Hereabouts, the parents of Chinese adoptees have formed an association and are working to head off some of the problems. They make a serious effort to learn about Chinese culture, some of them are learning Chinese, and many of them send their kids off to Chinese school on Saturdays. It remains to be seen how this will work out, I suppose it is a little like an open adoption, in that it is a culturally open adoption, and they aren't trying to turn their kids into little Canadians.

History isn't encouraging, anyway. The track-record for First Nations (Indian) adoptions into white or mainstream families is absolutely terrible. Oddly enough, Natives adopted out of North America, to Europe say, seem to turn out more successfully.

On a completely different matter, the problem is that prospective adoptive parents hunger for babies, and in North America with abortion & birth-control mostly available, a degree of female economic empowerment, and improved social supports for single mothers, the supply of babies available for adoption is a fraction of the demand. So we have the international baby trade, and it can be a truly nasty business some of the time.

The tragedy is that there are vast numbers of children 2 and up available for adoption, that nobody wants, doomed to a life of foster care, which we know from mountains of research is very much Not Good for most children.

Of course culture is not recorded in your DNA, and of course your appearance is. But it seems that even white internationally adopted kids seem to have more stressors and bad outcomes than domestically adopted kids (note "tend to" many work out just fine). The fact is, nobody knows quite why, though there has been a lot of speculative research.

The parents of adopted Chinese children association may or may not be on the right track. They are attempting to address the problem, but the jury is still out on whether to any effect. I have rather mixed feelings about the idea myself; is a contrived Chinese connection going to help or harm? I have no idea.

And at anyrate, of course those kids are Canadians, just like all their Chinese-Canadian classmates in Saturday Chinese school.

As for older children, well, in my mid-sized city at any given moment there are little over 300 2 to 12 year olds available for adoption (most yearning to be adopted, actually). Every year about 10 to 20 get adopted. The social workers most emphatically do not think shuffling the rest of them through foster and group homes is the best thing for them; unfortunately, it is the only thing available for them.

And some of them are quite messed up (in social-worker-speak, they are "complex kids"), and some of them are a bit messed up, and quite a few, actually, are just fine. But absolutely, no-one should take this on if they aren't sure they can handle it (my own family situation does not let me, for example). I just wish that there were more people who could.

It's all very confusing.

Female rape victims can't be counseled by a MTF trangendered, because a) their male life experience doesn't equip them to understand, or b) they still have that pesky Y chromosome and this will frighten already traumatized women, or c) they are taking away employment from downtrodden womyn. OK.

But where does a MTF go be counseled if she is raped? (It can't be unheard of.) A men's center? A women's center? Furthermore, where does a FTM transgendered person go if he is raped? Should there be women's, men's, MTF, and FTM centers? Hmm.

It gets weirder.

There is the whole question of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, which is a mental illness, not a mistake of nature. If you have always felt that you should have one arm or one leg, that is a disease, and should not be treated by surgery (indeed, if you help out someone with surgery, you can go to jail, as a few castration specialists have found out).

But if you have always felt that you should be the other gender, well it's a matter of human rights, and the best therapy is surgery. Except when it isn't. Oh, and except that gender disphoria is ridiculous, because gender is just a social construct. Or isn't, just a broad set of tendencies. Or the consequence of human sociobiological evolution.

Well, it makes you think, anyway.