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. 

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. We worry primarily about ourselves first.

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.

Therapy

Whether or not you need gender therapy as a transgender person depends on many factors. 

How old you are when your egg cracks certainly plays a huge part. In addition there will be aspects regarding your personality and family history that could greatly impact your psychology and ultimately decision making. 

Not everyone undergoes a full medical transition which is the goal of a minority of transgender people. However there are other partial forms of transition such as social which may still benefit from psychotherapy. This is to remove mental road blocks or simply help to clarify the steps one needs to take and place them in an organized sequence.

Knowing the difference between need and want can often be the biggest hurdle since the reality of decisions made haven't always been weighed properly. We may come to a crossroad and then imagine the steps without considering their full impact. 

At its worst, gender dysohoria can be a beast with every transgender person suffering it at different levels of intensity as well as types. Therefore there won't be one blanket approach to grappling with it. The stronger it is, the more it will be a good idea to seek professional help. 

Even social transition can be a scary proposition when one considers all of the variables involved. 

In the end I think that therapy is recommended for transgender people at any age. Youth need the guidance because they lack maturity and older people need help with self-acceptance, trauma, internalized transphobia and planning issues related to the logistics of their lived history. 

Being transgender is hard enough and the support of an experienced gender therapist can only have us answering highly pertinent questions before we embark on a particular path.

You don't need to go into all the crevices of the avaliable science, but at least understand the self more fully to determine how you need to live.

The Shadow

According to Carl Jung, the shadow represents the traits, impulses, and desires deemed socially unacceptable or even immoral. It is what lies suppressed underneath the ego. 

He proposes that we perceive our own shadow traits in others which can then lead to contempt towards them. It is not our evil side, but instead a receptacle for repressed creativity, desires or unfulfilled potential. 

Since our social conditioning can dictate which parts of the self are acceptable, the formation of shadow tends to have its origins there. This is when we first learn to suppress instinct.

Jung proposed that to become whole we must face and ultimately integrate the positive aspects contained within the shadow.

Ignoring it risks allowing it to grow larger and having exert its will via our unconscious mind.

My work on the shadow primarily involved dealing with vestiges of repressed rage after many years of living life in absence of full authenticity. It is my last piece of cleanup on the psyche.

Everyone has their own shadow.

They Come and Go

On the path of life we pick up people along the way and then we sometimes let them go. 

This is almost inevitable as we travel distances and take on new challenges. We grow apart not only geographically but in mindset such that the created bridge is no longer one we cross. 

I sometimes think about how those overlaps have helped forge who I am; how their input influenced me and how my own energy left a mark on others. 

Those people may have taken us outside our comfort zone and served as lesson for the future. We retain what we admire in them and reject the things we are no longer able to accept. Maybe we didn't like ourselves when we were with them. 

We mourn their loss sometimes and then release each other to the winds. 

No experience in life is wasted which is the moral of the story. Those people helped convince us that ultimately we are our own best resource. 

We confirmed that no one can help us more than ourselves.