…it should probably be Buddhism.
In the face of right-wing fungelical squeaking about transgendered individuals and the bathrooms they should or should not be permitted to use, a school in Thailand has actually built a separate WC for its transgendered students.
What I sit in awe of is not the fact that the bathroom was built; nor is it the fact that this is a school full of teens who apparently don’t suffer too strongly from homophobia; nor is it the fact that, according to a school administrator, 10 to 20 percent of students there annually consider themselves to be transgendered.
No, what leaves me floored is the simple fact that everyone is okay with it. There’s no yelling. There’s no taunting. There’s no outraged protest from religiously-retarded community members. There was simply a need to accommodate some students; the need was met; end, basically, of story.
But Thailand is predominantly Buddhist, and Buddhism is totally neutral about sexual orientation, because whom you fuck is irrelevant to achieving liberation. Transgender questions would fall into that category as well. So Thailand never developed under an institutional hatred of gays, lesbians or transgendered people, which means that their religion is not interfering with a civilized society.
Do we even need to speculate very long about what would happen if such a facility were put in place in a school here, in this ever so great “Christian” nation?
12:52 on July 30th, 2008
Great story!! I hope you don’t mind that I use it for my blog as well. And please add Spain to the list of countries where doing this would create a lot of “right-wing fungelical squeaking”.
13:44 on July 30th, 2008
Feel free to lift it, yes. I’m a little surprised about Spain — I’d had the impression things were a bit more liberal there socially.
18:10 on July 31st, 2008
Well, gay marriage is legal in Spain, but centuries of religious cleansing leave a mark … Catholicism is well entrenched there and the Church still has a lot of power (e.g., most Catholic schools in the country are subsidized). You’d have plenty of material for your blog!!