Thread: Sochi Olympics and the Law against Gays in Russia +

Originally Posted by Hanna

But it's a historical fact that civilisations that embrace homosexuality and become obsessed with money start to rot from within. Ancient Greece, Rome and pre-revolutionary France are well known examples.

This statement is questionable for at least three reasons:

(1) Has there ever been a civilization that wasn't "obsessed" with money? I would say that caring about money is that's practically a pre-requisite for being civilized.

2) What does it mean to "embrace" homosexuality? I'm not sure exactly which examples you're talking about in France, but certainly in the loooong histories of classical Greece and Rome, homosexuality was tolerated under certain conditions, mocked in other conditions -- and the degrees of tolerance, when such existed, varied from one era to another.

(3) Christianity became the state religion of Imperial Rome in 380 AD; Rome was conquered and looted TWICE within the next century (410 by the Visigoths and 455 by the Vandals). By your logical standards, then, the embrace of Christianity caused the internal rot of this once-mighty pagan empire much more quickly and devastatingly than any "embrace of homosexuality" did.

By the way, I am rather against the idea of using tax money to pay for transsexual surgery, but ESPECIALLY the idea of paying for procedures like breast implants for "MTFs" -- since fake boobs have no objective health benefits (whereas it MIGHT be justified to pay for their hormone treatment -- hormones have neuro-psychological effects, and therefore giving hormone shots to a clinically depressed transsexual might, in theory, help the depression better than anti-depressant pills alone).

And with that issue aside, I've also heard that some very anti-gay regimes -- including Saudi Arabia and China, I believe -- have offered to pay for the transsexual surgeries of men arrested for homosexuality, even if these men don't ASK for the surgeries, and don't identify as women! In other words, the surgery is basically a condition for NOT being imprisoned, or for having the sentences shortened. Evidently, the regimes find that the easiest way to deal with homosexual men is to turn them surgically into heterosexual "pseudo-women".

P.S. But I don't rule out the possibility that transgender identity is "real", organic, and to some extent neurologically hardwired by fetal hormones. As I wrote above, hormone/brain interactions are VERY complex even in mammals with brains a lot simpler than ours -- and at the present time, science doesn't understand them nearly well enough to exclude the hypothesis that transsexuals are literally "born that way." Or, perhaps, some percentage of them are "born that way," while others psychologically construct/invent a "trans identity" as their way of dealing with various traumas. In other words, there may be more than one "type of transsexual," just as there may be different types of homosexuality -- some forms that are "in the brain" (neurological) and other forms that are "in the mind" (psychological). Anyway, it's surgery as a THERAPY for "Gender Dysphoria" that I'm skeptical about, and not the claim that "Gender Dysphoria" exists. Part of me suspects that doctors fifty years from now will look back on sex-reassignment surgery as a horrifying sort of pseudoscientific quackery, as we now look back on lobotomies.

P.P.S. One other thing that occurs to me -- it's important to understand that homosexuality and transsexualism are different/independent from each other, even if one accepts the hypothesis that both may ultimately have biochemical/hormonal roots. For example, some male-to-female transsexuals are attracted to men ("androphilic") ; they live as gay men "pre-surgery", but hope to live as heterosexual women after the surgery. But other MTFs are attracted to women ("gynephilic") -- and they hope to live as lesbians, not straight women.