Consider a heresy which contradicts the Gleischshaltung of Political Correctness: Gender is NOT a social construct, and both Gender and Sex are in fact binary.
How is this possible? Some sceptics suggest that both gender and sex are determined by chromosome status: Males are XY and females are XX. End of story.
The truth is not so simple. From my understanding of Biology: the default setting for embryonic development is female. Female fetuses can become male if two events occur:
1 – The activation of the SRY gene (controlling events such as differentiation of gonads into testes/ovaries)
2 – Testosterone Receptors bind to appropriate levels of Bio-available testosterone in utero.
So far, we have described a Binary situation:
Where can Biochemistry proceed differently? (I do not imply that “pathology” occurs anywhere during this discourse)
Sometimes, there is a transfer of the SRY gene to the X chromosome from the Y – where XX karyotypes are now expressing male determining factor
There can also be a downturn in testosterone response in two crucial stages of embryonic development:
1 – The stage where cerebral hardwiring for sexual identity changes from the female default setting to male
2 – The different stage of embryonic development where cerebral hardwiring for sexual orientation changes from the default setting of attraction to males to attraction to females.
Of course, Hormone/Hormone Receptor status & SRY expression do not operate independently of each other. So, what about non-binary situations?
At birth, the genitalia can be ambiguous. Very rarely is the newborn a true hermaphrodite, but rather the genitals may not be well-formed or the baby may have characteristics of both sexes. The external sex organs may not match the internal sex organs or genetic sex.
Often (but not always) genital ambiguity corresponds with ambiguity in sexual identity and/or sexual orientation (resulting from hormone/hormone receptor status in utero). Nature is not binary under these circumstances: there can exist ambiguities in gender/sex status, in other words a continuum.
In other words: it is indeed possible to be a lesbian trapped in a man’s body: that is no joke! Meanwhile, some of the most feminine women on our planet are (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) AIS individuals with XY karyotypes, who do not respond to Testosterone. That said, hormone/receptor status is not always, all or nothing; some AIS individuals are “intermediate” in both Gender/Sex. Ben Barres (a famous transgender scientist who just recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer) is both a heroine and a role-model worthy of public adulation; another exception to the Biological rules cited above. She was cerebrally hard-wired to be male and not female despite her XY status.
The Biology cited above is not exhaustive but sufficient for our purposes.
OK OK, where does that leave us so far?
Everything described so far is decidedly binary and the gender-fluid exceptions to the rule are indeed real, but VERY RARE, far less than one percent of the population.
So, why are we currently witnessing a bumper-crop in gender-dysphoria in schools and campuses requiring a rethink in administration and teacher practice (not to mention a different set of washrooms in public buildings)?
I suggest, in politest terms possible, we are witnessing some public mass hysteria which is resulting in the horrible enabling of teenage angst and attention seeking, all with tragic results. I humbly admit I could be wrong on this, but I feel morally obliged to ask the question.
Many teens resort to self-injury/cutting, a sad condition (a result of teen angst) requiring intervention. Today, we now witness what I deem a similar phenomenon; i.e. pseudo-Gender Dysphoria (again, a result of teen angst). However, instead of intervention, conventional wisdom would male us codependents and enable teenage angst even to self-mutilation at an early age; all before frontal lobes are fully developed and hormones settle down. I am not saying gender-dysphoria is always unreal: I am suggesting there may be many false positives when diagnosing gender-dysphoria today.
Here in Canada, Kenneth Zucker, a renowned psychologist specializing in Sexology has taken a more conservative (and common sense) approach.
He counsels confused teens while encouraging them to wait. As a result, over 80% of these confused teens (after they calm down) discover they really were confused and 88% eventually reconcile with their birth gender. Meanwhile, a new BBC documentary, (Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?) has highlighted Doctor Zucker’s success. Of course, Canada’s moral and intellectual superiors responded by shutting down the BBC documentary on Canadian Television, not to mention shutting down Dr. Zucker’s clinic. Political Correctness will brook no compromise!
OK, let’s bring this home:
Can Sex and/or Gender be nonbinary from a scientific point of view? Yes, continua exist, but only in very rare cases: we are probably talking far less than one percent of the population. Is Gender a “Social Construct” and can it be “fluid”? The jury seems still to be out on either question, but all indications so far are: “No” on both counts?
Do these answers really change anything at a fundamental level. Decidedly no! Everyone still MUST treat each other with respect, not to mention love and compassion (that includes you too SJWs)
That all said – Primum non nocere! “first, do no harm!” Perhaps we should revisit our mad rush to mutilate youngsters, and pay heed to Doctor Zucker. Current evidence indicates the subsequent depression of Transgenders results in a 40%+ suicide rate – an instance where the cure indeed is far worse than the “ailment”. Well maybe not. At the very least, we should pause to ask the question and proceed cautiously.
His point is that he’s the perfect example of someone who will never understand an issue until it affects them personally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cheney#cite_note-nytimes-bush-6
I guess you two don’t follow UD…
If you did, you’d know that I don’t deny the fact that people are born with generic abnormalities, that may make them confused about their sexuality – the Dominican Paradox.
Many boys there are born with a genetics deficiency of the enzyme 5 alpha-reductase type ll, which prevents them from producing adequate levels of dihydrotestosterone- a by-product of testosterone. Due to that they are born without external sex organs and they are raised as girls…
When they enter puberty, they usually develop normal male features, and external sex organs…
Unfortunately, because they were raised as girls, they struggle to adapt to the new environment; they don’t fit in with male teens and they are no longer accepted with females…
They are very often confused about their sexuality due to their genetic deficiency and upbringing…
a wonderfully expressed opinion by a woman who was gender-dysphoric as a teen and grew out of it!
No, I don’t. It seems a little foolish to simply assume that someone would, and that something unspecified over there would make a point you struggle to actually articulate here. It seems almost as if you want to be misunderstood, so you can appear superior to the person misunderstanding you.
So I ask again, what is your actual point?
Allan Miller,
If you think that I’m struggling with this issue, maybe you can help me…
Evolution led to people who have gender issues and according to the rule of thumb of population genetics most, if not all of these people, should be eliminated by natural selection as they are less fit because they can’t or are less likely to produce…
So, why is there such an increase of youths with gender issues as many studies have shown? 27 % of youths are experiencing some gender issues…
Is natural selection impotent? Why is it not doing its job?
If you are clueless, maybe Joe F can help you with his speculative proof ….
What is the increase?
Does it matter? If it continues, and doesn’t increase mind you, we are doomed as human race soon… at least according to population genetics…
Where is natural selection FCOL?!
Sure it does, you made a point of mentioning it. What is the design explanation of a possible increase, a beta version of a new design?
You go first…
Why has not natural selection eliminated human children yet? Let’s see, lots of kids in the third world have been thru disease and war , maybe we are selecting those lucky genetic winners born in countries with ways to mechanically overcome many natural predators …
Now you start
Statistically a fluid situation implies a spectrum where a lot of in-between forms exist and are statistically distributed rather evenly. That is not the case with male and female humans. Humans naturally polarize between either being anatomically male or female. Someone born male doesn’t spontaneously start having ovum eggs and menstrating unless something is wrong. The in-between cases are not the norm, and hence this violates a fluid spectrum, but rather implements something closer to a discrete rather than continuous spectrum of forms.
I don’t think I could in good conscience encourage someone to mutilate their body parts with hormones and/or surgery. It won’t buy them happiness. In fact the suicide attempt rate is very high for transgendered people.
I don’t find it compassionate to let someone believe they’ll be happy amputating their arms or any other functioning body part. That’s what some trangender people are doing.
I don’t see why it’s wrong to suggest to them they’re screwed up somehow and maybe management of their internal psychology might be a tough road but would be a far better option than gender reassignment. Here is the sad case of Jazz Jennings:
http://people.com/tv/jazz-jennings-transgender-bottom-surgery-complications/
The problem is not with society, but with basic biology. A normal male, on average, is not biologically programmed to be attracted to a guy who chops his penis off and then advertises himself as a girl.
I was talking about kids with gender issues…. this is what this thread is all about… read again…
stcordova,
Sal, many people blame God for not being what they should be… What would you tell them? I have colleague who at 5 knew there was something wrong with him… His been struggling for over 50years
We overcome basic biology all the time, plastic surgery is commonplace, sexually augmented bodies are normalized. All those things have to do with society.
I bet enough would be if she had large breasts.
You asked why natural selection had not done its job, I am telling you it has. If kids with gender issues don’t grow up and make babies it will do its job there…
You going to crawfish now?
Just saw this, maybe Joe is too conservative.
“Scientists have been been studying the DNA of microbes for a quarter-century, and in that time, they have sequenced about 2 million microbes. By one estimate, as many as 1 trillion microbial species may live on Earth.”
Tom Mueller:
Sorry to have contributed to derailing your thread. I’m not going to have time to follow through with this, but I will mention that children are ordinarily reaching puberty years earlier than they did in, say, the Nineteenth Century. I don’t recall seeing the hard evidence for this, nor for the claim that it is due to improved nutrition. However, I think the evidence is good that brain development is not proceeding faster. It seems that children are going through puberty when they’re not nearly as well prepared to cope with it as they were not so very long ago.
There is also now a fairly high incidence of early puberty. See “Early Puberty: Causes and Effects” in Scientific American. Something very, very strange is going on with our children, hormonally, and I have to doubt that gender confusion is purely cultural. But I’m not well informed on the matter, and will not be working to make myself well-informed. So do with the prompt what you will.
I apologize as well
First off, happy new year newton.
Regarding plastic surgery, my mother had plastic surgery many years ago because she was in an accident with a drunk driver that cut her face in half. Thank God the plastic surgeon was called immediately and there is only a very faint scar on her face that perhaps only I will notice because I know of her accident. Actually I was also in the car with her, and it was one the saddest scenes in my life. So I do thank God for plastic surgery and I have no problem with the idea of using surgery to improve one’s appearance if feasible.
I would however, like many medical procedures, go with the addage, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Now, for many transgendered people or people struggling with it, I’d suggest they consider NOT going down a path that is practically irreversible physically. In the case of Jazz Jennings, the hormonal chemical mutilation has destroyed his male genitals irreversibly.
Many cases of teens going through transgender tendencies will grow out of it naturally. Just from a statistical standpoint, perhaps that might have been the better route of treatment for Jazz than to chemically mutilate his genitals to the point that some doctors won’t even try to operate to give him fake female organs.
I studied the works of a famous plastic surgeon who was more well known for his work as a motivational speaker because he was dealing with cases of people he healed but still thought they were ugly. He recounted the case of a patient who was in a car accident and he repaired her, but she still thought she was ugly because she lived with the damage for so long. He realized then that part of the healing process is psychological and that lead him to become something of a self-help guru and was in someways an inspiration for some of my views about life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Maltz
It was either Maltz or someone commenting on Maltz’s work that pointed out 90% of college girls are dis-satisfied with their looks. I once mentioned that fact to a rather attractive girl in conversation and she said, “I’d think the number is closer to 100%”!
There are moves in Canada to make it mal practice to try to correct someone’s transgender issues by trying to get them treated by changing their psychological view of themselves. That is, for purely the sake of argument, even though I don’t accept this argument… suppose there are two options for treating some 10 year old kid that’s a boy and he feels he’s a girl trapped inside a boys body. He could get chemically castrated and end up like Jazz Jennings or try to get psychological counseling to perhaps help him to survive to the age where we know, based on observational evidence, that dysphoria has a good chance (I seem to recall 80% chance) of working it’s way out naturally.
In the one case, chemical mutilation of male genitials is generally irreverisble and even if it were, it is subjecting the patient to a lot of risks, and in the end not be happy (remember 90% of college girls are dis-satisfied with the looks). In the other case, there is an 80% chance he’ll grow out of his transgender tendencies and not suffer from having mutilated genitals. I think that is a more conservative and safer bet.
Unfortunately, imho, some extreme elements of Canadian society is taking the option of psychological treatment off the table. Given that children and teens are not really in the best position to be risking life decisions without guidance, it seems to me just caving in and encouraging their whims is not necessarily the best and most compassionate way to deal with their personal sorrows and dis-satisfaction with their bodies. Even if a guy got operated on and thought he was a girl, if he were a real girl, he would likely still be dis-satisfied with his looks!
So let’s say a guy may hate the fact he has male genitals vs female ones.
Perhaps, a less risky route of treatment is to try to make him appreciate the fact he’s a boy and one day will be a man quite naturally, and that is perfectly fine. That seems much less riskier than goading him to take chemicals that will mutilate his own genitals. He should at least have the choice of doing so, and I think people in society should have some freedom to tell him he’s going down a risky path of chemical genital mutilation without their advice being labeled bigoted.
Citation please.
Citation please.
Also, out of interest, at what age did you decide you liked girls Sal?
https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-dysphoria-in-children
The 80% figure was my recollection, but this article support my general point.
That’s a rather personal question, but when I was age FOUR when dancing girls were on the TV, I got ridiculed when my mom noticed I was trying to get under the TV to look up their skirts.
So you decided when you were age four?
Awh, c’mon that was joke. Don’t take what I say seriously. You don’t take most of what I say seriously anyway.
The article also notes that 5 percent to 20 percent will persist in their GD as young adults. As they have not “grown out of it” do you admit that to those 5 to 20 percent it’s real and worth treating?
I’m trying to understand why you think that people choose to make life difficult for themselves.
If you did not choose, why do you think that other people choose?
And please note, I can link to comments where you talk about “boy on monday, girl on tuesday”.
Ok, thanks for reading the article, that supports the 80% figure, in fact as high as the 95% figure.
The question is at what age do you treat. If you treat them at the young age, for boys, they’ll end up like Jazz Jenning with mutilated male genitals if the treatment is chemical therapy. If you just let them dress and pretend they are girls, at least that is reversible, but I doubt a real boy will want to date a guy pretending to be a girl when he finds out he doesn’t have authentic female plumbing. There is an issue of honesty on the transgender guy/girl representing himself as an authentic girl when he’s not. Teaching boys to be inauthentic is not a good policy, but well, maybe it’s a temporary fix rather than mutilating his genitals chemically.
So let’s say we conducted a policy of encouraging male genital mutilation. What would be the success rate of them adjusting to society? You could hypothetically try to upend society, but we really don’t know how well that will go over because of biological imperatives (like the fact ordinary males tend to like ordinary females). You can’t fight billions of years of well selected mechanisms of reproduction (to use your evolutionary terminology, though I don’t believe in evolution) without some serious issues.
The less risky approach is to wager on the 80% success rate of just letting boys grow to be men rather than the potentially 100% failure rate of goading boys to mutilate their genitals and significantly lowering their chances to be accepted.
What do I mean accepted? A documentary illustrated the problem. A transgendered “girl” (a boy pretending to be a girl) was upset that teenage boys weren’t exactly lining up to date him like they do authentic girls. Would authentic girls want to be around someone like that and be their friend? The probability is lower for the simple fact a typical girl can’t identify with what that boy trying to pretend to be a girl is going through. It’s a numbers game and which course of treatment should be wagered on. I’d wager on an 80% success rate vs. a 100% failure rate.
What I’m describing is not a societal construct, that’s billions of years of biological imperatives that were evolved into boys desiring real girls (if you believe in evolution, which I don’t). If a boy is considering going down the road of genital mutilation, he should be told what he should expect from society rather than being fed the line “society is the problem not you.” For the sake of argument, let’s hypothetically say society and biological imperatives are the problem, that “problem” may not ever get fixed no matter how many laws are passed because people will love what they will love and like what they like. You can’t legislate love and likes.
Then the question becomes why does your god create people who feel their biological gender is incorrect?
Ironic.
In this case you are playing the role of “society”. And what you are saying is, as per the above quote is “you might think of yourself as a girl but I’m going to call you ‘he’ because I know you are only pretending to be a girl”.
You see Sal, society is not the problem. You are. It’s people like you, that refuse to use someone’s prefered gender pronoun that is the only problem here.
You dress it up as concern
but it’s not. Not at all. It’s just bigotry.
I think their psychological issue is probably rooted in a biological problem. Note, a biological problem is NOT necessarily the same as a heritable problem. For example, a baby born of an mother with tons of alcohol in her bloodstream will have biological issues as a result (not necessarily heritable issues).
So in the case of Gender Dysphoria, there is probably some biological mechanism that went amiss for whatever reason. For all we know there may be a chemical influence that somehow got in during embryonic development.
Sometimes counseling and “growing out of it” will fix the biological problem that causes the psychological problem. Our bodies self-heal from many wounds, and “growing out” of gender dysphoria is a form or self-healing.
For the 5%-20% where the wound doesn’t self heal, one has to weigh the alternatives. One might believe surgery will fix the problem, but as plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz noted in his practice, plastic surgery can’t repair a situation where the person can never accept himself. Case in point: an anorexic woman. No matter how much she starves herself, she sees herself as fat!
As I said, my mother went through plastic surgery after a car accident with a drunk driver, and that was highly valuable to her and every one else. So I have no problem with surgeries per se to fix a real problem.
So, let’s take the 5%-20% that GD persists. Will surgery make them happy on average? What’s the success rate vs. failure rate. If the failure rate is greater than 50%, then doing no surgery is statistically the better option. It might be better to “bear your cross each day” than create more problems for yourself and bear an even bigger cross of your own making.
In the absence of actual data, this is uncharted territory for gender reassignment and happiness thereafter.
In contrast, there is no question, such as in the case of my mother, plastic surgery contributed to her well being. I know of no one on the planet that objected to her face being restored after being cut in half. Dear God I’ll never forget being in the ambulance with her as I was injured too and her face wrapped in blood bandages and she couldn’t see asking the medics “Is my son alright?” I thank God for plastic surgeons. I advocate however, using plastic surgery for outcomes that are more certain than rolling the dice.
The trouble is that you don’t even believe GD is real in the first place (they are “only pretending”) so it would be impossible for you to agree with surgery even if the outcome was 100% guaranteed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4261554/
Of course, you won’t let trivialities such as what the people who had the operations think affect your judgement will you?
I have given you “actual data” now. Will you change your opinion?
I believe it is real. I even suggested a biological component is the root cause. Note: I said biological, not heritable, the two aren’t necessarily equal.
OMagain,
Given the suicide attempt rate is about 50% with transgendered people, that’s not surprising FEWER than half of the surveys were returned!
If an adult male wants to lobbed off his plumbing, that’s his choice, but I think goading kids to go down that route before they’ve had a chance to learn more about life is risky business. Personally my conscience would bother me if I ever goaded a boy to going through a fad phase in his life and he ended up mutilating his body irreversibly and then having regrets over what he did. I’d at least tell him he has an 80-95% chance of growing out of that desire if he’s willing to try to endure the difficulty.
In the case of Jazz Jennings, his body was so badly mutilated that even the plastic surgeons didn’t think it would be feasible to do a gender reassignment. That’s what can happen when you throw chemicals affecting someone’s development without accounting for the possible negative consequences.
I guess your conscience does not mind telling that same boy the earth is 6000 years old though.
Your compassion leaks from every phrase.
I have given you data that should change your thinking on that. Has it changed it?
No, of course not. Ever consider that the suicide rate is high because of people like you who say the are “only pretending”?
But if we concentrate on the 50% that were returned, a very high number suggest that they are happy after surgery.
Why are you ignoring this? Because it does not fit your narrative?
stcordova,
A man I grew up with had the surgery. He was married with tree sons. He was a guy that I new almost all my life but something seemed wrong when you talked to him. He attended Stanford and was a successful attorney. I got a call from a mutual friend a couple of years ago explaining that he had a gender identity problem and was in Thailand and had received the surgery. The “edge” he had made sense as he claimed to have the identity issue since the 8th grade.
A few months later the friend who let me know of the surgery had a party at his house had my friend with the surgery attended. We talked for close to an hour and she was the same I remembered except the edge was gone. I don’t know how she is doing at this point but it was clear that the gender identity problem was real.
Bear the cross God has put on you each day and in the next life you’ll be rewarded for doing so. One can choose to blame God for the cross he’s been given, or choose to bear the cross.
In some cases our suffering is due to real physical pain, in other cases our suffering is because we have unfulfilled wants and desires. They are the crosses we have to bear. I believe some of the component of Gender Dysphoria may be rooted in biology — after all the tendency toward adultery also has biological roots. It doesn’t make adultery right….
Jesus said:
There may not be a cure for being human and having natural or un-natural desires. That is the consequence of living in a world that Adam sold to the devil when Adam sinned.
Rewarded by the same person who put that burden on you in the first place? That seems logical….
Or live in the real world.
Why do you believe that? Does that absolve your god of responsibility then?
I can see why you’d think the desire to be happy is something that needs to be cured.
Fucking Adam eh? It’s lucky for us it’s just a fairy tale….
So despite being given what he asked for, evidence, Sal does not agree that 90.2% said their expectations for life as a woman were fulfilled postoperatively.
The “cure” here is surgery the desire is to change sex. The reported success rate is 90.2%.
So there is a cure. But for people like you that is the wrong thing. Instead they should:
Suffer now for a reward in heaven? Is that honestly the best solution to such issues? Is that your recommended course of action? Every time?
OMagain,
Can you support this claim?
Sal:
Yet instead of bearing the rather mild cross of your current financial circumstances, you are trying to make money, as you are fond of telling us. Why not bear your cross and wait for a reward in the next life?
Whence the hypocrisy? If you so casually permit yourself to shirk your crosses, why shouldn’t others?
I’m not ignoring this. In the casino sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It’s only fair to point out which course of action has the better odds and to point out when we really don’t know what the odds are. Same for any decision in life.
People with Gender Dyspohoria have a problem. People with anorexia have a problem. In the case of anorexic women who are just skin and bones, it doesn’t serve them well to confirm their insistence they are fat! In the case of a guy that believes he’s a girl, one has to weigh the physical consequences of what will happen in a gener reassignment. Generalizing the successes without accounting for the losses is like only highlighting the wins in a casino and then advertising that people should go to the casino as a result.
I’m saying, it’s not bigoted to point out, one may not be as happy as one thinks one will be after gender reassignment and chemical therapies. And even supposing pronoun police have their way, will that change the way people are biologically programmed to feel? Do you think all the romance novels and love stories ever written and will be written will be recast to make a trans “woman” as attractive as a real authentic woman born from birth that way.
I was at a wedding a few years back. At the wedding pictures of the bride and groom growing up were on display — the little girl growing up to become the birde, and the little boy growing up to be the groom. That simple ordinary story line is going to be hard to compete with. It has nothing to do with “bigotry” but just the way our expectations are molded by the way biological systems develop. I don’t expect that there will be as much demand for a romance novel where two girls grow up, and one girl gets a transplanted male plumbing from someone else and then the two girls become bride and groom. I went through the bookstore a few years back and saw walls and shelves of trashy romance novels that women just devour. I don’t think that is fundamentally a society thing, I think that is expectation molded by basic biology. No amount of laws and legislation and social “justice” is going to change expectations about the roles of men and women that are defined by biology. Gender dysphoria is the outlier on the distribution curve, it is not the norm. Those are basic numbers one can’t run away from.
In deciding on how society should run itself, to paraphrase the economist Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Which tradeoff is not as bad as another? As far as teens and younger, I don’t think it’s wrong to inform them that if they are suffering gender dysphoria, there are other solutions than trying to chemically and surgically alter your body and it’s only fair to inform these would be patients of the upsides and downsides of potential treatments.
I think it is perfectly ethical to say to a trans leaning boy, “you have really intense feelings you are a girl trapped in a man’s body, you have an 80-95% chance of growing out of it one day as the body self heals your mind. You might one day appreciate you are a man and be glad you didn’t irreversibly mutilate you body parts like Jazz Jennings. If you don’t grow out of it, it’s your choice what to do then. Have you ever changed your mind about something? What if you chop off your parts, and then change your mind, are you willing to take that risk?”
Yes.
Do you have a better deal for me than what Jesus offers? (rhetorical question)
The assumed better deal
Reality supports that claim chum.
So despite the people themselves being surveyed after surgery you still repeat this?
It’s kinda seems to me the textbook definition of bigotry. You are intolerant to those who hold the view that physical alignment to mental gender is usually a positive thing, even when it’s the people themselves who have gone through that saying it. You simply can’t or won’t accept that. Bigot.
Yes. Stop listening to bastards like you who want people to suffer due to some bigoted idea they have about what gender is and start making the real world, the only world there is, better.
You’ve some way to go yourself before you can claim to be a real authentic human being Sal.
I’m all in favor of gender euphoria for cisgender and transgender persons alike.
I’m not sure whether those of us who are spectators have any right to judge. My only caveat is surgeons too ready to wield the knife for profit.