Say, for example, my swimming pool is cloudy. I’ve already checked the acid, chlorinator, etc. so I surmise that the problem is that the pool is full of a little suspended particles – underwater dust, as’t were. Lots of Gautrain construction in my area, so that’s no wonder.

No problem. I know exactly what I need and what it’s called: a flocculent. The particles are so fine that they never settles to the bottom of the pool, where the Barracuda can suck it up. But a flocculent is a chemical that will make them stick together into larger clumps, that will sink and be caught by the filter.

Off to the shops, then.

I innocently and straightforwardly ask the shop assistant “where do you keep your flocculents?”, and I get punched in the face almost as hard as that time I told the petrol attendant “I want ethylene glycol” and he yelled at me: “I don’t care where you want her, pervert, you stay the HELL away from my wife!”

No, I lie. Today is a good day, the shop assistant just gives me a blank stare. For some reason they often give me blank stares when I ask for things.

So I just tackle the shelves myself. There’s rows and rows of Sparkle-Brites, and WonderBlues, and SuperClears – and SuperClear Plusses. Hmmm. On closer inspection, none are subtitled “WONDERBLUE flocculent” or the like, so a deeper inspection is warranted.

I turn the bottles round, expecting to find some marketing shpiel to the effect that “SuperClear is a superior flocculent that has been lovingly developed in our high tech labs in order to…”. Nothing. Nada.

What I do find is lots of promises that WonderBlue will make my pool wonderfully blue and clear, or that SparkleBrite is an essential part of every pool-owners poolcare regimen. Of course, I read the exact same statement on all the chlorine, all the Hydrochloric acid (pardon me, Pool Acid), Cyanuric Acid (oops, I mean Stabiliser), and algaecide (sorry, that would be “underwater disinfectant – kills blue-green pool-germs DEAD!”).

What to do?

If I’m lucky, the back of the product will at least say “… cleans the pool by making tiny particles that cloud your water sink to the bottom, where they can be sucked up by the automatic pool cleaner”. Then I can reasonably safely guess they mean “flocculent”.

If I’m less lucky, the back will read “…helps your pool filter clean the water better”. Then I can make a somewhat more cautious guess that they mean “flocculent”.

Alas, I’m left trying to guess whether a flocculent is most likely to be a powder, or a liquid, or a gel. Why can’t they just label their products with a description of what they actually are?

As it stands, I can just buy the damn things and see if they act like what I hope they are.

Which is, I guess, what the average consumer does, anyway: buy lots of stuff until they find something that works (because it complements their particular habits for neglecting certain pool chemicals), and then swear by that as the be-all and end-all of ultimate poolcare.

In a future installment, I shall relate my adventures when trying to purchase vulcanizing glue for a hobby project, and how the helpful shop assistant pointed me to “a theatre make-up shop where other that can help Star Trek fans like you”.

A hermaphrodite (or intersexed person) is someone who has some or all of the primary sex characteristics of both genders (for example, a penis and a vulva).

A young woman’s emotional health is on the line, and they can’t even bother to go to the trouble of getting good, up to date, information to balance the rumours!

The term “hermaphrodite” has fallen into disfavour. Virtually all of the people to whom the obsolete label applies find it offensive. On top of that, it is factually confusing and built on outdated knowledge.

A hermaphrodite is a creature that is fully and functionally male and fully and functionally female. Like an earthworm – for whom being a hermaphrodite is, of course, a totally natural state of affairs.

Now, I’ve got no problem with hermaphroditic sentient creatures, if such existed, and I’m sure their society would be very interesting and instructive. For all we know, they’d have support groups for the earthworms that turned out to be only male or only female.

But the fact of the matter is that us humans can’t ever be hermaphroditic. Even someone who, as in the Star quote above, has a penis and a vulva, does not have all the characteristics of both sexes. Due to having a penis, they lack a clitoris. Due to having vulva, they lack a scrotum. (I guess the closest you could come to a true hermaphrodite in humans is a male and female conjoined twin with a single upper torso and head – you’d need the two pelvisses in order two have two complete sets of genitals.)

More importantly, the obsolete “hermaphrodite” terminology just gets it plain wrong. At the time, the medical establishment was trying to salvage the notion that there really are only two human sexes. Which left them in the position of having to decide, in each and every corner case, which sex a baby really belonged to on purely anatomical grounds. They decided that the essence of sex is in the gonads – if you have any trace of testes you were a “male pseudohermaphrodite” (i.e “really a male”), if you had any trace of ovaries you were a “female pseudohermaphrodite” (i.e. “really a female”).

But by that reckoning, this would be a man:

Eden Atwood

That’s Eden Atwood, Jazz singer. She says she’s “…hard at work on “The Last White Horse,” [her] memoir that chronicles [her] experiences with [Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome] as well as [her] music and performing career”. You can watch a short ABC segment, including interview, here.

This would be a man too:

Melody, member of AISSG-USA

Now. Really. I know that the distinction between male and female is not always as simple as we’d like to believe (as these posts of mine attest). But to insist that these are men just because they have Y chromosomes would be like fighting so hard to preserve the simple binary male/female distinction that you’re willing to fight to the point of destroying it even in those cases when there is no grey in-between.

By the way, I suggest – tongue in cheek – that any men that disagree about the “grey in-between” and consider themselves obviously physiologically male without a doubt, go and have themselves checked out by ultrasound for internal uterusses and ovaries they had not been aware of. Just in case. Because it can happen, and has happened.

I could also point to the 1 August 2006 Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders from the journal “Pediatrics in review” that says:

Advances in identification of molecular genetic causes of abnormal sex with heightened awareness of ethical issues and patient advocacy concerns necessitate a reexamination of nomenclature.1 Terms such as “intersex,” “pseudohermaphroditism,” “hermaphroditism,” “sex reversal,” and gender-based diagnostic labels are particularly controversial. These terms are perceived as potentially pejorative by patients2 and can be confusing to practitioners and parents alike.

The article then goes on to advocate dropping the “hermaprodite” based terminology.

All these newspapers, going on about hermaphrodites. It’s obvious that the “experts” they consult, if any, are not really up to date, so one wonders how much effort they went to to find the “experts” in the first place.

It’s also obvious that the newspapers seem to think that Caster Semenya is such an oddity, that they never bothered to go search for support groups etc. of other, real, live people with other comparable conditions. Because if they did, they would have found out how problematic the term “hermaphrodite” was soon enough.

I know there’s this trope that scientific study is dehumanising. But for me, once I’ve read of, say, Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, about how a genetic mutation that makes cells oblivious to the presence of testosterone can make someone develop into a woman despite the fact that, as fetus, they developed testes, and once I’ve thought to myself: “Cool! How fascinating” – the people within whom these fascinating genetic events take place just become much more human to me.

Because there are fascinating genetic events in all of us.

Philosophically, I feel: for millenia we’ve been human without the slightest awareness of cells, or atoms, or chromosomes, or the like. Being human, male, or female, has never been about any of that stuff (except that we’ve had and still had the sad tendency let our notions of “male” and “female” limit our notions of “human”). For an extremely short slice of that time, we’ve known about X and Y chromosomes, and that XX makes women and XY makes men. And soon afterwards, we’ve discovered that er, no, it’s not always that simple.

Seen from this perspective, it almost feels just as silly for, say, a CAIS woman to be bothered by the fact that she has a Y chromosome in her, as it would be to be worried about the fact that you’re made up of electrons and quarks. From the perspective of our humanity, our hopes, dreams, friendships and relationships, all of that stuff under our skins is, in a way, abstract and irrelevant.

When I just wrote that, it seemed like a contradiction to me – superficially at least. On the one hand, I am intensely interested in the precise scientific details of these things. On the other hand, I say they are irrelevant to our humanity.

I think Alice Dreger (whose writing I on these things I strongly recommends) sums it up well:

I keep running into smart people who seem to think I believe that sex “isn’t real” because it is all “socially constructed.” Allow me to correct this erroneous social construction of me by summarizing here what I think about sex and gender. I’m tempted to say “what I know about sex and gender” because there are few things I feel as sure about as this.

Testes are real. Ovaries are equally real. They sometimes make real gametes. (I don’t mean to imply they sometimes make fantasy gametes—just that they sometimes don’t make gametes.) Chromosomes and genes are also real. As anyone who’s every forgotten to wear a pad on the right day knows, menstrual blood is real. To the delight of this straight woman, penile erections are real. So are clitoral erections. I’m equally delighted about those.

When I say these are “real,” what I mean is that these things have a material existence independent of our ability as humans to notice, study, deny, politicize, or categorize them. I can’t believe I even have to assert this claim, but some academics have gone over the deep end and disagree. (I don’t hang out with such people unless there I have some form of pain killer at the ready.)

…Nature doesn’t care that we humans tend to like discreet categories. The real world is messy.

And whilst we ponder and agonize over the mess, all of the cells, genes, chromosomes, gametes, quarks, leptons, protons etc. in our body quite happily continue being us, quite oblivious to all our wrangling about how they ought and oughtn’t go about the business of being us.

I’m not no red football
to be kicked around the garden
No no

Red Football, Sinéad O’Connor

As I watch the tragic farce of the Caster Semenya’s sex verification debacle unfold, I feel sorrow for her. What must it feel like for her to learn, in such a publicly humiliating spectacle, that she has testes hidden inside her?

One small piece of good news in all of this is that apparently someone finally saw fit to give her access to professional trauma counseling. I just sincerely hope that those counselors are well and truly independent of those bastard organisations that put Caster in this spot in the first place.

As the sex row washed over our newspapers, like a weeks-long slow-motion crash test, I’ve learnt a lot more about the many ways in which human sex and gender is só much more intricate than our simplistic notions would suggest. (Not from the newspapers though – their reporting is generally atrocious).

And I feel a growing sense of outrage at the paternalistic, daddy-knows-best, keep-em-in-the-dark way these people have been treated.

It’s a recurring theme: well into early adulthood, pediatricians, gynaecologists, parents, deliberately lie to someone about exactly why doctors are so concerned about their nether regions. People giving consent to surgery to have their “twisted ovaries” removed – only to find years later in life that they never had ovaries in the first place, and that “twisted” was an euphemism for “your ovaries were testes, girl”.

I know a lot of this is motivated by a desire to protect these children with atypical sex development. But what I read from the adults who emerge on the other side, it just doesn’t work. They know there’s something different, they know it’s not normal to have genital surgery every few years, to have countless hormone therapies – and the fact that no one will tell them what and why this is happening to them just makes them feel isolated and lied to. That’s a recurring theme: for many of these people, having been lied to and operated on without their knowledge and consent is the bigger pain – not so much the fact that the have unusual sex organs.

And amongst the shameful treatment of Caster, I see echoes of that same paternalism. The fact that Athletics South Africa saw fit to do a secret sex verification means that someone there very well suspected that she had some or other intersex condition. The fact that they did it under false pretenses, and didn’t involve her in weighing the risks of competing internationally versus having her sex questioned on the world stage, just feels like gambling with an innocent teenager’s psyche.

As an aside: how the heck does one do the intensive kind of sex verification they did surreptitiously, any way? “Ok, girl. The first part of your drug testing was when we took blood. That was to test for steroids. The second part was when the psychologists kept asking you questions about whether you feel more like a man or a woman. That was, ahem, er – to test for cocaine. Now, for the next part, we now need you to get in the stirrups so we can photograph your privates, so, er, we, um… it’s all Science my dear, just trust us!”

Lastly, I am outraged at the cowardly way some of the officials involved try to hide their mistakes. “The South African constitution forbids us to do sex testing, and that’s why we had to send her off to Berlin without warning”. Yeah right. The constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. How do you leap from there, to the notion that the constitution forbids the consensual diagnosis of sex-related conditions, or forbids psychological counseling to help a teenager learn and understand why that diagnosis might need to be sought in the first place?

We lie, we steal, we plot against each other, we betray one another, we stab friends in the back. We even beat up and assault enemies, or rape, or murder. The list goes on.

Now, it is almost undeniable that there are some things on the list that men are more guilty of than women. By that token, it’s equally undeniable that there are some things on the list that women are more guilty of than men. Sometimes it makes a difference whether it’s men doing it to men, or women doing it to women, or men and women doing it to each other.

Sometimes it’s easy to make a judgement call which of these are worse than the other: for example, as far as I’m concerned, one single murder outweighs a lifetime of gossip.

But sometimes it’s not that easy. If, for example, some drunk at a bar were to knife me twice and break my arm, would that be worse than if someone were to feign friendship for ten years and during that time systematically destroy my self-worth and independence?

Given all that, I find it extremely unlikely that one could ever stand back and make a final judgement call: yup, men are worse than women, because even though women are more guilty of A, B, and C, men are more guilty of X, Y and Z – and X, Y and Z are undeniably worse than A, B, and C.

I believe very strongly in gender equality.

Therefore, it seems logical to me, that if  men are, for example, physically stronger than women and have the upper hand when it comes to physical violence and intimidation – whether in sexual relationships, friendships, amongst their peers or towards their adversaries – women would tend to tactically resort to other strategies to even the field.

To imply that women are intrinsically incapable of finding other strategies would seem, to me, to be terribly paternalistic – a virtual admission that women are in fact inferior.

To imply that women are intrinsically virtuous and untempted to find other strategies, would seem – well, frankly as far as I’m concerned making women out to be Angels is just as paternalistic and demeaning.

To the extent that there are gender differences in aptitudes for various forms of coercion, the genders’ experience of those kind of violence would of course differ strongly. And this is true whether one is a victim, perpetrator, or merely a by-stander empathising with others of your own gender.

It’s quite likely that many levels of bias are at play. If men are truly more likely to be the perpetrators than the victims of physical violence, men just won’t have the same experience of fear of becoming a victim than women have.

Also, if men’s physical strength gives them an edge over women, whether or not they use it, just because women fear they might use it – then a man who would never dream of laying a finger on a woman might still be blissfully unaware of the advantage that he has over women and the extent to which he subconsciously caches in on that advantage.

And then, the bitter pill: if violence is truly a more male phenomenon, maybe there’s a corner in every man’s proverbial reptilian brain that biases him to downplay the extent to which men are violent towards women  – to protect an ace that he secretly knows he might want to keep up his sleeve and play in future.

But I believe the same holds true in reverse.

To the extent that women have their own tendencies towards their own kinds of strategies for aggression, they would similarly be blinded to what it feels like to fear being on the receiving end. They would also be blissfully unaware of the self-protective contortions men go through “just in case” this woman plays her female ace, and the extent that they benefit from the power that fear gives them. They might also harbour their own dark dreams in their own reptilian brains of maybe, one day, actually doing it.

For one example amongst many: men often express the fear that a woman might falsely accuse them of rape or sexual abuse – and then they would be royally screwed. Frankly, this is a fear I can relate to; but it seems to me that women are almost always dismissive of that fear. Often they even go as far as saying that the man who says he fears that  is a chauvinist asshole who obviously is a rape denier, and he must be a sexual predator of some sort because otherwise why would he be concerned about being accused, if he’s innocent? And anyway, they add, it happens so rarely that to even mention it draws away attention from the real problem, which is that men are violent and stronger than women, and assault women.

I submit that all the aforementioned biases are at play here. The women downplay the fear of being a victim of false rape accusation because, frankly, that’s one of their modes of aggression, not one of their modes of victimhood. They just can’t conceive of it happening, or can’t understand how such a remote possibility could in any way weigh on men’s minds. They just don’t “get” the fear of a false rape accusation, just like men just don’t “get” women’s fear of walking alone at night. It’s not part of either’s reality.

I guess there’ll be lots of women reading this who’ll be annoyed reading this because, “Duh! Men are stronger and more violent than women, so obviously all this talk of psychological violence is just hair-splitting, because psychological violence is just not the same as physical violence!”. Well, no. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t – as I said at the outset: it’s very difficult for to weigh up the various aggressive behaviors men and women engage in and say which are “worse” on average. And maybe the rhetorical gambit of “sweeping everything but physical violence off the table” is just the bias I mentioned before talking, making you blind to women’s unique styles of aggression towards men, making a sole issue of men’s styles of aggression.

My challenge to women is this: Equality of the Sexes goes further than just equality of rights and opportunities.  Uncomfortable as it is, it extends to Equal Responsibility to Own up to the Dark Corners of our Psyche.

Although the particular article that prompted me to write was about domestic abuse, domestic abuse was not the issue I wanted to write about – the article merely tickled other broader concerns that have been gnawing at me for years. This caused me to be much more casual about conflating physical, psychological and other abusive behaviours than I should have been.

Someone with an intense concern about physical abuse would see physical abuse being mentioned, assume my post was all about physical abuse – and naturally so, since we all read our own fears and hopes and issues into the world around us. From that perspective I would seem distressingly dishonest for suggesting that women are physically as violent as men are – and do so by making reference to psychological aggression.

And since my post was jumbled enough to permit that kind of misunderstanding, I apologise.

Also, the fact that I mentioned scholarly studies about men and women in roles of aggressor and victim could have created the impression that my post was itself trying to be a factual, scholarly discussion on what the actual percentages of various categories of abuse are. Instead, I was talking about common attitudes about male and female culpability – culpability in general, not just for domestic violence. Only to the extent that I am just another human animal swimming my part of that sea of attitudes do I lay claim to any special knowledge – and then of my experience of swimming that sea only.

The big point of my juggling the various real, proposed and thumb-sucked statistics of various kinds of male-to-female ratios of domestic violence was not to try and argue that any specific one of those statistics were true.

Much of what “everybody knows” is often false. Often scholarly research that the popular media presents as “settled” and proven is often not settled at all. Therefore, I felt willing to entertain the notion that maybe much of what “everybody knows” about male and female violence is skewed too.

I juggled hypothetical numbers in my head because my question was: is it the factual reality of various statistics that make people commit to them, or are there underlying attitudes and biases that also play a role in people’s commitments to various stances? The fact that it felt politically incorrect to even entertain that temporary suspension of disbelief – what if there are in fact more violent women, even physically violent women, that is commonly thought? – confirmed to me that maybe there is a larger component of bias to “what everyone knows” than we realise.

All in all, I could have brought across my actual point much clearer if I didn’t drag the random blog post that triggered it into the discussion at all.

So, instead of trying to rehabilitate my original post, I’ll try and re-state the original underlying point I was trying to make, with no distractions – in a future post to come.

(Update: the “”future post” is here.)

It is a common stereotype that men are the batterers, and women the victims.

Now, I’ve always found absolutistic either-or thinking fascinating – and dangerous. Even if, for the sake of argument, men were predominantly more violent than women, so that (thumbsuck) 90% of all domestic abuse were perpetrated by men, that would still mean that 1 in 10 victims of domestic abuse would be men,

Now, to my mind, the hypothetical 90% would be an extremely skewed distribution of violence, and as such would be a very generous admission of the premise that men are more violent than women. But even then: 1 in 10 male victims is far from nothing, and surely warrants a few shelters for battered men here, or magazine articles there?

The 90% was made up, of course.

This is where the black or white thinking comes in: it seems to me that even people who would quite freely grant that the notion of “men as batters” is a simplification, and that male victims do exist – even they seem to speak and act as if for all practical purposes male victims of domestic violence are sufficiently few to ignore for practical purposes.

In Woman Comparable to Men in Domestic Violence: Stereotypes and their Consequences on Brainblogger, Robbert Yourrel presents a telling anecdote:

A volunteer who presents about male victims was presenting to a police department. She had 200 law enforcement personnel present. At the end, she got a police officer to volunteer a call to a shelter, posing as a male victim. He called a hotline for a battered womens program and asked about services for men, explaining that he was experiencing violence at the hands of a female. The hotline worker said, “You should be in jail.”

He then cites a  litany  of 22 research papers from 1980 – 2007 that either show a more or less equal victim vs. aggressor distribution between men and women for physical and/or emotional abuse – or show a ration that is significantly less skewed than my hypothetical 90/10 ratio above.

It feels to me as if there is a strong pressure to either admit that men can be victims too – in which case one is immediately branded as denying that women are victims at all. Or one can be concerned about the number of female victims of abuse – in which case there is strong political pressure to not just say that there are more female victims, but that there are only female victims.

Just consider the tone of this comment:

This guy Hamel sounds like a male supremacist. His idea of being equal is to cast blame onto women who are the victims 90% of the time. He does bogus studies to attempt to undermine protection for women and children.

Again with the black-and-white thinking. Why on earth would a reasoned discussion that men sometimes are victims too be and attempt to “undermine protection for women and children”? And if women really are the victims 90% of the time, why do the 10% victims not deserve the rare blog post or research paper here and there?

One thing seems clear to me: is such a strident person, who most likely is vastly exaggerating their case, can only dare reach for a number as relatively small as 90% to make the case that “only women are victims, male victims do not exist” – then likely the true ratio is likely closer to 60/40 or 40/60.

And that would be a very different reality than the one we mutually pretend to live in.

Just to be clear: I do not deny that women are victimized. And if they are, I wish them to break free from their abuse. I wish them to have the support they need to do so, and heal from the abuse.

All I want is to go a bit further than that: when those therapists or counsellors have helped the women, I wish the therapists would go grab a beer and shoptalk and compare notes with their buddies – the therapists and counsellors that assist the men.

In the battle of the sexes, why can’t we all just make love, not war?

We’ve become pretty accustomed to guide dogs for the blind. But when I read this New York Times article about other animals used for other handicaps – and a social ‘backlash’ of sorts against them – I wondered how long it actually took us, as a society, to get used to guide dogs in the first place.

Note the patronising 'Things that make you go aahh' slant

One interesting new development mentioned in the article is the use of miniature horses, instead of dogs, as guides to the blind. Apparently some people, in some contexts, find horses to be superior guides. They live longer, so the owner does not have to re-bond with as many guide-animal partners in their lifetime, the horses have a better temperament and don’t go running after cats, dragging their owners along, the horses have near-360° vision and so can keep a better eye on how their owner and obstacles she might bump into, and so forth.

But no denying it, the idea of a guide horse breaks the mould.

And we people like our moulds. In the NYT article, they mention the rising problem of fraudsters taking their pets along into public spaces where pets are not allowed, and then claiming the pets are “service animals” for some unmentioned psychological disorder.

And instead of a common-sense, compassionate approach, people fall back to their boxes.

If the animal is not a dog, nor the owner blind, then – dissonance! Therefore, some moves are afoot disallow all non-dog service animals.

This is not the first time I hear of novel use of service animals. The article mentions, in passing, the use of dogs to “[help] autistic children socialize” (isn’t it amazing, the bias – autistics are always children, when they grow up the disappear, off society’s radar, into a la-la land where they now longer need dogs to help them socialize?).

If read of that in 1995 already from Jim Sinclair (J8, as he is known amongst some – an autistic letter-counting nickname of sorts). He calls them SSigDOGs – Social Signal Dogs and Orientation Guides.  And it goes further than just helping him to ’socialize’. Dogs are more adepts at reading human body language than most autistics are, therefore a good SSigDOGs role is to growl at or shun people who act threateningly or dishonestly towards their autistic master, and to be chummy with trustworthy people. One would presume from that that the autistic owner finds it easier to read the animal’s body language than humans’.

One gets the feeling, from reading Jim’s account, that these kinds of dog fulfill a purpose that is very difficult to grasp if one is not in the shoes of an autistic:

I found that with my dog by my side, my overall awareness and orientation to my surroundings was better. I actually understood more of what I saw and heard when I had the dog to direct my attention to the particular things in the environment that were important for me to attend to.

…

… a dog who responded well to people, distinguished between familiar people and strangers, distinguished between people who just happened to be standing near me and people whose body language indicated they were trying to get my attention–all things that are very difficult for me to do.

…

Isosceles has enabled me to recognize acquaintances when I encounter them, which has made it easier for acquaintances to turn into friends.

…

Several years ago I saw a report about service dogs being trained to help people with Parkinson’s disease break out of motor “freezes,” and I realized that Isosceles had been doing this for me for years.

Precisely how a dog would help one to recognize acquiaintances is a bit murky to me – but since I don’t have the problem I suppose it is not for me to judge the solution. More power to Jim.

I suppose the idea of a grown up autistic not just existing but also functioning, choosing and training and buying a guide dog, acquainting and befriending people shatters some stereotypes.

Which brings us back to people and their boxes, and the following very saddening comment on Rebecca’s blog:

Rebecca
it’s always nice when a sighted journalist tries to enter our world and always makes for some amusing reading. You see my wife has been blind since birth and she uses a guide dog. So let’s look at some of the facts that you seem to have left out your article and I have some questions for you. First of all you fail to tell your readers who was responsible for having the changes made to the ADA [a law that limits the definition of serivce animals to dogs-only - Ed.] . It wasn’t the big bad government it was the guide dog users themselves… We have a hard enough time as it is for business allowing us access to their establishment with a well-trained guide dog. Having ill trained animals pretending to be service animal’s just makes it harder for us to be accepted… how do you train a horse not to defecate or urinate when it wants to? How do you take a horse on an airplane? How do you command a horse to lay down? Horses require iron shoes how are you going to protect delicate floors? How are you going to get a horse to the second level of a building that has no elevator?… You cannot train non-domesticated animals to do the same functions as dogs. And we the disabled community that use service animal’s correction service dogs are sick and tired of people who want their pets to travel with them so they figure that they will fool the general public because people are afraid to confront the disabled. I do believe that the parrot does help the man who has bipolar disorder. And the monkey is a great help to someone who has lost the use of their arms. But should they be for afforded the same rights and privileges that we guide dog users have struggled for over 80 years I think not.

I get the feeling of someone whose become so immersed in one particular world, that of blind people and their guide dogs, that they’ve become blind to the fact that other worlds, other people with other problems, exist. And too blind to notice that the objections are precisely the same kind of objections that were and are still made against guide dogs for the blind: “But what if the dog poops on the street or in the restaurant? How will you ever take a dog into a hospital waiting room?”.

The “I’ve got my rights – now I’ll join the majority in bashing other minorities” syndrome is always a sad sight to see.