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Promoting the idea of “gender fluidity”
The ideological glue that holds Jill Soloway’s Transparent together is the deconstruction of the whole concept of gender. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? As one character in the show puts it,“We’re just a bunch of bodies, that’s it. No penis, no vagina, what does it matter?” According to Soloway, “The show questions the binary; trans people question the binary. Trans-ness demands that people live in the gray. The word ‘trans’ is about traveling the space between the binary. Judaism/feminism/trans politics — they can all really be woven together. Living at that ground zero place of otherness is inspiring to me.” Soloway is passionate about normalizing the concept of “gender fluidity”: Paste Magazinenotes that: “In Transparent sexual identity loses its ‘statehood’ and becomes fluid, treated like an ongoing process with its own ebbs and flows.”
As Dr. Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, noted, the reality, as distinct from Soloway’s ideologically-driven fantasies, , is that far from being a normal healthy behavior, “transgenderism” is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment. Noting that changing sex is “biologically impossible,” McHugh observes that “people who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.” ...