Transgender

TRANSGENDER PLAY PROVOKES RUSSIAN POLITICIANS

By Stephen Wilson

 

A play where Jesus Christ identifies himself as a woman and transgender which was performed with the approval of a Union of Scottish Teachers {the Education Institute of Scotland} to celebrate 'Pride month', has provoked angry comments from Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov, that schools in the west are teaching  children that Jesus was bisexual. He regards it as another example of how an 'autocratic democracy' allows  schools to  impose their largely unwanted values on children.

 

A Scottish teachers' Union known as the Education Institute of Scotland sponsored and supported a Scottish play to celebrate 'Pride month ' in Scotland. The play, titled 'The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven', by Jo Clifford, is about a man who identifies as a woman and depicts Jesus as a Transgender woman. The play was performed in Scottish schools in honor of 'Pride Month', which defends the rights of gays and transgenders. When Sergei Lavrov learnt about this event from  'Christianity Today', he declared that this represents a typical case of how a boundlessly permissive society seeks to impose their values on not only America and Europe but abroad. Scotland  represents a striking example of an 'Autocratic  democracy in action.' 

Lavrov is not alone in lamenting the performance of this play. An article published by the conservative journal' Christianity Today'  also expressed dissatisfaction. John Denning stated the play was inconsiderate of the views held by  E.I.S.Christians. Denning declared, "This play deliberately imagines Jesus as a Trans Woman and puts words into his mouth that he never said, misrepresenting him. That's deeply offensive for many Christians ... It is hard to see how a teaching union justifies using the subscriptions paid by its members to promote this play."

 

However, this is hardly the first time some people in education have offended Christians. When I was a student at Glasgow College 30 years ago one of the questions I came across in a psychology exam I was sitting went 'Was Jesus Christ a Schizophrenic?' I think most if not all students skipped that question because it was just impossible to answer as well as absurd.

 

How might the proponents of staging such a play answer those negative claims? They might argue, 'Well, the play is fiction. It is just a play! Why take it so seriously?' However, this is not the main argument they are making. The aim of Pride Day is to counter not only discrimination against gays and transgenders, but to protect school students who are often bullied for their sexual orientation. So contrary to what people think, there is no intention to offend or attack school students, but to defend them from homophobia. The reaction of the Russian Foreign Secretary is just the kind of thing that you would expect from a Russian state that is set on forbidding gay marriage.

 

That is not how some Scots and Russians see things. They claim that people are attempting to not only impose their values on school children but even fire employees who disagree with, say, Transgender views. Instead of a tolerant and open-minded discussion about Transgender, the debate has been characterized by threats, coercion and being forced to take special courses on 'How to fight transgender discrimination in Education'. A Russian math lecturer told me "I had no choice but to do this course. The situation in England has gone crazy. If a person has to fill in certain application forms he is asked are you 'male, female or transgender? A lot of people are perplexed by the need for such questions." A Russian businessman told me, "I have friends who lived in America that have decided to return home to Russia because they don't want to be brought up in those values." A Scottish woman recently told me, "The Russians probably think we have gone insane". She seems to have hit the mark. 

It is important to mention that while some people have nothing against gays they express reservations about the Transgender question because they think that gender is largely a biological rather than social construction. For instance, when the author of the Harry Potter novels, J.. Rowling expressed her reservations it led to a hysterical over reaction where people threatened to 'cancel her out'. Cancel out means to stop her books being published and denying her right to a livelihood. In other words, if a teacher or actor expresses a disagreeable opinion they can be fired from their job and even blacklisted. In Scotland, a lecturer at a Scottish university was suspended from his work simply for defending one of Scotland's greatest philosophers, David Hume. He argued that it was senseless to topple his statue. The anger against David Hume stems from his connection with the slave trade! In this case, Albert Einstein would also have lost his job because he claimed that his theory of Relativity was largely inspired by a novel interpretation of Hume. One might ask the reasonable question "How can you fight persecution with another form of persecution?" The German philosopher Nietzsche warned 'when fighting monsters watch out you also don't turn into a monster'.

The bullied can easily inadvertently become a bully. As the saying goes 'Two wrongs don't make a right'.

Are their other views defining identity worth exploring? Well, it is worth asking, 'What constitutes a person's identity?' Is a person really defined by his sexual orientation or gender identity? Nobody to my knowledge would call the works of Russian composer Tchaikovsky 'Gay music' or the pictures of the artist Francis Bacon 'Gay art '. Most people do not care whether those people were gay and were more interested in their works as well as how they personally related to them. For example, my father met and drank with Francis Bacon in a London pub and liked him very much because they exchanged amusing anecdotes. He did not know he was gay or even cared. A person's identity is not defined by whether they are gay but other deeper inner aspects of his personality, as well as his acts. A person's core identity is defined by his soul which is often inscrutable to other people. Each person is a mystery. This point has been made again and again by Russian philosophers and by the Austrian author Robert Musil in his work 'The Man without Qualities.'  We could argue that a person is much more deeper than his or her sexual orientation or gender. That is why it makes no sense to present Jesus Christ as having a particular sexual orientation or identity. At least people should be freely allowed to debate and discuss this point which is often lost.