Li Yinhe talks about sex

Chapter 37 Respecting the Rights of Transsexuals and Cross-dressers
As a modern civilized society, respecting the rights of minority groups is the minimum standard; as a civilized modern person, we must also learn to respect brothers and sisters who have different gender identities from ourselves.Any slight discrimination against them can only show our own vulgar ignorance.

According to reports, a man in a certain city in my country often secretly wore his wife’s clothes when she was not at home. He was accidentally photographed by a neighbor across the street, and he was blackmailed for a lot of money. Couldn't hold my head up and lost my job because of it.His situation is sympathetic, and his rights and dignity as a law-abiding citizen who does no harm to others deserves our attention.

This man is one of the few who don't fit the "norm" when it comes to gender identity.There are many terms used in international sexology research to describe transgender phenomena.According to incomplete statistics, the terms used to describe this phenomenon include: cross-gender, gender infidelity, intersex, hermaphrodite, intersex, etc.

The origin of the term hermaphrodite is

The union of the son of Zeus and the goddess of sex and beauty.There are two myths about hermaphrodites: one is that they have a child whose sex is difficult to determine; the other is that their child is so beautiful that the water nymph falls in love with him and becomes one with him.

Androgyny, also known as the "third sex" problem, refers specifically to those whose biological sex is inconsistent with their psychological sex.Some cultures throughout history believed that such people possessed dual souls.The standard definition of transsexuality is: a persistent feeling of disliking one's anatomical sex, a persistent desire to give up one's genitals to live a life of another gender, a person trapped in the wrong body.

The tendency to cross-dress is a purely human phenomenon that does not exist in other animals because they do not wear clothes.Cross-dressing can be subdivided into underwear cross-dressing, ritual cross-dressing, compulsive cross-dressing, and homosexual cross-dressing.

In Western society, the phenomenon of transsexuality and cross-dressing first appeared among women.While the majority of transsexuals today are men, it was women who were the first to feel insecure about their gender.Over the centuries, thousands of Western women have lived like men, some because they thought they belonged to men; some to escape strict female roles.A growing number of educated, single women are rejecting marriage and motherhood, adopting a lifestyle of working and making friends, threatening normative gender roles. From the 19th century to the 20th century, most of the cross-gender people were men, which may be due to the improvement of women's status and stricter behavioral norms for male roles.

The phenomenon of cross-dressing also appears in a large number of literary and artistic activities.Boys played women in plays as early as the 17th century.Hardy's "The Return of the Native" is played by men in cross-dressing.There are many female transvestites in Shakespeare's plays, but no male transvestites. A novel, The London Mystery, published in 1848, has a heroine who disguises herself as a man.In traditional Chinese dramas, there is also the custom of men and women cross-dressing, such as men in Peking opera disguised as women, and women in Yue opera disguised as men.

Therapy for transgender phenomena emerged only in the 20th century, after they were either ignored or treated as sins and crimes. Hormone replacement therapy was introduced in 1990 for sex change.Benjamin, the father of transsexuality, initiated the debate on the etiology of transsexuality, arguing that transsexuals are a female soul entering a male body, or a male soul entering a female body.He invented hormonal therapy to bring the body and the mind into harmony.His therapeutic practice has led to research across genders.Of course, there are many transgender people who are only satisfied with living like the opposite sex and are not obsessed with undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

Transsexuals and transvestites are discriminated against in the same way that blacks are discriminated against in the United States, South Africa, and Jews in Germany. After the civil rights movement of the 20s and 70s, perceptions changed, but transsexuals and cross-dressers still weren't doing very well.As a modern civilized society, respecting the rights of minority groups is the minimum standard; as a civilized modern person, we must also learn to respect brothers and sisters who have different gender identities from ourselves.Any slight discrimination against them can only show our own vulgar ignorance.Let us try to escape from barbarism and become civilized people.

(End of this chapter)