TODAY I AM A MAN

In Judaism, children are not obligated to observe the commandments; although they are encouraged to learn and follow the obligations they will have as adults. At the age of 13 for boys (12 for girls), children are considered to have become adults and are required to observe the commandments.  At the ceremony that marks the occasion, a Bar Mitzvah, the celebrant always proclaims at the start of his speech, “Today I am a man.”  Chastity Bono, born a woman, could have proclaimed those words after his transition.

The Merriam Webster dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transgender) defines transgender as “of, relating to, or being a person (as a transsexual or transvestite) who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that differs from the one which corresponds to the person's sex at birth.”  Basically, the sexual organs that a person was born with does not match the gender that the person feels he or she really is. According to the Human Rights Campaign  Human Rights Campaign, “There are no concrete statistics on the number of transgender people in the United States. Estimates on the number of transsexual people, which ignore the broader transgender population, range anywhere from 0.25 to 1 percent of the U.S. population. These estimates are dated and likely undercount the transsexual population because, for example, they do not account for people who have not yet undergone, cannot (for medical, financial, safety or other reasons) or choose not to undergo sex reassignment surgeries.”

Since the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the 2010 population of the United States at 308,745,538, even if we use the small estimate figure of .025%, we would arrive at more than 77,000 people who are transgender.  The figure is probably more in the hundreds of thousands.

As Bono described his life in an interview with Cynthia McFadden on Nightline, in May of this year, "It's actually pretty simple if you look at it,” Bono said.  “We all in the womb start out as female and then hormones come and we either stay female or we become male. I think of it as hormones that, you know, went in the brain but not in the body, and that's all being transgender is. It's just that the sex of your body and the gender of the brain don't match up.”

Because of his sexual confusion, Bono thought he was lesbian. He said in the McFadden interview, “It was my 13th birthday, actually, and my best friend, we were living in New York, my mom was doing a play there. I mistook sexual orientation for gender identity. I went for the obvious answer.”  Later, he realized he was not gay, but transgender.

Being transgender is not a conscious choice people make.  It is just what they are, just as some are born with blue eyes or black hair. Yet for some reason, the fact that Chaz Bono has been selected to be a participant on Dancing With The Stars (DWTS) has outraged some people.

One of the groups, onemillionmoms.com, a part of the American Family Association, finds Bono’s participation a major issue and is urging people to write to the ABC network (which airs DWTS) to complain that they will not tolerate not only Bono being on the show, but also Carson Kressley, who is gay.  The site says, “Both are LGBT rights advocates and promote this destructive lifestyle. DWTS is helping them create visibility for the LGBT community.”

What makes this story so fascinating for me is because of what faithful blog reader and Kathy Posner fan club president, Sue Kupcinet, wrote to me after my posting the Michael Vick blog and my feelings about his return to football.   Sue wondered why someone like Michael Vick is forgiven after he had consciously committed such heinous crimes -- yet people are judging Chaz Bono because of a biological mix up in his brain that happened by no conscious choice of Bono’s.

British poet Thomas Babington Macaulay said, “The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.”  Bono is more a man than Vick will ever be.