Pauline DeHaas' belief that Bill 10 will somehow force or at least encourage children to change sexual identities is not well-founded. Her own early sexual-identity crisis ended well for her, but there are growing numbers of children for whom that is not the case. Not all parents are as patient and tolerant as hers seem to have been. Some children are severely scarred, and some do not recover. Forming alliances with other children in like circumstances does not seem, on the face of it, a threatening or unhealthy resource. The real problem is the suffocating polarization of sex and gender, and the almost obsessive importance given to "appropriate" behaviour according to each.
This is entirely arbitrary and artificial and goes back to the substitution of settled agricultural societies and systems for hunter-gathering, nomadic lifestyles. Under this arrangement, inheritance of property and therefore "legitimization" of progeny became all-important. Women then became property whose chief value was first physical attractiveness, sexual fidelity, and then domestic skills. This system was endorsed by religion and has been to the present.
Sex and sexual behaviour is still the primary target and interest of Christian religion, in spite of the terrible problems posed by other human behaviour regarding climate change – a connection many even deny – and the absolutely horrendous wars of imperialist exploitation that have ruined countries since Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, to the recent deadly incursions into Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and dozens in between.
This is what should cause anxiety and outrage and not the normal questioning of steel-like barriers between the only recognized and tolerated sexual orientations: male and female. Perhaps there would be fewer requests for physical sexual transformations via surgery if societies – and religion – loosened up a bit and had a more balanced perspective on the issue.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
