Unbelievable, Outrageous, Criminal
I read today about David Reimer, a man who had been raised as a girl after doctors botched his circumcision and then convinced his parents to simply cut the rest of it off and raise him as a girl, claiming that gender and sexual identity is determined by environmental factors. He committed suicide last week at 38.
I'm not sure which emotion is strongest: sympathy for the poor man and what an incredibly difficult life that must have been, or outrage at the cowardice and ineptitude of his doctors and the arrogance of one man who put his own agenda over the well being of a fellow human being.
There are a couple lessons to be learned here. First, if nothing else this should make quite plain that you can't "teach" someone their sexuality. The tragic irony here is a conservative agenda—sexuality is a learned behavior—was actually trying to teach a straight man to be gay, they were trying to teach a man to be attracted to men. It obviously backfired, and David is the one who paid the price.
Which brings us to the next lesson. The conservative agenda with regard to sexuality has nothing to do with love or compassion. Paramount is proving that their archaic ideas about human sexuality are True, never mind the cost. They are even willing to sacrifice their own principles to achieve that end. How many more people get to have their lives confused and scrambled? How many more people live with guilt and uncertainty about their own identify and battle depression their whole life? How many more people have to die? David isn't the first. Sadly, he won't be the last either.