When a Rose is not a Rose

The biggest news today is not related to the election. No. It is instead a story about the state of New York legally recognizing that black indeed may be white, that up can be in fact down! Specifically New York is moving forward with a plan to allow people to change the sex on their birth certificate upon affidavits from a doctor and mental health professional laying out why their patient should be considered a member of the opposite sex and asserting that the proposed change would be permanent.

Cool.

Applicants would have to have changed their names and lived in their new gender for at least two years, but there is no requirement for any surgical operation, which is considered arbitrary. “It’s the permanence of the transition that matters most,” says Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, New York City’s health commissioner.

This “recognizes the emerging shift away from viewing gender as simply the sum of one’s body parts.” (Quoting Damien Cave, the NY Times writer of this story, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/nyregion/07gender.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print).

Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization is a human born as a male, but living as a woman since 2000 without surgery said this is a progressive move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s identity.

“It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

Okay, value judgment time. Since love should be the guiding rule for all humanity, I will look at it through the eyes of that highest of values. Doing so I say, “GREAT, FANTASTIC, AWESOME!” Undoubtedly there are folks dancing to the tune of a different drummer than the storybook band that convention has decreed as being the only one suitable for the dances similarly dictated as acceptable.

These human souls long for the freedom to be themselves, thereby attaining a peace of mind that we all require to live happily, and by extension, to help others live happily as well. It just makes for a better world.

This recognition, radical and revolutionary to be sure, is for me another sign of God’s mystery. Today’s “Truth” is more than what I thought it was yesterday, and certainly—hopefully--not as full as it will be tomorrow.