Freaks in our time

And speaking of freaks, here's news from the frontiers of progress:

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.

Ten years ago, when Nancy and I became a couple, the idea of us having a child was more dream than plan. I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. But after the success of our custom screen-printing business and a move from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest two years ago, the timing finally seemed right. I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. It had been roughly eight years since I had my last menstrual cycle, so this wasn’t a decision that I took lightly.

Of course not. Perish the thought. Now, the forthcoming baby's mommy is also the baby's daddy. God help that poor kid. This story brings to mind Flannery O'Connor's observation

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.

... in these days when we are afflicted with the doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature by its efforts that the vision of the freak in fiction is so disturbing [because] he keeps us from forgetting that we share in his state. The time he should be disturbing is when he is held up as a whole man.

I know the comboxes will be full of denunciations of the word "freak" to describe this pregnant man-woman, but I would also use it to describe, say, Jocelyn Wildenstein, who has mutilated her body grotesquely to make it conform to her will. There is no such thing as a freak if you believe that the individual has the right to do whatever he or she wants to his or her body, or live in whatever manner one prefers to, and one's free choice renders it normal and acceptable. You can no longer recognize a freak because you don't recognize the category.

But as O'Connor says, you hold to an ideal of the whole man, then while none of us are truly whole in this postlapsarian world, freakery is defined as the more extreme deviations from the norm of wholeness. I would say that if a woman who surgically mutilated her body to become more masculine, and who went to the trouble of having herself declared a man in the eyes of the law, decides she wants to get pregnant and does so -- if that person doesn't qualify as a freak, the concept doesn't exist.

UPDATE: A further thought: freaks, in O'Connor, exemplify not something alien to human nature, but an extreme distortion of it. We are meant to see in her freaks something of ourselves, and our own tendencies toward disorder. Wealth, technology and changing social mores allow us to indulge our all-too-human disorders in new and depressing ways. In the case of the Bride of Wildenstein, we see the human weakness for vanity taken to a freakish extreme. In the rather more complex case of this pregnant man-woman, we see manifest to a freakish extreme the contemporary view that there is no such thing as an essential self, that the "self" is whatever the individual wills it to be, and that it can and should be constructed. That there is no such thing as natural limits. That children are to be seen as manifestations of the individual will. And so forth. Pregnant man-women are not the only manifestation of these traits -- only the most visible.

In most cases, it seems to me, freaks are living examples of the principle of reductio ad absurdum applied to the sinful human condition. I think that this is perhaps the main reason Jesus warned against the corruptions of wealth. With money, we buy control. Opportunities to indulge our disordered willfulness that would have been denied to us because of natural limits suddenly present themselves to us. It takes an exceptionally strong character not to yield to those temptations -- to keep one's eye on the prize of wholeness, of working to repair the cracks in our foundations instead of widening them and calling them good.