Punching down

Punching down is easy. We assess that someone is weaker than us and we degrade them to make ourselves feel better somehow; no matter how briefly. 

Dave Chapelle has seen the writing on the wall and is trying to back away slowly from his right wing cheerleaders; the ones who rejoiced in the litany of transgender jokes he now says were meant differently. He sees MAGA fracturing and the backlash coming and he wants off. 

Too bad for him. 

His pronouncement that he is a proud member of team TERF wasn't intended how it sounded he tells us. It wasn't punching down as much as people thought. After all he had one transgender woman friend the way some whites say they have a black friend while letting their racism slip here and there. 

It's too late for Dave and many others who made a decision while the going was good. A brain dead Lauren Boebert wanting his autograph will remain on the record.

Because people have memories.

Never over

A transition is never truly over. It is instead a constant process of becoming. We are moving fluidly through a series of mental changes which lead to a version of ourselves that radiates from the best of our lived experience. 

It encompasses much more than just gender and is overwhelmingly guided and governed by our psychology. 

Nothing matters more.

Pathways

Our original knowledge of self is based on our earliest neural pathways. In other words, what you were taught became reinforced through repetition until it became unquestioned orthodoxy. 

Any divergences from that were outliers to be rejected. 

Of course this is false but we don't know that in infancy and into adolescence and so we suppressed instincts which went elsewhere; all this reinforced through social pressure to conform. 

The more restrictive your family upbringing and social norms were the less likely you were to escape their grip. 

Look at film from the early 20th century for evidence of people being obrdient sheep. From behaviour to manner of dress, everything was hermetically controlled. 

Reprogramming the brain requires building new neural pathways which then allows individuality and instinct to flourish. We analyze our early instruction and build new brain coding which reinforces an authentic and emboldened sense of self. 

The older we become the more imperative it becomes. 

Our bullshit detector is working at peak efficiency.

77 million

Trumpism is fracturing at the seams but even after it's demise the repair will take decades. It's perhaps the dose of cod liver oil that was needed to make Americans realize that something is fundamentally wrong with their system. 

77 million people thought that voting for a narcissist imbecile was a good idea and they are feeling the consequences daily. Farmers who are struggling to keep their farms are seen complaining on YouTube trying to make the mental connection and failing. 

It turns out that losing your farm workers to ICE plus paying tariffs was too complicated a calculation so they went with simple hate and strawman arguments. 

This level of stupidity isn't repairable in humans which is why it will keep happening again and again.

Help

Just as my life as an out transgender person was increasingly falling into place, society was crumbling around me. More people in economic need and higher rates of anxiety and depression than I've ever seen in my lifetime. 

This is when I need to turn outwards and be kind. I need to try and help in my own little ways.

Timebombs

Unresolved issues can create a lot of stress and turmoil for us. With me it got to a point that if you perturbed me I went straight for your jugular. 

It harmed me more than it did anyone else. 

When something remains unsettled it festers and colors us. We become ticking timebombs that we need to disarm. 

This week I met some of the ladies from work for dinner and much of the discussion centered around career. One unsavory office character came up during our discussion and I recalled how many incidents I had with him over my 20 years there (my third and last firm).

I had concluded over time that he had unresolved issues and slowly but surely changed my approach towards him. If nothing else, it lowered the temperature between us in parallel with my increasing sense of self. 

My getting a handle on my dysphoria over the years was helping to make me a less frustrated person. A dysphoria that my busy career was impeding me from adequately addressing.

This fellow's rap sheet with HR is very long and he continues to get away with his bad behavior. However, I know all too well that no amount of corporate stair climbing and fancy cars can substitute for internal peace. 

One of the ladies unabashedly said she hates him and I can understand her sentiment as he remains the single most difficult character of my entire career. 

However, by the end of time there, I no longer felt compelled to seek any discord with him.

Things have only steadily improved since then.

What is identity?

What do we mean when we talk about identity and how do we know what aspects are intrinsically tied to it? 

We can talk about physical traits, behavior, ideas, ethnicity, gender, experiences, career and social roles. Who a person is can encompass all of them and includes both a personal sense of self and how we are perceived by others. 

How much we are attached to each can vary. For example someone may feel a strong affinity for their Italian ancestry and celebrate its cultural heritage while another person with the same ethnicity may feel completely detached from it. 

We can think of a myriad of examples that measure what is ostensibly a sense of attachment or belonging along with their varying strengths. 

In this era where identity is so often discussed (we speak often of identity politics for example), people want to plant their stake using traits which feel like home to them. 

What people are drawn to is adopted as a key part of what defines them. 

Interestingly, conservatives have used this found sense of self as fodder for criticism because finding uniqueness and especially diversity is antithetical to them. They want to boil things down to a simpler set of possibilities. 

A black, feminist, lesbian professor who is a climate change advocate has too many unappetizing variables for them. It is too DEI and they want it whittled down to remove pride in identification with things they have distaste for.

Conservatives might prefer to simply call her a misguided soul and leave it at that.

God bless their simple little minds.

Going our own way

The Carney liberals now have a majority government which will only hasten the policies being advanced to diversify the Canadian economy. The move away from the US will be permanent and make sure that we have more options going forward plus greater autonomy.

This is thanks to Trumpism which oddly did us a favor. The Maple MAGA movement of Pierre Poilievre was threatening the vision of unity by parroting, on a tamer scale, the toxic and divisive approach to the south of us. 

We rejected it. 

The vision for our country is about human rights; inclusiveness and uniting people rather than dividing the population to distract from bad governing. 

We are making alliances with countries with similar values; a shared comprehension that differences aren't intrinsically evil but instead a strength. That science and education are things to be advanced and treasured.

For that, we have the right man for the job.

Software update

Youth doesn't think in terms of a rigid binary so those stuck with the old mindset need to update their software. They see the divergence from old rigid norms as entirely expected. 

In other words, youth isn't on the lookout for perfect archetypes of man and woman.

It tends to throw the concept of "passing" off kilter a bit since they are more aiming for originality and authenticity. 

I see it everyday.

Fractured

Your 60's can become a decade of reconciliation and clean up. We have lived for years with a well honed mask which is now fractured thanks to authenticity coming to the fore. 

This process can sometimes feel unsettling. 

We had spent much time and effort to meet expectation and after a while it became second nature. We operated on reflex and melded the real us with the fashioned persona on the assumption after a while that they were one and the same. 

They aren't. 

Separating the real you from the social persona then becomes challenging because what we had melded together now begs to be properly undone. It's never a clean process. 

Good thing that age tends to bring both maturity and patience.

Calculations

Transgender people have a series of calculations to make. They need to assess how every step they take forward will impact them adversely; how much of the life they lived before gets incorporated or left behind. 

It's not for the faint of heart especially if you are older. 

By far the most important aspect is their own psychology which must be able to withstand potential rejection from others. They must be able to sustain themselves outside the idea that everything will fall into place perfectly which never does in life. 

One thing I realized very concretely is that the worse case scenario you imagine doesn't happen. At the same time, assuming the ideal will occur will be equally far fetched. The truth will be somewhere in between and lean towards more positive than you had assumed. 

Also, some sort of compromise will be the order of the day if we don't entirely want to destroy everything we have built to this point. 

If fear is our main road block we will remain stuck because moving forward into the unknown always involves some level of risk. Hence, we determine whether the regret of not acting becomes more powerful than the dread of moving forward. 

We take baby steps and see how our psychology responds. It's an iterative process. 

We then ask: "Is this what you imagined living authentically would be like and are things now better or worse?"