Reverend Pat serves up another piping hot plate of dumbass

Ladies and gentlemen, Pat Robertson, transgender historian.

Forgive me, Pat, as I'm sure you've studied transgender issues in depth, but your analysis begs the question: If changing genders is, as you implied in your comments, a rare, embarrassing, and awkward decision, why in the world would anyone willingly undergo the procedure?

Well, there are a number of reasons. One is fairly obvious. Perhaps you're familiar with a condition known as "ambiguous genitalia." If not, here's a quick primer from the National Institutes of Health.

Normally, an infant inherits one pair of sex chromosomes -- one X from the mother and one X or one Y from the father. The male and female reproductive organs and genitals both arise from the same tissue in the fetus.

If the process that causes this fetal tissue to become "male" or "female" is disrupted, ambiguous genitalia can develop. This genitalia makes it difficult to classify the infant as male or female.

According to Patient UK, genital anomalies occur in an estimated 1 out of every 4500 births. When the results are severe enough, doctors must make do and "assign" the child a gender. Not surprisingly, they occasionally botch this little coin toss and the kid grows up haunted by conflicting impulses (much like the mindbattle that rages between my attraction to Lindsay Lohan and my horror at what monsters most assuredly lurk in her vagina).

In this case, maybe a more appropriate question for Pat would be: Why does God allow children to be born this way? Or deformed at all for that matter?

This Yahweh character must have a pretty sick sense of humor. "It's a boy!... It's a girl!... It's... umm... come here and take a gander at this... does that look like a penis to you?"

What with all the abuse, war, sex trafficking, and starvation a child potentially faces in this world (merely for the crime of being born), handing out a gender seems like the least this omnibenevolent deity could do.