As my grandchildren have gotten older I have seen their preferences in TV shows mature to “higher”(?) levels. However, I am alarmed at the current trend in the shows they are watching, namely “Hanna Montana” and “Jake and Josh”. “Hanna Montana” is the biggest offender, but many of the shows currently aimed at this younger age group feature a common theme where the kids are self-centered, conceited, materialistic, almighty and powerful decision makers, while any adults, even the parents, are portrayed as grossly inept or are totally absent. This trend in programming is sending a disturbing message to the young impressionable minds watching these shows.

A few nights ago, I saw that Miley Cyrus, the star of “Hanna Montana”, and her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, who plays her incompetent and ineffective father on the show were going to be guests on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno”, promoting her current concert tour of course.

No one is a guest on the late night or daytime talk shows anymore unless they are promoting their latest movie, book, TV show, CD, concert tour, etc. These shows have become nothing more than glorified infomercials promoting some celebrity’s latest moneymaker. But, I digress, back to the topic at hand.

So, I thought I would try to watch the segment with an open mind in hope that it might change my opinion of her, her show and her father. I even recorded it in hope of showing my grandchildren that she was indeed just a normal child. To my surprise, I discovered that she is even more conceited, self-centered and materialistic then she appears to be on her TV show. Her father just sat there like a dolt, with a Cheshire cat like grin on his face (I really wanted to say shit-eating grin, but am trying to have this remain as proper family fare) as if she was something to be proud of. All the while she bragged on and on about herself and made several disparaging remarks about him and his incompetence. In fact, in the still picture above she is looking at him with disdain over a comment he had just made that she said was stupid. WHAT? Time to take out the belt.

I had thought that the premise of the “Hannah Montana” show, with the spoiled, all-knowing child and incompetent parent was just an ill conceived plot contrivance. But, after seeing this interview, I now know that the show is just a slice of their real life.

Jay Leno, who has no children and obviously doesn’t know any better, gave Billy Ray the misguided compliment that he has done a wonderful job of raising his daughter. Give me a break!

Can there be any question now as to where the Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchey types in this world come from? I had originally thought and hoped that the cave where these pods are secreted would be discovered, so that they could be destroyed before more of them hatched. The sad part is, with the popularity of these shows, more and more of these types will be coming from mainstream American families.

Who would have thought this to be possible?

Iran leaders kinder to transsexuals than to gays

By Ladane Nasseri|Bloomberg News

February 28, 2008

Nasser didn't think much of Iran's Islamic regime -- until it paid for him to become a woman.

Growing up in the city of Mashhad, Nasser knew he was different from the other boys, sneaking around in his aunt's skirts and experimenting with makeup. At age 14, he told his parents he wanted to have a sex-change operation.

"I realized that I had a problem and that I needed to solve it through an operation," Nasser, now 18, says at a downtown Tehran clinic two days after he became a she called Hasti. "Even if lots of negative things are said about the regime, they also do things that are good."

In Iran, where men and women are segregated, and homosexuality is punishable by death, the government plans to spend 6 billion rials ($647,000) this year to help pay for sex-change operations. The policies aren't as contradictory as they seem, because in traditional societies there is more pressure to conform to standard gender roles, says Mahdis Kamkar, a Tehran psychologist who works with transsexuals.

"In closed cultures, a transsexual will be encouraged to clarify things, starting from his or her appearance," Kamkar says. "Dressing up or behaving as the other sex is not satisfying enough."

Religious family

Hasti grew up in a religious family, shocking her parents by letting her curly hair grow, wearing tight pants and makeup.

At 14 she was expelled from a school in Mashhad, a city of 2 million in northeastern Iran, because her looks and behavior were deemed "immoral."

An article in a local magazine prompted Hasti to learn more about transsexuals. Then, like many Iranians seeking answers about issues not discussed at home, she turned to the Internet.

"Before that I thought I'm a homosexual, but fortunately I got more information and realized it wasn't the case," she says.

Hasti's transformation took four years. She worked at her uncle's clothing shop and then a candle factory to save money for the operation. At 15, she began 14 months of medical examinations and psychoanalysis to make sure she qualified for a sex change.

In May 2007, a panel of doctors gave Hasti permission for the surgery.

"It was very difficult," says Mahsoumeh, Hasti's mother, who like her new daughter spoke on condition their family name not be disclosed. "I would go pray all night: 'God, please don't let this happen, let him remain a boy.'"

Hasti, though, had made up her mind.

She applied to Iran's State Welfare Organization for financial assistance, and in November the agency agreed to pay 35 million rials toward the surgery.

Hasti's parents finally agreed after her father set one condition: She must wear the chador, a full Islamic cover worn by women from traditional families.

"Before, when she went out and put makeup on, I suffered a lot because I thought people would look at her in a bad way," says Mahsoumeh, who also wears the chador.

Nine-hour procedure

Hasti's surgery, which involved removing the male genitals and creating a vagina from a section of intestine, lasted nine hours. Her doctor, Bahram Mir Jalali, is one of about 10 sex- change surgeons in Iran. He says he has performed more than 460 operations in the last 12 years.

Iran authorized such operations in 1984 under a decree issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The government considers transsexuals to be people who are "trapped" in a body of the wrong sex, says Mohammad Mehdi Kariminia, a cleric who wrote a thesis on transsexuals.

"It's extremely enlightened thinking, and it's most welcome," says Bernard Reed, who founded the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in Surrey, England, which promotes transgender issues in the U.K. "Would you see President Bush or Tony Blair making such a statement?"

Iran's State Welfare Organization is processing 116 applications for financial aid.

Transsexuals "are not to blame," says Hassan Moussavi Chalak, head of the agency's office of social injuries. "They have rights such as every other citizen."

By contrast, the Quran condemns homosexuality as a "moral deviation," Kariminia says. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who revived the so-called moral police to enforce Islamic laws, denied gays even existed in Iran during a speech last year at Columbia University in New York.

Hasti says she was arrested several times when, as Nasser, she walked down the street in tight jeans.

Now she wears the chador as a sign of her femininity, what she calls "a girl thing."

"I prefer going out with the chador in the heat of the summer rather than being considered a homosexual," Hasti says as she examines her nails.

"I've liberated myself from society, from people's perception of me."

Hasti is now planning for her new life as a woman.

"I'm totally ready mentally for marriage," she says. "They call us, transsexuals, women to the power of 1,000, in the pleasure we get from taking care of a husband or of the house.

"I was born the day before yesterday," she says, smiling.

So, we wish that we had been born the woman we know that we are in our minds and we try to claim that which we were denied by transitioning into womanhood. However, is this yet another instance where we should be careful of what we wish for, because it just might come true? If we could have it, would we really want every part and parcel of that which womanhood entails?

Following is a tongue-in-cheek accounting (I hope), written by a lady friend of mine, wherein she relates the many “joys” of being a woman.

Why Women Are Crabby

We started to "bud" in our blouses at 9 or 10 years old only to find that anything that came in contact with those tender, blooming buds hurt so bad it brought us to tears. So came the ridiculously uncomfortable training bra contraption that the boys in school would snap until we had calluses on our backs.

Next, we get our periods in our early to mid-teens (or sooner). Along with those aching budding boobs, we bloated, we cramped, we got the hormone crankies, had to wear little mattresses between our legs or insert tubular, packed cotton rods into places we didn't even know we had.

Our next little rite of passage was having sex for the first time (premarital or not), which was about as much fun as having a ramrod push your uterus through your nostrils (IF he did it right and didn't end up with his little cart before his horse), leaving us to wonder what all the fuss was about.

Then it was off to Motherhood, where we learned to live on dry crackers and water for months so we didn't spend the entire day leaning over Brother John. Of course, amazing creatures that we are (and we are), we learned to live with the growing little angels inside us, steadily kicking our innards night and day making us wonder if we were preparing to have Rosemary's Baby.

Our once flat bellies looked like we swallowed a watermelon whole and we pee'd our pants every time we sneezed. When the big moment arrived, the dam in our blessed Nether Regions invariably burst right in the middle of the mall and we had to waddle, with our big cartoon feet, moaning in pain all the way to the ER.

Then it was huff and puff and beg to die, while the OB says, "Please stop screaming, Mrs. Hear-me-roar. Calm down and push. Just one more good push" (more like 10), warranting a strong, well-deserved impulse to punch the %*#!* hubby square in the nose for making us cram a wiggling, mushroom-headed 10 pound bowling ball through a keyhole.

After that, it was time to raise those angels only to find that when all that "cute" wears off, the beautiful little darlings morphed into walking, jabbering, wet, gooey, snot-blowing, life-sucking little poop machines.

Then come their "Teen Years." Need I say more?

When the kids are almost grown, we women hit our voracious sexual prime in our early 40's - while hubby had his somewhere around his 18th birthday.

So we progress into the grand finale: "The Menopause", the Grandmother of all womanhood. It's either take HRT and chance cancer in those now seasoned "buds" or the aforementioned Nether Regions, or sweat like a hog in July, wash your sheets and pillowcases daily and bite the head off anything that moves.

Now, you ask WHY women seem to be more spiteful than men, when men get off so easy, INCLUDING the icing on life's cake: Being able to pee in the woods without soaking their socks.

So, while I love being a woman, "Womanhood" would make the Great Gandhi a tad crabby.

Women are the "weaker sex"? Yeah right. Bite me.

As uninviting as she makes this all sound, I for one still wish that I would have been born with the body to match my mind and would have gladly accepted and even looked forward too all of the things that being a woman entails. After all, my brain was already programmed along those lines. Besides, in spite of all the trials and tribulations that she mentions, she finishes by saying that she still loves being a woman. That’s enough for me.

Would you be willing to accept the entire package?

I have seen many postings here by girls wishing everyone a Happy Holiday season, accompanied by a picture of them in front of the Christmas tree. I felt that I would like to do that too. But, since I do not have a recent photo of myself in front of the tree, I thought that using an older photo might be even more appropriate, since this is the season of wishes. This is a picture of a time in my life that I wish I could remember and also wish would have continued throughout my life. It is a picture of me as a little girl sitting on my mother’s lap in front of our Christmas tree when I was one and a half years old.

As Paul Harvey would say, “Here is the rest of the story.” After having had twin boys who were now four years old, my mother was hoping for a daughter when I was born. I don’t think that she was totally disappointed in my being a boy, but she still wanted a baby girl very badly. So much so, that she decided to raise me completely as a girl and did so until I was three years old. So, here I am in a dress and pink fuzzy slippers with long blond hair with a bow in it, just like my mother. She is really fawning over me in the photo. Little did she realize that she did indeed have a little girl, in mind and soul.

I wish that her love for me being a girl could have continued throughout my life. In fact, this has been my only Christmas wish for all of my life. And it has also been every birthday wish and an every-night wish that I would be a girl when I awoke the next morning. I would gladly have traded all of the toy trucks and toy guns to become a real girl. But alas, it was not to be. When I was three years old I was turned back into the boy I was born as. My very long, curly blond hair was cut to a boy’s length and I no longer got to dress as a girl. There were probably several reasons for this, one being that my mom was again pregnant and that baby was later born a “real” girl, my sister. I don’t recall this at all, but I imagine that I must have been devastated at the transformation from being a girl and mom’s favorite to a boy and at most, my mom’s second favorite.

It is a cruel paradox that I was born trans-gender, unknown to my parents, and I had their total acceptance of being a girl for three years. When I became aware of my trans-gender feelings a few years later and began to act on them by dressing in my mom’s clothes, I was severely chastised for such unacceptable behavior. Being punished just made me become more secretive in my need to wear feminine clothes to express the gender I felt I was. I must not have been a very clever little cross-dresser, as I was caught on many occasions throughout many years. Although, in my defense, I am sure that my mother’s cross-dressing radar was set on high after I had been caught openly wearing her panties and stockings and then later on wearing them under my boy clothes. Each time I was caught, I was severely chastised for my little dalliance into the world of women’s lingerie.

In her defense this time, I assume that she reacted so strongly to my cross-dressing out of a certain amount of guilt, that she may have been the cause of it by raising me as a girl. I am sure that her intentions were none other than to rid me of this desire to be a girl for my own sake. Neither of us, nor anyone else at the time really understood this condition, so we were never able to discuss it on a rational level. I was offered psychotherapy, or more accurately threatened with it, if I didn’t change my ways. I did not want anything to do with the therapy of the day, since I knew that the only treatment they used was electro-shock aversion therapy, and I did not want any part of that. I did not want to be ordered to put on a dress and then have electrodes attached to various parts of me and then be plugged in to a wall outlet. So, I just became more secretive about my dressing. That didn’t work too well though, as I was still caught many more times. But at least I avoided being plugged into an outlet.

It is too bad that both of my parents passed on before I understood what being trans-gender meant. I would like to have been able to discuss it with them and explain why I needed to do what I did. I am not sure if they would have approved, but at least they would have understood my actions better and maybe I could feel a little less guilty about how they saw me.

I am still waiting for all of those Christmas, birthday and every-night wishes to come true. Can you guess what I want for Christmas this year? I'll give you three guesses...the first two don't count.

I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year. May all of your wishes and dreams come true.