Transgender, Therian & Transchron??

on October 23, 2014

Transgenderism, which claims that mindset and desires, not physical bodies and chromosomes, determines gender, is all the rage now. Some claim their gender is always in flux, or they transcend gender altogether. Cool, but soon to be passé.

Otherkin, or therians, might be the next wave. These persons believe they are in fact not persons but animals, actual or mythological. There’s been a reality program about them, of course. Inevitably therians will demand that government subsidize surgical transitions to animal appearances, and why not!?

Some might now smirk about therians, but not for long. Soon, skeptics will be bigots, and we’ll all have to nod with great seriousness when a neighbor or coworker claims to be a lion or dragon. After all, in our current postmodern age, each autonomous individual has a right to define his own identity and reality, while demanding societal affirmation.

Trying to stride way ahead of the next wave, I’m proposing a new form of identity claim for which I have a special affinity: transchronology. It will refuse confinement to any particular time and place. Transchronologists, or transchrons for short, move effortlessly across history and cultures, claiming who they really are, in an era and place suitable to them.

So if your neighbor says he’s actually an Aztec warrior from Mexico in the 1500s, believe him! Or her! You’ve no right not to. The old Cary Grant movie, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” courageously pointed to this long suppressed phenomenon by featuring a character who claimed to be Teddy Roosevelt, busily digging the Panama Canal in the basement of his spinster sister (and murderous) landlords. Supposedly he was insane, but now we know he was wonderfully transchron.

In this bold new era I myself will delight in several transchronological identities. Here are just a few of my new personas that seem very real to me, because they are!

It’s 1943, and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek is squeezing my hand as our plane evades Japanese zeros over the Pacific. I’m helping her write her upcoming speech to Congress, which will triumphantly persuade the U.S. to fund China’s resistance against Japan. I am a close advisor to China’s seductively charming First Lady, prompting rumors in Chungking that our intimacy is more than professional. In fact, our relations are quite correct and I am also close to her husband the Generalissimo, based on the common Methodist faith we three share. We together dream of a free, democratic, and Christian China. As our plane soars through the clouds, she and I peer out the portal, silently praying together for the liberation of her occupied country.

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Its 1789, and I’m in a carriage with newly elected George Washington in route to his New York inauguration. I had served on his military staff during the Revolution, but our friendship is based on shared faith in God’s plans for our new republic. He is especially intrigued by the new sect known as Methodism, of which I’m an adherent. In a moment of spiritual zeal, the General has the carriage stopped by a river and demands that I baptize him as a Methodist. “Sir, I must follow the Wesleyan path to perfection!” he implored. How could I refuse?

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It’s 1862, and the clock in President Lincoln’s office tolls loudly, reverberating through the silence. I and other cabinet members are stunned by his announcing a promise to God that he would free the slaves after a military victory, which has now occurred at Antietam. Salmon Chase is swallowing nervously, and William Seward is coughing. The President looks pleadingly at me. He knows that Methodists are historically anti-slavery, and he and I have passed many late evenings in deep theological discussions. With the rest of the Cabinet quiet, I speak: “By all means, Mr. President, you must keep your sacred promise!” Lincoln warmly smiles and nods.

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It’s 1941, and President Roosevelt has asked me to accompany him to his first summit with Winston Churchill off the coast of Nova Scotia to craft the Atlantic Charter. At times he calls me to his side during grueling negotiations, hungry for my counsel. On Sunday morning, aboard a British warship, there is a joint worship service, during which the assembled sailors and officers, with their chiefs of government, sing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” FDR glances at me with a smirk, and exclaims loudly to an amused Churchill, “I prefer Methodist hymns.”

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It’s 1979, and newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is addressing her ecstatic supporters. She’s asked me to stand at her side for reassurance. We share together a common Methodist background, which she cherishes. “I’ll need you in the difficult days ahead,” she whispers in my ear, as the crowd roars its approval.

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It’s 1898, and President William McKinley, a devout Methodist, is unable to sleep, pacing and praying, struggling to decide what he should do with the Philippines newly acquired in the Spanish American War. He summons me from my home across Lafayette Square, as he often does. “Of course, you must lift them up, and democratize them, as people for whom Christ died,” I tell him, as he responds with smiles and nods of relief.

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It’s 1649, and I am a senior advisor to the new Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell, although I’m suspected of Arminian beliefs. For his role in provoking war with Scotland, Cromwell has decided King Charles I must be executed, and he cajoles various Puritan officials to sign the death decree. Some shake with apprehension, but I cheerfully grab the quill pen and affix my signature. “It’s so time to move on!” I definitively pronounce, as Cromwell vigorously shakes his head up and down with approval.

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It’s 1784, and an aged but vigorous John Wesley invites me to join him on the preaching circuit. I stand in the crowd as he proclaims salvation to joyful audiences, but he is troubled in his spirit, as he confides to me later. Should he grant autonomy to American Methodism and appoint Francis Asbury as its bishop? I sense the weight of the decision but respond immediately. “Yes, Rev. Wesley, God has raised you and him up for this very purpose!” Wesley stares at me momentously before he grabs a pen and paper, then he calls for his horse.

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All of these great moments seem very real to me, because of course they are real. It’s my reality, which nobody can dispute, not in the current era, when everyone can reinvent themselves in countless ways. Now I think Thomas Jefferson is trying to reach me as he reconsiders Unitarianism for Methodism…

  1. Comment by Gene Bulmer on October 23, 2014 at 10:41 pm

    Hilarious! And, of course it will give rise to those claiming to be a male pig in the eighteenth century, then a female, uhm…dog in the 19th…& then Monica Lewinsky’s transgendered male confidant in the present day.
    Yikes!! I can see the long lines forming for Judgement Day already!

  2. Comment by polistra24 on October 24, 2014 at 5:31 am

    Excellent Swiftian slice. It’s even better than you think, because the only way to actually BE transgender is to be transchron.

    Actual hermaphrodites are extremely rare. Roughly a dozen exist in the world. Thus 99.9% of the people who claim to be some kind of cis or trans are delusional. They believe they have “changed their gender” but they haven’t.

    The only way to change your gender is to jump in your trusty Tardis and travel back to the moment of your conception. Become very small, crawl into your mother’s uterus, and pick a different sperm to join with the egg that was going to become you.

    But then you don’t exist because you weren’t born. Someone else is/was born in your place. So your Tardis (no longer yours because you never existed) is now marooned in space and time. But of course Tardises don’t exist anyway, so the whole thing is just scifi.

  3. Comment by localhistorywriter on October 24, 2014 at 11:26 am

    Pasco County, FL, north of St Pete, now has a trans school teacher – 30 years old, married to a woman, who “fully supports him,” and the county school system says it is completely behind HIM.

    Glad I’m not in school now.

  4. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 24, 2014 at 12:54 pm

    It’s 2014, and you’re a jerk.

    People who wrestle with gender issues have serious burdens on their hearts. You can engage their pain with sensitivity and respect, or you can pen a snarky satire that primarily serves to gratify the already convinced.

  5. Comment by RickPlasterer on October 25, 2014 at 12:18 am

    However hurt they may be, their hurt feelings have become a tyranny. The right to your own reality has become the right to tell other people how to live

  6. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 25, 2014 at 9:40 am

    And hurt feelings are nothing a compassionate Christian would ever respect? Hmphhh!!
    Keep in mind, the Evangelicals are telling people how to live their lives everyday. By decree!!

    The snarky article by Mark Tooley serves to ridicule and mock. Not to mention affording him more time in the Photoshop app. (Which would have produced better images, if only he had an eye for pictorial perfection).

    Why it is so difficult for the religious set to ponder any variants of gender? If YOU were suffering with issues of sexual identity, would you not hope for a caring and compassionate community?

    Leave the disrepectfulness at the door.

  7. Comment by Semp on October 25, 2014 at 9:59 am

    We do NOT tell people how to live their lives “by decree.” We have the insane situation of two perverts telling us we MUST bake a cake for their “wedding,” so who is being coerced here? There is no Christian due to “respect” insane people’s delusions that they are the opposite sex.

  8. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 25, 2014 at 10:46 am

    “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel” …That sounds to me like “telling people what to think, or how to live, or who to believe in”!

    The demand that we as a society make for differences in one another is not going to unhinge society as some fear. If anything, it should reveal a more compassionate nature to humanity.
    But I’m not holding my breath!

  9. Comment by Charlie Sutton on October 27, 2014 at 1:27 pm

    Sharing the Gospel is a matter of presenting the Good News of God in Christ, and ALLOWING the person to accept that as truth, or not, as the person decides. There is no force involved – although some who share the Gospel can be more enthusiastic than their hearer may like.

  10. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 25, 2014 at 6:02 pm

    Any person who supports any legislation is telling people how to live their lives by decree. And most American Christians support at least some item of legislation or another.

    Nobody is telling you that you, a private citizen, must bake a cake for anybody. But if you want to operate a public business, in the public sphere, then your business may have to serve who the public demands.

    If you don’t want to serve the public, then operate a private entity, i.e., the “Members-only Club for Non-perverted Cakery.”

  11. Comment by Semp on October 25, 2014 at 9:57 am

    All human beings feel pain, but we don’t try to coerce the rest of society into kowtowing to us. A man who thinks he’s a woman is mentally ill – what he needs is therapy, not playing along with his psychoses. God does not call us to “respect” another person’s delusions.

  12. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 25, 2014 at 5:17 pm

    In your sense of religious ethics, does God “call us” to mock the “mentally ill”?

  13. Comment by Paul Hoskins on October 25, 2014 at 5:47 pm

    As a rule, part of the cure involves naming the illness. The guy who feels he is really a woman is mentally ill – tell him so, for starters.

  14. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 25, 2014 at 6:14 pm

    And what therapist is going to “name” their client’s “illness” with a mocking screed?

    A legitimate therapist is going to take the time to understand their client’s perspective and build trust and rapport. You have to earn the opportunity to speak to people’s issues, especially if your message will require profound, life-altering choices.

  15. Comment by Darah Gaz on October 27, 2014 at 5:20 pm

    LOL
    Seriously? You think it’s a “mocking screed” to tell a man he’s a man?

    That’s the looney left in all its glory: calling something by its real name is a “mocking screed.”

  16. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 28, 2014 at 1:18 am

    No – I think the article above by Mr. Tooley is a mocking screed.

  17. Comment by Paul Hoskins on October 25, 2014 at 5:46 pm

    Really, “serious burdens on their hearts”? How about “head seriously inserted into the lower colon”? We are a dangerously sick society when we start treating nonsense seriously. These people are mentally unstable before AND after their “fix,” so the fix is a faux fix. (How am I doing here, audience?)

  18. Comment by kaufmannphillips on October 25, 2014 at 6:24 pm

    We are a dangerously sick society. There’s this one guy, for instance, who glibly mocks the “mentally unstable.”

  19. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 26, 2014 at 10:54 am

    Paul, your insensitivity is glaring.
    Thank God you’re not a licensed therapist.

    You exhibit a strange dichotomy in your Christian compassion, and cold indifference to what are very personal matters.
    What may seem like nonsense to YOU, matters significantly to those wrestling with their own lives.

    A good start, would be to realize that human sexuality isn’t as simple as you would want to believe. The gender spectrum is nuanced, and Life will always pose challenges in it’s race toward the future.
    We’re not living in the age of our grandparents, so we need to evolve.

    Kaufmannphillips identifies your folly in his comment below.

  20. Comment by RickPlasterer on October 26, 2014 at 8:01 pm

    Macro (and Kaufmannphillips),

    You need to consider my statement “the right to define your own reality is the right to tell other people how to live.” Are women and girls in our society to accept men and boys in women’s restrooms because some men want to be women or at least are defining their “gender” to mean that they ought to have access to women’s restrooms? Should women get over their irrational prejudice of the past in this regard, and just “get used it” from now on? That is the logic of rest room integration, and given the unbending attitude of courts regarding sexual self-determination,it is a vicious logic that is prevailing.

    Similarly, we find Christian (or possibly other religious) bakers, photographers, counselors, and
    really anyone who sells goods and services to the general public told that they must provide such goods and services that contribute to homosexual behavior, even though it violates their consciences. So they are being told how to live their lives because of other peoples’ self-determination and definition of reality. A generation ago, conservatives would laugh at the craziness of the “looney left”
    counterculture, but it is no longer a laughing matter, but a tyranny promoted in the name of liberation which is destroying peoples’ lives and businesses.

    Doubtless people confused about their identity suffer. But that is not a reason to make society bend to their disordered wishes. Jesus forgave penitent sinners, but required
    repentance (Matt. 11:20-24), and so
    should we.

  21. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 27, 2014 at 9:02 am

    Thank you Rick Plasterer, for your clarification on this matter.

    I too, am not comfortable with removing the exclusiveness of Men’s and Women’s bathrooms, for the accommodation of those who can’t identify as either male or female.

    I basically don’t have any issues with Unisex restrooms per se, but as private as people expect to be when using those facilities, it is best if they aren’t made more uncomfortable in order to be more accommodating. Privacy is the operative word in this case.

    As a nudist, I was raised without the taboo, or fear of being comfortable in my skin, but much of the general public is still salacious on the topic of nakedness, and sadly, that’s not going to change soon enough.

    As for the political push to satisfy the minority? …maybe they’re not the minority?!

    I still relate the current LGBT issue with that of the Civil Rights era struggles.
    A generation ago, the public was much less understanding of these matters. It’s just now, that we’ve evolved enough to recognize the layers of the human condition. Remember, back then, Gays would be killed, and the public wouldn’t care!

    Finally, I think those businesses SHOULD be allowed to continue denying their services to those whom they deem unworthy. That’s “Free Market” (prejudice!)

    Things will change eventually.

  22. Comment by Darah Gaz on October 27, 2014 at 5:22 pm

    TMI
    That’s disgusting.
    Old people should never be nude in public, gag. Must be a sign of Alzheimer’s when people aren’t able to look in the mirror and see what a wreck time has made of them.

  23. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 27, 2014 at 5:39 pm

    Dear Darah Gaz,

    Not if one has taken care of their body!

    Young and old are welcome in nudist communities, because families that live there are not prone to the superficial hype that the general public is taught to embrace.
    Try it, you’ll like it!
    After all, God created all of us to be naturally healthy, and comfortable with his creation.

  24. Comment by MarcoPolo on October 27, 2014 at 4:57 pm

    Dear Paul Hoskins, You have no audience…just honest people trying to share ideas and philosophy.
    Although, there may be some contest between some postings for ‘Up votes’. If that’s important?

    I presume you’re not sensitive to those who are wrestling with their sexual identity?

  25. Comment by JuliaMarks on October 24, 2014 at 10:02 pm

    Just think of all the different bathrooms that will be called for when dragons and unicorns and fairies rule the Earth.

  26. Comment by Ella on April 16, 2020 at 10:46 pm

    Hoi! I very much liked this article. I am actually a Therian myself!

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