The Duchess of Kulfi
by
Bachchoo
Germaine Greer, speaking in Mumb-ai, said some controversial things and now in Britain she has ensnared herself in a fracas about free speech. A vociferous lobby of students at the University of Cardiff have protested against giving her a platform to speak there. Their protest is against a stance she has recently taken and the more strident have even resorted to calling her nasty names.
And for what In India, Ms Greer said she was in favour of female foeticide. In Britain, she said she didn’t believe that transgender people, who had undergone surgery and the whole treatment, had in any real sense changed their sex from male to female or female to male.
Her analogy was amusing and apt. She said that if she had her skin tattooed with patches and her ear lobes extended by surgery to hang down, say to her shoulders, it would not make her a cocker spaniel. She would remain the redoubtable Australian female and feminist academic she has built her reputation as.
I strongly disagree with her view on female foeticide, which amounts to saying that bringing up girls in India is costly and more trouble than bringing up boys, so girl babies should be aborted. I expect Ms Greer has taken into account that a foetus’ sex can’t be determined until a late stage in the pregnancy. So what she is advocating is the abortion of fairly advanced foetuses. It should have been obvious to her that the moral and correct way to proceed is to bring down the cost of raising female children by strictly enforcing the laws against asking for or receiving dowries and by making the environment as safe for girls, as it is for their brothers.
Nevertheless, on the question of the change of an animal’s gender through surgery or hormone treatment, I am philosophically on Ms Greer’s side. I don’t merely mean that I am against banning her from speaking at Cardiff in the interests of free speech. I think her contention is logically correct.
Please note, dear reader, that I have used the words “philosophically” and “logically”. By this I mean that I would not advocate preventing by law, or through other means, a man having his genitals removed by a willing surgeon if he was determined to mutilate himself in this way for whatever reason. If someone asked for their hands to be amputated through surgery I would seriously advocate psychiatric treatment for the hand-hater. If a man asserts that he is a woman and wants to be addressed and treated as such, I am absolutely in favour of respecting his wishes even though I myself might do it with a residue of ironic puzzlement.
No, I am not advocating, and neither to my mind is Ms Greer, the banning of the transgender phenomenon. Some of the statistics I have picked up do horrify me. Children as young as five in the US, have been encouraged to undergo surgery because their parents deem that they were “born in the wrong body”.
This is where my philosophical considerations intrude. Rene Descartes said Cogito ergo Sum — I think therefore I am! He wasn’t a pioneering physiologist, but he had worked out that the function of the mind is the essence of being. In itself, this is not a philosophically materialist point of view. Descartes has identified the fact that the “I” does not exist without the ability to think.
The religious point of view, through Christianity and Islam, for instance, tells us that there is a spirit inside the body. When the body dies, the spirit is released from the material of the body. Muslim historians believed that the infidels slain by pious Muslims “went to hell”. The suicide bombers of today believe that when their bodies are blown into a million bits, their spirits will ascend to heaven as they have by their action of killing people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike in most cases, gained “martyrdom”.
Thomas Aquinas and Dante tell us about very many places such as limbo and purgatory where the souls released from their material base are doomed by their karma to reside.
Essentially, the idea that the human animal is a “soul” or a “spirit” caged in the box or receptacle of flesh is a religious one.
On the evidence of neuroscience, backed by the force of Descartes’ argument, it is a false idea. The mind is not a resident of the brain, it is a product of its chemical activity. The mind, one may say, is the functioning brain, as much part of the body as the heart or the toe-nail. There is no spirit trapped in a box. The spirit is the box. The old joke for a man with a roving eye is: “He is a lesbian trapped in a man’s body”. But it’s a joke. The body is the person. To say “I have always felt that I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” may accurately describe a powerful and persistent feeling, but it is essentially a religious one that separates the person from the body in which they are encased.
The irony is that this dichotomy of body and spirit invented by religion will not, in the case of transgender individuals, be accepted by the religious. The Vatican hasn’t pronounced on the subject and one imagines that Saudi Arabia would not be ultra-hospitable to the idea of transgendered individuals.
In the Western world, transgendered people have allied themselves to gays and lesbians, making common cause as minorities. There is, I suppose, a tentative connection between a struggle for recognition of your sexual proclivity or preference and a struggle against the possible prejudice one might face after surgically transforming your genitalia.
