what's a man, what's a woman?

[Guest guest]

On 17 Apr 1999, Madhusudani Radha wrote:

 

 

> Now we're threading on thin ice (besides getting side tracked). There are

> definitely women born without all their internal organs and women who never

> ovulate or have periods.

 

 

Yes, but when the doctor said, "it's a girl!" how did he know this? Doctors

have been saying, "its a boy!" or "its a girl!" for millions of years. I doubt

in over a billion births a doctor ever said, "its an in-between!".

 

 

> But I think the larger issue is our preoccupation

> with wanting to classify all human beings into either men or women.

 

 

Every human being is either male or female according to their past life. The

demigods don't make mistakes and Krsna had a very good reason to create males

and females. Why do people have to imagine all of this weird other stuff.

Especially devotees. Its scientific. Simple. Why complicate it with

speculative psychology.

 

> Just

> like with the distributions of most other human characteristics, this is

> not a clean bi-modal distribution. People do fall in between male and

> female for various reasons, including anatomical, hormonal, and

> psychological ones.

 

 

They were born one way or the other. Male or female based upon their karma.

There is no getting around it. If they develop psychological anomylies that is

one thing but it does not erase the birth gender which was given by higher

authorities. How can one fulfill one's duty which is prescribed as the result

of acquiring guna and karma from past activities? This is a most fundamental

principle of our philosophy isn't it? I am not convinced that this gender/sex

change issue is such a little issue if it makes us overlook basics in the name

of compassion. Who are we helping?

 

 

I do not want to get at odds with everybody here but I have not heard

convincing, sound, scientific, philosophical arguments for this. If it is too

dry and the consensus is that we do not want to discuss it please advise.

 

> So do we focus on how "weird" these people are or

> simply accept that they are simply here?

 

 

They are NOT weird, but they ARE male or female. There is nothing wrong with

either gender on the Absolute platform.

 

 

> If it wasn't for our society's

> preoccupation with "male" vs "female" , maybe it would be easier for those

> "in between" to function just the way they are.

 

 

Well, that's true, but then many would not be getting the Absolute Truth

either and living in an imaginary mental plane of "in-between". C'mon bring it

down to earth for me. I get dizzy up here with all this stuff.

 

 

It's not just male VS female, it's also the male AND female thing, which,

quite frankly, I often find quite pleasing.

 

>But since that's not the

> case, who can blame them for wanting to correct this statistical anomaly,

> both to faciliate their living in our general society and serving in the

> society of devotees? That decision really is not dissimilar to someone

> correcting a club foot so that s/he can get around more easily and

> work/serve better in general.

 

 

I do not see them as the same thing. Maybe I'm just thick? One is correcting

something to its accepted norm (a normal foot)and the other is substituting a

conceived/speculated abnormal(not to imply sick or depraved or deviant), a

woman in a man's body, with another abnormal(not to imply sick or depraved or

deviant), a man with some woman's body parts.

 

 

> Why this hang-up about genitals? They're

> just another organ (although I'm well aware from the college classes I

> teach on human sexuality that most men cross their legs and wince when the

> topic of castration is brought up). As we've seen (see his letter to

> Jennifer), the decision whether a devotee wanted to be male or female

> didn't even seem to matter to Prabhupada. He just wanted the person to

> decide once and for all and then get on with the business of chanting Hare

> Krsna.

 

 

 

Exactly. So why change a penis to a "vagina"? Isn't that a genital hangup?