is true that a lot of society and a lot of conservatives in particular struggle with the entire concept of transgender-ism. Many people believe that transgender individuals fabricate their gender and sexual confusion. Many say that transgender individuals are simply mentally ill. I never like hearing those remarks and reject those poorly considered and dismissive conclusions. A larger reality suggests that the complexity of the human body is almost without bounds. Even though humanity has learned a lot, much more remains a mystery to scientists—especially when it comes to the brain. While there is no scientific doubt two genders—male and female—accurately represent the biological norm of human sexuality and reproduction, we all know that natural science does not create cookie-cutter life forms. We must not ignore, that there are very real differences among all of us across all aspects of our physical and psychological traits, with our biochemistry determining nearly everything about our physical and emotional selves. True, gender is initially and foremost defined by chromosome structure. But gender and sexuality are further driven by hormones, pheromones, endorphins, the 5 senses (some say 7), our central nervous systems—including our brain function—and possibly a lot more. It is further known that the production and distribution capabilities of those variables change during different growth periods of our lives and are not identical from person to person. By these facts, it seems the only possible outcome is that while most individuals will develop distinct clarity in gender and sexuality, others simply will not. Each of us needs only to look in the mirror to discover all kinds of variations on the human theme—some we like, some we don’t like. Science is just that way.
That being said, I do fault certain members of the trans community for their abuse of Title Nine and women themselves. Before anyone tries to deny that, let’s take a look at the situation. First, many people don’t even clearly know what Title Nine is about. Wikipedia provides a really good outline. Some of that content is loosely paraphrased here. The original purpose of Title Nine (part of the Education Amendments of 1972) was to provide gender equity for female students (elementary through college) by eliminating sex-based discriminations in schools and education programs receiving federal funding. It intended to target academic equity. Nonetheless, one outcome of Title Nine was that female athletic programs in schools were financially leveled out and female athletes and athletics soared because female students were able to add more sports to the school program and optimize their access to equipment, facilities, and training. But then President Obama stepped in and allowed those students with gender identity issues and claims to usurp the rights and protections for girls and women, protections necessitated—we all had agreed—because of the smaller muscle mass, skeletal structure, and organ capacity of the female body. Here, it is important that we acknowledge that even though a person can rightly determine for himself or herself that he or she belongs to another gender, we cannot conjecture that the biology of this person belongs to that self-appointed sex, rather there are distinct physical and emotional inequities that measure outside the desired gender’s norms. Consequently, the solution is not to deprive girls and women from their performance achievements, scholarships, and professional opportunities. Nor does the solution need to deny trans people opportunities. Instead, the solution is to create another category and appropriate locker room facilities for the trans participants. The competition might be small to begin with, but since there are indeed 23 flags representing the entire LGBT group, it seems logical that participants in the trans category could rapidly multiple in kind.
More concerning on the trans topic is the push by a portion of the trans population to subject children and teens to hormone therapies and surgeries by influencing legislation that expands the roles and rights of our schools and medical community via restricting parental rights and jeopardizing the long-term health and happiness outcomes for the young. Readers, I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know that overstepping the very clear boundary from the public sphere of government and institutions into the private sphere of family is no way to create friends or support for your cause. The backlash came and will continue as every parent, grandparent, aunt and uncle will rightly tell you, keep your paws off my kid.
But how exactly could society help trans individuals? After all some (and maybe most) in the trans community do know these experiences: Nobody understood me, nobody supported me, I couldn’t tell me family, I was completely isolated, I was suffering every day, I did not belong anywhere in this world, I became unhealthy, I thought about killing myself. Obviously there must be enormous strain on the psyche of any individual who is not in sync with everyone else around them and the world at large in terms of the most basic identification mechanism as gender.
Rather than thinking we need to fix a psychological disorder, as some approach the issue, it might be a better practice to consider the physical nature of gender and sexual development and receive the associated information without all the excess drama that currently surrounds the topic. This includes, I need to say regarding the other approach, rushing to a medical solution to transition to a different sex. As tempting as it might be to gratify the request of your child and put him or her out of pain, it is important for everyone to know that human development is often not considered complete until somewhere around age 28. Erik Erikson and Daniel Leviason are a few names associated with human development theories. But there are also more recent studies and thoughts circulating in the scientific community that suggest there are a tremendous amount of physiological changes, including brain changes, which occur through late adolescence and young adulthood that reinvent perception, thought, emotion, and identity. Such information leads me to believe that disturbing the natural development of a child or young person during this sensitive time would be a very precarious endeavor. Would it not be better for this person to wait and see how things reorganize before causing irreparable change and possible harm to one’s body and mind?
Along with the research and reading that is specific to transgender concerns, I advise anyone on the trans spectrum (and anyone who wants to learn) to take a look at the brain from a neutral perspective. One book I can suggest is A User’s Guide to the Brain, by John J. Ratey, M.D. The book was published in 2001 and provides a study of the structures of the brain and how they develop and function. The content is not about gender and sexuality specifically, although that is touched upon too. However, when you start to understand the tremendous amount of biomechanics at play within the theatre of the brain (actually four theatres, according to Ratey—Perception; Attention, Consciousness, and Cognition; Brain Function; Identity and Behavior), you come to realize the miracle operating within the complexity of our brain tissue together with the brain’s inherent individuality and fragility. You begin to glean how ultimately consequential the brain is. I would think that you would want to take very good care in messing about with yours. After all, your brain is the most spectacular and precious thing about you.
Star Trek was already in re-runs when I was watching in elementary school. But like so many generations of kids, I was fully absorbed by the interesting assortment of beings, planets, and predicaments the crewmembers encountered. No matter the individual missions you or I might be assigned or volunteer for, there is little doubt in my mind that we are all a part of a higher voyage not unlike those aboard the Enterprise. A voyage such as ours requires that we boldly go with prudence and wisdom and compassion to explore the unknown realms and challenges that even life on Earth presents. I mean…why else were we given these magnificent brains?
