Rosie knew

 

Amiga mia

Julia is 10 years my junior and feels something is off everywhere. We can all tell that the world is in a bad place and it's infecting all facets of our lives. 

She works at the Toronto office sometimes from home and other times going to the site. It varies but the work doesn't and at 52 the routine is draining her as is the way things are done now in a "show me the bottom line" world. 

We became friends in 2017 when we overlapped on the same project and now we keep in touch with calls which she always begins with "hola amiga mia" 

She heartily approves my choice of dress for the wedding after I have sent it on whattsapp. 

I know the extreme heat isn't helping and the constant bad news on the international front does nothing but make our feeling of malaise worse. 

So we cheer each other up as best we can and I tell her to focus on herself. Take long walks, have coffee or lunch with friends, connect with strangers and call your amiga in Montréal when you need to vent.

Serene

Young transgender people who don't blend in all that well are noticeably calm and chill. This morning on the metro at rush hour she was standing maybe 3 feet from me and the riders were of course minding their own business. 

She wasn't immediately detectable but my radar didn't need to go into overdrive to notice her. Others possibly didn't detect or just couldn't care less.

It was the expression that I liked; placid and serene while off to work.

The meaning of clothes

The process of adopting traditionally  feminine clothing as your own is both slow and organic. It is tied into the neuroplasticity which allows you to accept your identity which moves in conjunction with expression. 

I used to think I had reached a plateau and was repeatedly proven to be wrong. After a while there was no novelty left but thankfully it was replaced with a rightness which felt much better. 

You feel right because you have addressed a gap that was there since early childhood and you become calmer in the process. 

I wasn't changing anything in my daily routine, only that the psychology which was lagging behind finally caught up.

Back in style

Alberta has the highest concentration of measles cases per capita in North America; over 1200 cases since March. 

This is not surprising given that Alberta has a high percentage of conservatives who don't trust government or science. There are more vaccine skeptics there than in other parts of the country. It's the Texas of Canada.

We used to be completely measles free but belief in science and doctors has gone down substantially.

Outlaws

Some people believe that being transgender means that you are transitioning from one sex/gender to another when instead, you are more liberating your expression and identity from the constraints of birth sex. In other words you aren't going from a biological male to a female but instead rejecting the idea that your birth sex automatically determines who you are. 

When people transitioned in the past there was no middle ground and male to female transsexuals were correct to live as much as possible in stealth to avoid rejection and prejudice. 

Here I will also add that being a man and woman have traditionally been loaded with all kinds of social obligation and expectations which have little to nothing to do with their biology. 

Today, transgender youth are more likely to live somewhere in between the old binary model because both men and women are more free to explore life outside of what were very strict gender roles. This is why they have adopted more terms for how they identify. 

Binary transsexuals who felt they had been subjected to a complete psycho-sexual inversion still very much exist of course and are part of the broad spectrum of humanity and always will be. 

So in a sense being a transgender person makes you a gender outlaw (as Kate Bornstein famously coined) where you have a public and transparent identity which necessarily exists outside the constraints of birth sex and the rules which used to govern it.

Drinking the Kool-aid

I never realized to what extent people were gullible until I became much older. I would see supposedly well educated people go into cults or believe in wild conspiracy theories forcing me to think about how this could happen. 

It was the process of adopting a belief and then working backwards to develop reasoning to substantiate it; sometimes not even that. My father taught to apply critical thinking to everything and that there could be no faith without reason. 

I think the problem with many people is that the urge to fit in overrides their critical thinking. It is why joining a religion invented by a science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard can happen. They need something to cling to even if it means mental gymnastics to explain it to themselves. Believing in Xenu is the inevitable conclusion of a process which starts off with a trickle and ends up in a waterfall. 

Everytime I pass a Jehovah's witness kiosk the instinct to want to wake them kicks in but I stop myself.

Without this basic need of humanity for connection, Jim Jones wouldn't have been able to take advantage of people and get them to drink Kool-aid laced with poison. 

Trumpism works in much the same way where the need for a savior overrides what your own eyes are telling you.

Funnel

For the longest time I said that I would never entertain any form of transition; not even a social one. I remember the sexologist Helene Cote (who I would see maybe once a year) telling me that it was usually those most adamantly opposed to it that would end up transitioning whereas many who came to the hospital program very gung-ho at the outset often backed out. 

It's an interesting process that can feel like entering a funnel. When you are at the rim you think no problem but as you near the spout you realize that at a certain point it becomes almost inevitable. 

I reflect on what being educated in a more open minded society as youth are today. They will be less likely to view their path as an increasingly constricting funnel because they have less reasons to push back. If anything, their danger might be being more gung-ho than they need to be because acceptance is so much higher despite there still being obstacles. 

Yesterday I watched a video of someone about my age ruminating on how to tell an immediate family which includes people who are adamantly against transgender people. They have struggled to get where they are after knowing from earliest memory that they had a gender issue. 

You could very clearly see that they were at the spout end of that funnel.

Patinkin on Gaza

 

Chess with a pigeon

I just love this comment which had the word idiot replaced with Trump supporter. The imagery is brilliant:

"Arguing with a Trump supporter is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it's victorious"

Loose thread

The Epstein files are proving to be an Achilles heel for Trump. His calculation that his base would go along with everything he did was misguided as many see this case as an important part of their desire to unmask the deep state. 

They love the idea of a Bill Clinton or Bill Gates being outed as part of a pedophile leftist elite but Trump's long association with Epstein is problematic for a false populist who leans much more into authoritarian narcissism. 

This case has divided the MAGA base so much that the cracks in the foundation are impossible to conceal. Pam Bondi's mistake of teasing revealing the list and then pulling back by saying it doesn't exist is going to hurt the regime dearly.

The Trump reaction on his toxic platform revealed he is petrified of discovery and I would not be surprised if this is the loose thread which finally unravels the entire garment. 

The MAGA base has a large contingent of Christian nationalist hypocrites who love inflicting cruelty on others and the Epstein drama would be their ultimate prize towards "owning the libs"thus justifying their conspiratorial instincts.

If the list gets out, then very likely it is the beginning of the end for Trump.