The Bookends of Gender Reality

By Mike Shoesmith

In today's day and age many people are possessed by the idea that gender is "fluid" and can be medically altered through self-mutilation and hormone "therapy." But what many fail to realize is that there will be a final "say" in this matter; the last bookend of our life on earth - death.

There are traditionally two book ends in any set designed to hold upright multiple works of information stored in paper form. For the sake of this argument we can see how conception and birth make up the first bookend. With the exception of very few of us who are born hermaphrodite the rest of us are born with determining chromosome factors which literally make us male or female. There is absolutely no way to change that. No surgery. No hormone injections. Nothing.

The other bookend, death, which is undeniably the final word in all of this, is perhaps most illuminating. When someone is cremated, the person in charge of the process must enter certain parameters into the device which controls the burn. Apart from weight, one of those parameters happens to be, believe it or not, whether the deceased is male or female. At this point it doesn't matter with which gender a person "chose to identify." For example, if Caitlyn Jenner is cremated, he will leave this world as a male. The crematorium operator will need to do this because men have much thicker skin and measurably greater bone density.

See:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15746999
https://int.eucerin.com/about-skin/basic-skin-knowledge/male-and-female-skin

If a person goes the burial route, nothing changes. Using Jenner as our example again, if his body is exhumed years after his death to, perhaps, clear away land for a shopping mall  - or maybe hundreds or thousands of years from now anthropologists stumble upon his ancient burial plot and open up Jenner's coffin, they will see his bones stripped of their flesh. By observing his bone structure alone, and especially his pelvic arrangement, they will make the obvious determination ... this was a male.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ap/chapter/the-hip/

Knowing all of this begs the question: why are we giving up on these people? Clearly - and many experts agree - we are dealing with a problem not of the body but of the mind. We know from countless examples of gay men and their histories that family dynamics are responsible for this behavior. Nothing genetic. It's all nurture.

Nature has already had its say. And at the end of life when it's all said and done, nature will once again be the determining factor. And then... God. And I believe that in the afterlife we will be judged not only for our actions but also our inaction -  and worst of all, even worse than hate, for our indifference.

Society is capable of reversing this path of acceptance of indifference toward these vulnerable people - so confused within the most intimate relationship they will ever have - that being the relationship with their own bodies. It is do-able if we as a society will dare to love them properly.

However, love does not always show up with words that everyone wants to hear. But true love always shows up. It doesn't walk away when the voices say "let me cut myself... it will make me feel better."