Now I am usually quite liberal an individualistic in the sense that I respect the choices people make for their own lives and I am not bothered by them, but I am not a huge fan of transsexualism or any of that gender confusion crap. You are simply born a biological male or a female, and like many other biological aspects of who you are, people deal with it. The whole conviction of being a different gender than your body doesn't have any scientific validity, so I am hard pressed to see it as anything different than a mere choice. I am inclined to think that if the scientific possibility and an albeit low degree of acceptance did not exist, few would actually come to this conclusion. It's a whole nature versus nurture thing of course, but I believe that your environment has a huge influence of the ideas one has about oneself. They could just be the most feminine and gay dude ever and I wouldn't mind. But changing the very core of your biology is such a far reaching intervention in a natural human life based on a wholly psychological idea about yourself, I for one would be against using public funding to do sex changes.
I shamefully admit to having watched a bit of Eurovision for the first time in like 6 year before I went out, of course ironically and it was quite hilarious, but I was quite impressed by the musical quality of what I have seen. Norway had a pretty damn awesome and tasteful song. Sweden was decent, apart from the godawful lyrics. Germany was allright, bad stage set up though and vocal style. Didin't watch the whole voting stuff, but I looked at the end results and they make sense if you imagine the tacky taste of the average European. Except my own country, the Netherlands, that bland boring ass song apparently was well liked, well the stage performance was excellent.
Austria had a perfect Eurovision song, that could be appreciated by anyone and a good lighting show. On song and performance alone they would have ended up high anyway. Gotta say, it was a nice looking beard.