Falling behind

The Trump regime is now only barely able to gaslight a decreasing part of its own population. Everyone else has moved on. 

Europe, Mexico and Canada for example are making other arrangements but the tough talk is what the regime is going with as they bargain that it will look good at home.  This despite the horrid polling. The US is also gambling that the bond market won't crash as world confidence in their country declines. 

This is massive hubris that is entirely unwarranted 

China for its part has seen astronomical progress over the last 40 years and is now seeing the fruits of investment in technology and its workforce. The country has lifted a huge chunk of its population out of poverty and threatens to show the world what looking after your people looks like. 

No the Chinese aren't perfect on human rights but then most countries have skeletons in their closets. 

As the western world figures out how to mitigate the consequences of Neoliberal policies, the selling of more socialist approaches is becoming more palatable even in the US with its DSA candidates. 

This is because people are getting fed up of falling behind.

Desire

My desire to want to slap people in public has waned dramatically which is very good news for me. 

However, it's not because society in general is getting better behaved, but because I am learning to, better than ever, tune them out and live internally in peace.

To belong

One of the challenges we have as human beings is to find our community. We need a clan to belong to which can bring security but also potentially present us with a trap. 

In order to belong we need to define ourselves as being members and sometimes shoehorn ourselves into a model that may not feel quite right. 

This is human nature in spades. 

My instinct has always told me to be wary of groupthink precisely because the draw to belong can potentially cloud our judgement. It's wonderful to feel part of something bigger than ourselves but that invariably comes with some warning stickers 

We love labels and categories so we can fit in with the flipside being that they can serve as criteria for exclusion and even banishment.

Life and fairness

No one can imagine my life perfectly and there are many other lives I cannot relate to. All we can do is empathize by virtue of our humanity. 

My empathy is very strong for people who suffer in quiet dignity. There is something very noble in that while knowing that life doesn’t appear to be entirely fair. 

The saying goes that "God gives us what we can handle" which I don't really subscribe to. I prefer to think of it as different experiences bring out different strengths and qualities in us.

Maybe next time

Sometimes I have to stop myself from approaching another transgender person. I am tempted and then think twice because they may not appreciate such a random approach. 

This afternoon it was at my closest thrift shop where I noted that one of the employees (she about the age of my kids) was clearly trans. I took note but then carried on browsing. 

She had grown out her hair which was neatly gathered inside a large adorned clip. A little rouge on the cheeks was all I saw in the way of makeup. 

What always stays with me is how people just mind their own business. Whether they noticed she was trans or not didn't matter but then the majority of the browsers there weren't much beyond 30. 

I resisted saying hello but who knows for the next time.

Disarming ferocity

Anger is one of the unavoidable but necessary emotions we need to access and process to heal trauma or issues of repression. It's likely been bottles up for a long time and needs somewhere to go. 

There are always consequences to repression and that is one of them. 

This anger needs to be mitigated and released out of the body. Otherwise it sits there waiting to burst out at inopportune times. It can even scare us with its volatility. 

Remaking our lives in a significant way often requires we deal with suppressed anger which is often nested in the frustration of unattained life possibilities or potential. We get to a threshold where it must be dealt with because it's not sustainable to live with it long term. 

Once past the stage where it is mostly dissipated we can still be angry when required which is good for us but just not with disarming and disproportionate ferocity.

Scare tactics

FOX News is working overtime to scaremonger over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's recent victory in his Michigan primary. The words communism and socialism are never far from the tongue and you can tell they are deeply worried. 

If El-Sayed is anything like Mamdani he is going to win the election and then work hard to deliver for his constituents forcing the propaganda machine at FOX to invent new scare tactics including tying him to the scary Hasan Piker. 

The current economic environment in the US only works for the wealthy. The rest struggle to get by with buying power that has been steadily declining since 1980 after adjusting for inflation. 

It's why the middle class is gone. 

Trumpism is likely going to get the boot in November and Trump himself might be lucky to make it all the way through his term. He looks more and more like shit everyday. 

Centrists democrats who have long been partly bought off by special interests are worried this new breed of politicians will blow their cover. 

If these democratic socialists (that for us Canadians are just plain old Liberals) stick to their game plan of helping the average citizen it will destroy not only the far right but the centrists who were sure they were the good guys.

Muslim democratic socialists! Run for your lives!

For Pete's sake get a grip.

Davina

I don't like it when some transgender people become overly ontological in defining themselves. It can invariably turn apologetic. 

Davina is someone I happened to catch on Soft White Underbelly and over the course of the interview proceeded to explain her take on her own identity. 

"I am a biological male who has had FFS and am on hormones. I am not a woman but always wanted to be" she says in a deep baritone. 

Okay, but then this could be a great number of transgender people who don't feel compelled to stress their genetic origins. 

One of the reasons I have deliberately strayed away from getting hung up on manhood and womanhood semantics is that both definitions contain a healthy dose of societal definition. Depending on which culture and era one is born in the expectations and obligations can change significantly. 

It's also become a trap for gender criticals to deny rights to transgender people based on the "you're not a real woman" argument. 

Consider two people with exactly the same path taken in terms of medical approach. One emphasizes their biology while the other one their womanhood and yet they are both transgender individuals on precisely the same regimen. 

The one who acknowledges biology might be lauded by the right wing for being "sensible" while the other is considered delusional. 

Both say they are living their truth and I would have argument with neither because the label doesn't necessarily impact their day to day.

FOMO

Fear of missing out isn't a new phenomenon but it's been greatly made worse by our society having access to everybody else's business. 

We originally wanted to keep in touch with friends but suddenly we knew more than we needed to including when and where they went on vacation and that they could also afford the best kind of avocado toast. 

In the not too distant past people were too busy living and at most knew what their family and immediate neighbors were up to. Fast forward and we are swimming in meaningless details that won't make our lives any better for knowing them. 

It's just making us addicted to consuming more of the deeply unimportant.

No way around it

Older transgender people will have more trouble adapting to existing at a point somewhere within the old binary than today's youth. The reason is simple: when we grew up there were two choices with no meeting of the poles being possible. 

Within male to female gender variance we basically had men who dressed up as women once in a while and mostly in secret or transsexual people who transitioned fully. It was never that simple in truth of course, but from a bird's eye level it just seemed that way. 

Youth today more readily and openly embrace an identity somewhere between those two poles or they transition fully. The choices are there for them and they can pick and choose what particular procedure will get them to a goal. This is because their psychology is less perturbed by the constraints their elders lived under. 

My primary personal challenge was how I was going to live in the open as a transgender person who had existed for decades under a fixed model I was taught regarding what sex and gender were supposed to be. I had come to transition kicking and screaming always thinking I had to avoid it until I no longer could nor wanted to. 

I had constraints placed on me because of my age and decided on an approach that embraced authenticity; one which also required that I retool the psychology. 

It meant making  a life that looked different to the one I was forced into for many years but also required resiging myself to, what for a time, felt like an awkward compromise. 

This psychological adjustment has taken me the longest. I had the voice, clothing, mannerisms, etc down pat for a long time but the mind hadn't yet caught up to nearly the same level. 

I knew I wasn't going to ever hide any longer because I was sick of it but that also meant finding a plateau which included the blending of people I have met over recent years who don't know I am transgender and those who have witnessed the entire transformation process happen slowly. 

There are many more things to patch up due to our lived history and there is just no way around it.

Good thing

As I discovered more about how the world functions I began to take the approach that the masses are generally stupid and I went by exception 

"Prove to me you aren't one of the stupid ones" is what I adopted as a baseline.

This isn't very charitable at all. 

I have modified my approach to give the benefit of the doubt as a starting point since most people are well-intentioned even if they aren't well-informed. 

That they are susceptible to misinformation does not imply malice. Many are simply incurious and don't even bother with things outside their immediate sphere. 

Willful ignorance is what tips the scales for me which is plentiful in this world but definitely not in the majority. 

Good thing.