Transsexuality- Reflection 20

My understanding of intersexuality as been expanded after reading the article “What is Intersexuality.” An intersexual is a person that has characteristics of both sexes. To be more specific they have one ovary and one testes. They are called hermaphrodites. To be honest, I’ve heard of hermaphrodites and I knew that they were born with both gender characteristics. I wasn’t aware that there were pseudohermaphrodites for the different types of hermaphrodites depending on which sex genitalia they had more characteristics. I always understood it to be that they were very rare and sometimes hardly happens. I also know that often times parents for these children end up choosing their child’s sex and then providing them with steroids and hormone pills so that the child can grow properly in to the sex that was chosen for them. Trannies, transsexuals, Lady bois are all the same thing. They are men who dress p in women’s clothing who basically feel as though they were placed in to the wrong genders body. These men often get sex changes and they have breast implants in order to give the outward appearance of the woman they desire to be. I’ve never met anyone who has become a transsexual but that doesn’t mean that my mind is not open to them. I believe that there may chemical imbalances within thie person to make them feel the way they do and I wouldn’t want them to be unhappy in their own skin. There isn’t anything wrong with seeking happiness. Others believe that changing your sex is a sin against God because he has created in his own image. God also gives us the feeling to want to be happy and complete and I feel that if a person feels like they would be complete after doing the sex change surgery then why not let that person achieve the happiness for which they strive? The study of these topics have been useful in the sense that they provided me with more in depth information as to the intersexual and transsexual life. Not only that, it also allowed me to be able to call hermaphrodites intersexuals. Intersexuals sounds much more pleasant to the ear than the afore mentioned word. Growing up you hear a lot of people make jokes about intersexuals and transsexuals and tease each other about actually being one, not knowing the severity of the topic and the situation. It must really be hard for people who classify themselves of either one of the two groups to live in such a close-minded society.
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Same Sex- Reflection 19

What are my thoughts to the cause of homosexuality? This topic is one that called for a lot of thinking and evaluating of beliefs and values that are of my family. Not necessarily mine considering I have yet to really develop my own thoughts on many of the things I was raised to believe. First and foremost, homosexuality has been around for a very long time because it is even spoken about in the bible which is one of the oldest written literary works known to man. It is said that ONE of the reasons that Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed was because of homosexuality not to mention all of the other sexual immoralities that caused the city’s destruction. Some people fail to understand that homosexuality was not the only reason for the city’s destruction. This is only what we have come to know because of what someone else written. With that being said, we cannot determine the truth as to why the city was destroyed. The bible is a piece of work that many authors collaborated stories and made No one knows what was really said and done in those times because there isn’t anyone who is alive to tell their story and even if there was, it would be so many people speculating that it would be less of a hassle to just disregard what is said. I believe that people of the same sex that seek a relationship with each other was defined as something that is supposedly “bad” out of fear by the general population. People are always afraid of what they do not know and this is just an example of that statement. People place too much of an emphasis on gender and gender roles. Feelings can develop for whom ever, who are we to judge someone and tell them they are wrong simply because they are a part of the minority group? My views on homosexuality were impacted by the study of this topic only in a sense of enlightenment. The new information learned allows me to keeps my stance that people should have the right to be with and love whomever they please. It shouldn’t be society’s prerogative to place itself in the lives of each of the inhabitants only to try and rule them with the negativity in their words and actions. As for thinking what the actual cause for homosexuality may be, I do not have a stance. I’m not sure that it was caused by anything in particular. Saying that it has a cause makes it seem as if it is a disease or something. I’d like to believe that homosexuality has always been around and that people have always chosen their lifestyle and some people even have their beliefs that they were born the way they are which is not highly unlikely being that people are also born straight.
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Backyard Islands- Reflection 18

The information provided in the article “Tale of two Islands” sort of clarifies what many people have been saying all along. Miami Florida is a very diverse place that is home to many immigrants. Amongst those immigrants there are Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Jamaicans, etc. Of these immigrants, the Cubans stand above the rest when it comes to getting permanent residency in America. America tends to be more lenient to immigrants from Cuba than from any other country specifically Haiti. Cubans have the Wet Foot Dry Foot policy on their side which basically says that if they reach land before the Coast Guard can get to them then they are able to stay and have permanent residency. Though when those immigrants who travel from Haiti via an overfilled small passenger boat, they are denied and sent back to their country; A country that is one of the poorest countries in the world if it does not already hold that title. Even though Cuba is governed by dictators, they aren’t in the most horrible of situations. Haiti has and is still suffering from poverty and lack of a stable helping government. Not to mention the recent earthquake that happened that has devastated what was left of the declining country. The U.S has offered to grant temporary protective status to the Haitians that are already in the United States and that can prove that they have been here before the earthquake happened. They have been granted this for only eighteen months which seems preposterous to me. The government provides the immigrants who can pay to get a temporary social and residency card which will allow them to work legally for a year and a half. I wonder what the government will do when the eighteen months have depleted. Will they ship all of the temporary residents out of the country? Now many would say that the United States are being racist because of the fact that it is so easy for Cubans to get their residency and to get their official papers than it is for a Haitian who may have traveled the same way that the Cubans travel to the United States which is by boat. I think a case can be made for charges of institutional racism against Haitians by the United States. Why is that a country would deny one country’s immigrants while other they grant refuge? If you’re going to allow one, allow the both of them. Or to make it simpler, simply allow no one. But do not refuse immigrants from a country who suffer from poverty only to take in immigrants who feel their government is being too mean.
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rACING AGAINST Racism- Reflection 17

I’ve learned many things about both race and racism that opened my eyes to a whole new world. I also realized that many people do the unthinkable because of their and and for their racism against other races. White people feared their inferiorirty to blacks and therefore there was slavery that controlled blacks and made them the inferior to the whites. After the blacks moved from slavery because of them beginning to speak up and hold uproars about their race they went to segregation with the abolition of slavery. But even then white folk still felt like they had to prove that they were better than blacks by causing lynchings and killings if a black person so much as looked at their wives. I’m baffled at the fact that there were many people like Emmitt Till, a child, who was killed because he whistled at a white woman. I don’t understand what makes people think they are so much better than others they believe that their fecal product has a scent of roses in bloom. The ethnic cleansing done by the Serbian military to the Bosnian people was another baffling event in history because while they felt that the Bosnians were not good enough to dwell in the same territory as their race, they still made it a point to rape thousands of the Bosnian women hundreds of time. The way I understand that is these women were good enough for your men to pleasure themselves but not good enough to be left alone to live and stay with their families? For fear of their own race being overthrown and becoming the underdogs, many of these military personnel became leaders who lead their people to kill others and think that it was permissible. I wonder about the people who were merely kids when these major events in history took place. How they grew up believing that their fathers and brothers and uncles and grandfathers were doing the right thing by killing all of these innocent human beings. See, I think this can be very juch avoided if there were people back then who decided not to tell their child all of the misconceptions about people of different races from theirs. Even now, I think of black children who will not befriend anyone who isn’t black. Sometimes I wish I knew what they were being taught in their homes by rtheir parents about the other race. I doubt that we would ever reach a point where we can be done with racism and prejudice. Although humans beings have a brain larger than animals, sometimes we revert to our prehistoric beings and think as though we have a brain no larger than a pea. As the age old saying goes, “Be the change that you want to see in someone else.” I just wish everyone knew that phrase.
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Cleansing Ethnicities - Reflection 16

After reading and learning about ethnic cleansing and genocide I realized how lucky and blessed that I am that I didn’t have to endure the atrocities that the people of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur had to experience. To make matters worse, the genocide in Rwanda was the most recent of them all. The pnly thing that is more disgusting than knowing that this happened so recent is the fact that there were other countries in the area and the United States that could have stopped this genocide form happening. When I had the opportunity to watch Hotel Rwanda I was already briefed that the events actually happened and was not from someone’s imagination. What does it take to stop an event like this from occurring? How many more people have to die before we realize that prejudice has done enough damage? One thing that I have learned is that theses prejudicial and obscenely cruel acts only stem through fear. Fear is by far one of the most powerful emotions that one can hold. It has the power to make people do things that they would normally not do, but if someone fears of their culture’s decline, their group, their family, or even themselves, they evidently hold the power to do many things. One can never stop learning about the human race and the ill-mannered things that they are capable of. I can only imagine the paint hat these victims have felt and even that is not enough. The genocide in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia have the same output. Merciless killers who gave themselves the authority to kill these human beings. There were over two hundred thousand people that were killed in Bosnia by the Serbians who had leaders that even ordered for some villages to be “cleansed” more than others because there were more Muslims living in the territory. After the cleansing, only then was it safe for Serbians to live in the “freshly” cleansed territory. Who are they to judge and say who should be cleansed? Sometimes I wonder where was the logical thinking government in these countries that basically allowed these things to happen to their people. These events can be prevented if people understand that not everyone is going to be alike. This only proves that people only fear what they do not know. If everyone was supposed to be the same I would think that they would have been created the same by the superior being (God). Or even if they do not believe in God they would understand that if people were meant to be the same then all the apes in the world that evolved into human beings would have been the same.
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Entombed -(Reflection 15)

The Holocaust was a terrible situation that happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime. Putting humans in concentration camps and making them live in ghettos and branding them with marks only to use them as scapegoats from their own problems. Sadly, the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. Gypsies, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners, as well as mentally and physically disabled persons were also annihilated. There were four major killing centers where victims were killed almost immediately after their arrival by gassing. They were loaded into gas chambers and were killed that way. Treblinka was physically the largest killing center of the four. The people who claim to not believe that the Holocaust happened are too ignorant and I believe they are simply blinded by their own cruelty and stupidity. With so much evidence, how could one deny such a horrific event. Though the slaying of Africans didn’t have as much killings events like these in history shouldn’t be denied. There are witnesses and key role players who admitted being a part of this. Would so many people lie about the same thing? Why would so many people have the same story? I feel that these people should really try to open their minds about the Holocaust. Alive today there are some people who have written books about their life during the Holocaust so I think it is crazy and ignorant that there are still some people who believe that the Holocaust didn’t take place. When I was in middle school I had a teacher, Kathleen Serio, who assigned for everyone in class to read a book called “Entombed” which was about Bernard Mayer and forty five other Jews who lived underground and were lucky enough to survive the Holocaust. They were saved by a non-Jew who was nice enough to let them in his home. The reality in the life story of Bernard Mayer that was depicted in his autobiography lead the reader to feel as though they were living during the Holocaust themselves. At least that was how it made me feel. I felt all of the raw emotions of pain and hurt as the journey of life underground took place for Bernard. With the life story of a man who was able to write and share his story that contained the gruesome details of the Holocaust, it shakes me to believe that there are still some people who believe that the Holocaust isn’t real. Hopefully they are able to get the chance to read and to educate themselves with our history.
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Prejudice- REFLECTION 14

The fact that Jim Cole wanted to look at prejudice differently from the normal way people evaluate other things such as rape automatically caught my attention. His intentions were to look at the people who are acting upon their prejudicial dysfunctions rather than those who are victimized by their actions. He spoke truth in saying that we learn many of our prejudices as children by simple stereotypes that are learned in the home. With these learned stereotypes the children row into adults making decisions and plans based on the stereotypes they grew up on. In the article Beliefs, Values and Attitudes, prejudice is described as the most problematic of all negative attitudes. The article provides a good description of each of the negative behaviors that are involved in prejudice. These behaviors are sometimes so etched within us that we do not even notice when they are being displayed. The article provides good information about prejudice. The author made a statement that fear is the most responsible element in prejudice and the behaviors that are associated with it. The author also points out human beings connection and relation to familiarity. Humans like things that are familiar so they automatically associate things that are familiar to be good. On the other hand, humans dislike and have an outward negative disposition about things that aren’t familiar. Those things which ar different aren’t good and they definitely aren’t accepted too well amongst people. This is evident even in babies. For instance, I live in Miami and my sister has a little girl named Alyssa who is a twin to her brother Nathan. I see them all of the time and so the know me and know my face. My niece who doesn’t live here came from Tallahassee from school during her Spring Break and came with me to my sister’s house to see the twins. Alyssa didn’t even want to come to me because my niece was in the room, but as soon as my niece left Alyssa flew into my arms. I thought it was weird at first but then I understood that Alyssa didn’t know who my niece was even though we were all family. I doubt that Alyssa’s behavior can be considered prejudice since she is a baby. The fact of the matter is that even babies, when in the face of something that is different to them, tend to think that difference is not a good thing and won’t have anything to do with it.
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