Thanks everyone for advice on my shitty friend situation. I'm not going to call her again, and I'm not letting her know when I'm in town any more.
In my LGBT studies class today, we watched a video about children who are born hermaphrodites (I guess the proper term, which I just learned today, is
intersex) and it was dead scary. Not because of the intersex kids. I could care less about genitals. But the kid who was featured, who is being raised as a boy named Patrick, I mean his story was terrifying. Apparently, he was born with ovaries and one fallopian tube, but also a micropenis and one testicle. The doctors wanted to do surgery to remove the male organs, and his adoptive mother said that she wanted to keep him as he was (go her!). Apparently what happened is that after a weeklong battle, she was finally able to take him home, but shortly afterwards, the doctor said that his testicle might become cancerous, and asked permission to do a biopsy. The mother agreed to the biopsy, and the doctor said the testicle was malignant and then removed it. Later on, the mother asked to see the biopsy report, and right on the first page it said that the testicle was benign!
This terrifies me. I am not one of those people who is scared of doctors. I trust doctors implicitly. I believe in the Hippocratic Oath, and until now I believed that they did too. The fact that this doctor went against every moral code that he was supposed to be following is literally one of the scariest things I've ever heard of.
I kind of feel like I saw a policeman beating someone, except that I grew up not trusting policemen that much. I feel like something's gone terribly wrong with the world. This is the country that rails against female circumcision. How can we allow this to happen to children? The kid in the video is going to have to take hormone injections for the rest of his natural life. And the worst thing is that his parents, who are fantastic for fighting for his right to his own anatomy, are still forcing him into the role of a male. They aren't doing it maliciously, they just can't concieve of a world with more than two genders, or that there's a choice involved in gender roles. It's terrible. This kid is trapped. I hate it.
I'm a cynic. I can't help it, I usually think people have an angle. It's easy for me to believe that someone is taking advantage of someone else. But there are a few things that I've managed to maintain a rock steady belief in, and now I'm so disillusioned by a profession that I always had a good opinion of. I trust doctors, just like I trust scientists, just like I trust writers and artists. And yeah, they might be wrong, they might diagnose something in error or come up with a false theory, or they might just be in it for the money, but I always thought those people, at least, had some kind of moral compass. And what these doctors do to these intersex kids is inexcusable. They're not misinformed, they're not working off of incorrect theories. They're doing something that is not only against the wishes of the parents, but it's dead wrong.
I don't want to lose faith in people any more. There's so few things that I have faith in. I feel like I have to find something incorruptible, like Allison, who believes in herself and in grass. I believe in...I don't know.
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tired
crappy
my emotions make no sense!
cynical and disenfranchised
disappointed
emotional
depressed