Imagine God appearing suddenly to you and asking you whether you would like him to change you into the opposite sex. What will be your response?

In a home where the family is made up of boys and girls, the argu­ment about which group i.e. males or females have the easier tasks ultimately leads to the boys wishing they were girls and girls wishing they were boys.

In a typical Ghanaian setting which is not a middle income home, the choice will be driven by the specific job the parents do for a living.

Again, it will also depend on whether it is in a village setting or a town setting. I am under no illusions that if you are a boy in a village, you would not think twice in asking God to transform you into a girl.

Society since the days of Adam, has been fashioned to prepare males for tedious work. Jobs that require lifting of heavy items are the preserve of men which is a nat­ural occurrence, due to the natural physique of men.

There are a few exceptions of course where some women have been observed to have even beaten their husbands.

Being a provider for the family is a huge responsibility and it is something that most men given the opportunity, will wish it were shift­ed to their wives but you cannot eat your cake and have it.

When the children do well in school, the credit automatically goes to the men even though the mental capacity exhibited by the children, could be traced to their mothers. Some men are as dull as they come.

At the physiological level, I believe a lot of females would wish they were males. At a certain age, girls begin to menstruate and this will happen every month until they reach age 50 on the average if my biology teacher did not give me wrong information.

During this time there are com­plications with some women expe­riencing pain in their bodies, not to mention the psychological pressure it brings to bear on the girls and women.

In certain societies and even in some religious organisations, fe­males are considered to be unclean during menstruation period.

In certain sporting activities, sports women are not able to par­ticipate due to their inability to be 100 percent psychologically fit as a result of their being in that period of menstruation.

Let us consider the issue of child bearing and if you consider the agony women go through from conception till delivery, I believe I can boldly say that no man will have the desire to be transformed into a woman.

It is true that men also have an issue when it comes to circumcision and again I believe that if that is the only consideration then boys and adult males will be in a rush to change their sex status because if you go through the pain of cutting and the hot water treatment of the sore, the rush to transform from male to female, if the exercise were to be repeated at some point in their lives, is a forgone conclu­sion.

However, there is an aspect of child bearing that if considered, no man will ever rush to be trans­formed into a woman, given the opportunity. If men were the ones who give birth, most homes and therefore families will have only one child, I can guarantee that.

The agony women go through during delivery is out of this world.

The story is told of a renowned man of God in Ghana who near­ly collapsed, when he wanted to behave like a Caucasian and went to witness the delivery of his baby by his wife.

A friend openly confessed in church that he was in tears as he heard the screams of her wife during delivery. If God were to put the question to me, I would kindly and politely say no.

The abuse some women go through at the hands of some insane husbands makes the idea of trans­forming into a woman highly unat­tractive to me.

By Laud Kissi-Mensah