Providing LGBTQ Affiliation on College Applications

           Today in class we started a debate on whether colleges should be allowed to have students identify themselves as LGBTQ. I do not agree with this idea. This question would cause too many problems. Although having the option to identify allows colleges to help these students by providing them with extra help and programs, in reality we would be alienating them more. School officials will not be able to provide the right help to these students. In reality they probably don’t need help, nor do they want to be a spectacle. By identifying them, schools would be pointing them out to all the rest of the student body and making them susceptible to pressure from those who aren’t accepting of the LGBTQ community. This question on college applications would also point out who identifies with a different gender, allowing some schools to deny those students if they wish, or to favor them. This could also create certain favoritism, so that some students may even lie and say they’re a member of the LGBTQ community in order to gain admittance to a certain college. Instead of having these questions, colleges should ignore gender or have a neither gender and not force people to have to identify. Colleges should be looking for personality and intellectualism, and ignore gender. Everyone should be treated as equal.

            I do see why colleges might want to know what their students identify as, but I don’t feel that it is necessary. It might be beneficial to know the statistics and to make them feel welcomed. However, I feel the negatives out weigh the benefits. Students are not old enough or mature enough to know what they really feel and we shouldn’t need to force them to decide.

Having One Gender is not worth the Pain of Surgeries

The video on hermaphrodites was very powerful. It made me almost cry to know that some people suffer greatly because medical doctors and parents think it’s best to submit people to surgeries all their life, than to let them live the way they were born. I personally feel that we shouldn’t be able to choose our child’s sex for them. It was evident in the video that we saw, that choosing to make a hermaphrodite child one sex is more damaging than helpful. How are we to know if the sex we chose is the one they will identify with? Since we don’t know, we really shouldn’t choose. Maybe they identify with both and by making them live as one we are just forcing them to be something they aren’t. Plus, the process seems ridiculously painful and not worth it. Why would a child need to suffer that much pain when they could easily have a normal child hood without surgery. No one will be looking at their privates and the day they fall in love, that person will love everything about them.

            If one day they choose to have a surgery, I hope it’s because they want to have it and they understand the consequences. As parents, people think they know best, but sometimes you have to let your child choose and this is one of those situations. Being an overprotective parent in this situation makes it worse, and I think medical doctors also deserve blame for recommending these surgeries. They, better than anyone, should know that children born with two genders can live normally and that having these surgeries is painful, long, and tedious. As doctors they should be more understanding and accepting. They understand how often mutations occur. Our bodies make mutations everyday of our lives and these people were just unlucky (or lucky, depending on how you view it) that they had a mutation in their reproductive genes.