real life x men
Ok, I'm no big fan of comics, so I might be getting the point of X-Men all wrong, but I just wanted to draw a slight comparison between the comic series and a real-life event. According to Yahoo News, doctors in China have just removed an extra, third arm from a baby boy. The kid basically had two left arms, neither was perfect but both were "surprisingly well formed" according to the docs. I'm not saying they flipped a coin to decide which one to remove, but it sounded about as arbitrary. In the pics on Yahoo you could see really clearly how amazingly *right* both his little arms looked, which leads me to wonder...
Why not leave the kid with his three freaking arms??? I mean, how cool would it be to have an extra arm?? Or at least leave the arm long enough for him to grow up and decide whether he wants it removed. And what if they picked the wrong arm? What if the arm they removed was actually the one with the most sensation or the most latent ability to be flexible or dextrous or whatever arms and hands can be. I mean, forget the arm, think for just a minute about the extra *hand*! Having an extra hand is like having an extra face: hands are so expressive and communicative and helpful -- so full of life and personality.
So, back to the X-Men, aren't we doing what those comics warn about in their alternate universe? Aren't we squelching the mutants among us, literally? This is similar to the gigantic paper I wrote last semester about "gender normalizing" surgeries performed on babies born with so-called ambiguous genitalia. Instead of allowing a whole panoply of sexual development and expression to flourish, we squelch it in it's infancy and apply a crude cookie-cutter to babies, almost always opting (against all outweighing physical evidence) to make the baby a girl because it's easier to make a hole than a pole. No matter how much testicular tissue has to be permanently cut away, no matter that you might have to administer female hormones at puberty to induce development of secondary sex characteristics, no matter *what* medical contortions are required to successfully "normalize" the kid -- we've decided that this is the best way to "treat" difference.
That's fucked up. And I guess that's my big statement about it. That it's fucked up. So there you go.
Why not leave the kid with his three freaking arms??? I mean, how cool would it be to have an extra arm?? Or at least leave the arm long enough for him to grow up and decide whether he wants it removed. And what if they picked the wrong arm? What if the arm they removed was actually the one with the most sensation or the most latent ability to be flexible or dextrous or whatever arms and hands can be. I mean, forget the arm, think for just a minute about the extra *hand*! Having an extra hand is like having an extra face: hands are so expressive and communicative and helpful -- so full of life and personality.
So, back to the X-Men, aren't we doing what those comics warn about in their alternate universe? Aren't we squelching the mutants among us, literally? This is similar to the gigantic paper I wrote last semester about "gender normalizing" surgeries performed on babies born with so-called ambiguous genitalia. Instead of allowing a whole panoply of sexual development and expression to flourish, we squelch it in it's infancy and apply a crude cookie-cutter to babies, almost always opting (against all outweighing physical evidence) to make the baby a girl because it's easier to make a hole than a pole. No matter how much testicular tissue has to be permanently cut away, no matter that you might have to administer female hormones at puberty to induce development of secondary sex characteristics, no matter *what* medical contortions are required to successfully "normalize" the kid -- we've decided that this is the best way to "treat" difference.
That's fucked up. And I guess that's my big statement about it. That it's fucked up. So there you go.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 10:34 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home