Baby Sex Change
The idea of baby sex change sounds horrible and unethical to most people, but I really think that this is a good idea for group four. The idea of any adult male or female changing their sex is considered a taboo, just imagine how horrified people would be if parents changed their child's sex after birth, while the child was a baby. When a little boy or a little girl lives their life and feel as if they are in the wrong body, they are able to make the choice of whether or not they should have a sex change operation. Even now, the youngest person to ever undergo a sex change service was sixteen years old. Now if the sex change decision is made by the parents while the child is still a baby, that adds more controversy to the whole idea of sex changing. What if the child grows up and feels as if they should have been the gender they were before their sex was changed.
At first we were expecting to get a lot of angry blogs from people with conservative social views, but I think that this subject will outrage those who are liberal on social issues. The gay, lesbian, and trans-gender group will even be appalled by our topic. There's something about harming little kids that gets people very angry. Babies are innocent, they don't have a say- so in anything, they can't think for themselves. Babies are considered minors. I am a minor, I'm seventeen years old, but I don't believe that my parents can tell me that they want me to have a sex change. Is it right for the parents to take advantage of their child's inability to defend themselves even though the baby is oblivious to what's going on? This subject will not only bring up ethical issues, but it will also introduce legal issues as well. I believe that group four will receive a lot of interactions from many different types of people.
At first we were expecting to get a lot of angry blogs from people with conservative social views, but I think that this subject will outrage those who are liberal on social issues. The gay, lesbian, and trans-gender group will even be appalled by our topic. There's something about harming little kids that gets people very angry. Babies are innocent, they don't have a say- so in anything, they can't think for themselves. Babies are considered minors. I am a minor, I'm seventeen years old, but I don't believe that my parents can tell me that they want me to have a sex change. Is it right for the parents to take advantage of their child's inability to defend themselves even though the baby is oblivious to what's going on? This subject will not only bring up ethical issues, but it will also introduce legal issues as well. I believe that group four will receive a lot of interactions from many different types of people.
Comments
Before I continue, I just wanted to comment that I think when we're getting ready to actually launch the viral we might want to consider deleting or at somehow censoring our posts about the project here (I forget if you can set specific posts on Blogger to private, because that'd work too) just because something like this would be a dead give-away and Blogger's indexed by google pretty regularly.
There's a lot of existing material relating to this subject and some legislation I think we all need to be familiar with. One big one is an experiment conducted by Dr. Money in which he tries to prove that gender is entirely socially constructed (details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#David_Reimer )
I think to lend some more legitimacy to our story we should go with more of a parents-concerned-for-their-child's-well-being more than parents-changing-the-child's-sex-on-a-whim which, is admittedly several magnitudes more reprehensible but I think it'll label the story as a bunch of nutjobs who shouldn't have kids rather than sparking some hardcore controversy about gender and sexual identity (personally, I think a meatier response is what we want to aim for rather than just a quick and hot response).
On that note, I heard a story on NPR several months ago, on This American Life about these two transgender 7-year-old boys who are currently living their lives as girls. It was a really interesting piece and if you think about something like that and taking it to the next logical step of hormone therapy/surgery (where there seems like there might be some legitimacy to the case) I think it's a good starting point. I'll see if I can find the episode for everyone to listen to.
[oh god this was so long I had to split it into two posts]
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I think we need to make sure the story will generate *at least* two sides--a sympathetic one and an antagonistic one. If we just go for pure disgust/moral reprehensibility it's not going to be as interesting as if we do something that might even catch people in the middle. For example, with that This American Life story, if you extended that to the parents trying to help their kids by getting them sex-change operations before puberty (just to clarify that wasn't the case in the story), I dunno, personally I think I'd be caught in the middle somewhere--on one hand I think they'd have a good case for the operation but then again they're only 7 and that's pretty extreme and irreversible... Basically, with this sort of reaction you force the audience to think a bit more (at least the ones willing to think about it rather than just go with a knee-jerk reaction) and I think ultimately that's a more desirable outcome than just pissing people off. Plus if two sides develop you get debate between audience members occurring naturally (assuming it takes off) and that sort of thing (I think) would be a lot more interesting than just: GO TO HELL! YOU'RE UNFIT TO BE PARENTS! type responses (not that it's unlikely that we'd get that with a more sympathetic strategy too, but hopefully that wouldn't be the *only* sort of response).
Ah... I hope that made some sense. Oh! And before I forget to mention it, on the legal side of things in the US in order to get a sex-change operation you need to get approval from a psychologist. As I recall the requirement is living at least 2 years as the opposite sex and undergoing hormone therapy for a certain amount of time during that period (it's a liability thing for the doctors/hospital iirc, so people don't end up changing their minds after the fact and blame the doctors for allowing them to undergo the operation while they were not of sound mind or something like that). Also, technology-wise male-to-female surgery is more "successful" so to speak (compared to female-to-male surgery) since the technology to surgically create fully functional male genitalia isn't really there yet (and also m-to-f transsexuals are significantly more common, I believe it's like 3:1 compared to f-to-m).
Ah... sorry for the massive info dump, I was worried I'd forget everything if I didn't post it.
Really looking forward to see the development of this project
Found the TAL episode I was talking about. The story in question is act two: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1283
Mp3 version in case you don't want to have to listen to the whole stream/have streaming problems/etc:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?wayzandnh3o