It will have to do

Trump's election says less about him than the people who voted for him. Millions looked at this man and said: 

"Yes I like that" 

The same obnoxious carnival barker I set my eyes on many years ago and dismissed as comic book villain was suddenly presidential material. 

It has been difficult for me to reconcile this without losing respect for a large segment of the population. There is just no way around it because at their core, stupid or not, people have a deep need for saviors who tell them what to do. 

The impetus which makes religious orthodoxy work is the same one which sees them vote for absolute idiots. 

At this point those who haven't snapped out of it never will and there is much evidence out there that tells us they will drink whatever poison their leader dispenses. The mind has gone all in and their profound cognitive dissonance doesn't allow for a deprogramming. 

Those who have woken up don't give me much solace because their realization was largely due to their own lives finally taking a significant hit. 

The price of gas became an issue whereas crimes committed and cruelty towards others were conveniently ignored. You don't score any brownie points for that.

By my estimation, 25% of the world is made up of people who redeem the rest of it. They are kind, intelligent, deeply empathetic and try to do the right thing for others to the best of their ability. 

I guess it will have to do.

Dysphoria and attraction

Gender dysphoria and sexual attraction are not mutually exclusive but they can be in direct competition. One can take predominance over the other and occupy much space in the brain. 

For example, some androphilic transsexuals go through a period where they attempt to be gay men only to realize that something is wrong. Their attraction moves in the right direction but their dysphoria is acting as a force of incongruence which blocks them. 

It can be the same for gynephilic transgender people who try to lead normal lives but the unresolved dysphoria acts as a deterrent. Their potential sexual psychology has been impacted likely before they even reached puberty when they may have detected something wasn't quite right. 

Attraction to being female (not just expressing as one) was confusing their circuitry. 

Blanchard in the 80's tried to sell this confusion as sexual deviance for both orientations through his two-type taxonomy model when in reality it was the gender dysphoria behaving as agent of chaos. 

Needless to say it can work the same for male to female transgender people who were conveniently ignored back then.

Here is where non-dysphoric gender variant people have an advantage and can more readily compartmentalize their cross gender expression since there isn't a roadblock to sexual functioning.

Exposed

After the pandemic was over we never came back to normal; whatever normal had been for us before. 

Our collective consciousness had changed but we couldn't put our finger exactly on how. It's as if we had lost confidence that we would be okay again. 

The hum of everyday life had been perturbed and suddenly we were forced to examine deeper questions about our fragility; about how tenuous our grip on peace and balance was. 

The gears behind the system had been exposed to show that much of our reliance on it had been ill-advised. The imbalances in the way we were living could no longer be hidden behind our distractions or our consumerism. 

Now we are faced with a complete rebuild but are somehow hard pressed to know where to begin.

Life's a long song

 

Truscum vs Tucute

Truscum and tucute (too cute to be cis) are slang terms for polar opposites. The former are strict transmedicalists while the latter see being transgender as something one can choose because gender is a social construct. 

You could say they are the opposite ends between expression and identity. One says dysphoria is mandatory for a transgender diagnosis while the other says it's not required. 

One embraces non-binary identities while the other is highly skeptical of them. 

They both exist within the global umbrella of gender variance and I have slight problems with both approaches. Yes, identity should be primarily rooted with the self but here there is too much rigidity in one aporoach versus too much looseness in the other. 

Truscum are highly exclusionist but Tucutes risk making errors with transitions that may later be rethought. They also sometimes deliberately or unwittingly help gender critical groups to delegitimize the necessary transitions of others once they themselves have detransitioned. 

In my view, self-identication as transgender is less important than understanding the self fully before a path is chosen. It is what can make definitions dangerous when they supercede deep self-analysis. 

A label isn't a way forward.

Once Ray Williams detransitioned he immediately became an advocate for gender critical groups including interviewing the infamous Ray Blanchard. His ultimate rejection of self-identification need not have included throwing others under the bus because he determined his own motivation was rooted in a fetish. 

People are entitled to live as they choose but before adopting a label they need to be careful with how they apply it whether to themselves or others.

Hence, I embrace neither of the poles.

Sign of the times

I took the photo below in my quiet residential neighborhood and it is a sign of the times. The plastered flyer simply says in French:

"revolution against the billionaires" 

It is concise and to the point and features Luigi Mangione as symbolic patron saint of a cause of little man against the system. 

Yes, he murdered someone which is not the right way. 

We are without doubt headed for that critical moment in history where the injustice must be dealt with before we can make a new world; a new era. 

It's coming.

Movie plot

When I watch content from older transgender people it's as if they are telling my life story; it is so thematically linked as to be eery. 

The early understanding that something was off, childhood raids of our mother's closet, years of repression and self-rejection followed finally by acceptance well into adulthood after having tried everything. 

The little details vary but the overarching plot is almost identical. 

The last one I saw was by someone of my age who only found authenticity once their spouse had regrettably died. It was far from a welcome occurrence which then became a doorway to, in this case, a medical transition beginning just after age 60. 

It's a similar movie plot.

First Day

 

Control

Life resists that we attempt to exert our control upon it. We can try to order things as much as possible only to be even more shocked and dismayed when we are regularly thrown curve balls. 

The serenity prayer of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asks that we be endowed with the following gift: 

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference." 

This should be seen as the pinnacle of human wisdom and regretably I have never known of anyone who has achieved it. Some people I have known have come closer than others. 

Surrendering the ego is certainly part of the secret which allows humility to more take its place. It becomes easier to relate to the experience of someone else and we stop judging them. 

Envy also falls away since we come to understand that underneath the public personna of every human is someone suffering the same existential angst. 

This balance point isn't about lying on the ground and waiting for a building to fall on us. It is instead about moving forward in quiet and confident resolve knowing that our fate doesn't belong to us. We just trust that our impetus to do good will be its own reward. 

We count on there being a purpose to all things that we may not fully understand and find joy in the openness of being surprised. 

We can relinquish control with confidence and wait for the universe to find us in our serenity.

Baked in

Increasing our IQ points doesn't make us nicer or better people. If anything it can potentially make us more complicated and prone to over analysis. 

Analysis paralysis. 

Humans can create narratives for their lives and sometimes stop there which can be both good and bad. 

Some skip the headache of asking the deep questions but then potentially suffer more consequences through the lack of introspection. 

On the other you have people who delve into nook and crannies of issues. They think before they leap and often more readily avoid major missteps but then suffer through overthinking the possible outcomes. 

In other words, there is no perfect under any circumstance because our imperfection is naturally baked in. 

Perhaps the optimum is to exist somewhere in between and know when to stop just at the right spot every time.

Good luck with that.

"Let them eat cake"

Even if Marie Antoinette never actually said "let them eat cake", the message from the French aristocracy was still about the peasants making due for themselves somehow. 

Today we are facing our own global crisis where wealth inequality has become so grotesquely obscene that FIFA is selling a $33,000 top ticket for people who fly in to matches on their own plane. 

"Eat the rich" slogans are found plastered in various places and recently MET gala attendees were met with slurs by angry New York protesters telling them to f'ing pay their fair share. 

Globalization and Neoliberal policies got us here and the unbalance is going to go off like a bomb. As soon as the more ardent, dimwitted and illiterate voters wake up from Trumpism there will be a reckoning there which hasn't been seen since the great depression. 

We got rid of jobs by the millions due to automation and efficiency objectives that now have more people than ever panicking about how they can afford to live day to day. 

The repair for this should be obvious if the world ran on the common sense principles of fairness and intelligence. Instead it runs much more liberally on greed and stupidity than is good for our health. 

The US will pay the price first (inflation is outpacing wage increases) followed by nations who toy with excess just a little less.