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. 

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.

Small solace

We can all tell that things are off. Rates of depression and anxiety are through the roof largely because the times are so uncertain plus we are more disconnected from each other than ever. 

Thankfully I got all the way to my late 30's without cell phones and social media (which I don't use) and yet I am still impacted by this global malaise. 

My son is very perceptive and he struggles in this environment. As an introvert he needs to spread his wings and reach out to people but he finds it hard. It's the next step in his personal evolution. 

My generation was busy doing things and we took it for granted that the way the world operated was there to stay. We made social connections face to face but then many of us also wore heavy masks to fit within the structure we were expected to conform to. 

There is no perfect in this world. 

My son and I compare notes and I impart to him what I have learned in my almost 64 years. I tell him that the process of discovering the self will take him well past his forties and beyond. Exactly as my own father had told me.

However that is small solace for him at the moment while living in the most erratic period of my lifetime.

Patriotic

The Trump regime has underestimated Canada. We are nice people but don't piss us off. 

Well now we are royally pissed. 

Even as provinces pulled US alcohol from shelves in response to tariffs and the 51st state rhetoric, recent polling shows that 75% of us won't be buying any even if it becomes available again. 

We have learned an important lesson here and we are going to be bull headed until well past the expiration date of the current criminal regime. 

Carney has played his hand well. He is smart, tactful and experienced with those multiple trade arrangements with other nations now offering him leverage as the CUSMA talks become increasingly less critical. 

It leaves him room to hold out if a deal doesn't suit the interest of Canadians. 

US tourism has taken a huge plunge driven largely by Canadians and Europeans staying home. It's left many businesses that depended heavily on tourism dollars on life support. 

Trump's favorite word is "tariffs" which was largely responsible for helping the US into the great depression. A tax on Americans is precisely the wrong thing to do when your population is already struggling to pay for basic necessities. 

We don't want America our neighbour to fail but we aren't stupid either and when faced with this type of arrogance and aggression we aren't going to sit back and take it. 

In that sense we are as patriotic as they come because when our value system and moral code is under attack, we firmly stand our ground.

Wholeness

There are most definitely psychological consequences to a secret life. However that doesn't automatically mean we spill our guts to everyone we meet about things that don't concern them. 

The aim is to achieve wholeness and authenticity with self-respect as an anchor. 

The problem is that secrecy has a tendency to bolster shame and guilt which can greatly hinder self-respect. Therefore a balancing act should be sought which says that "my life is my business" without feeling that any part of our humanity is cause for embarrassment and shame should anything about it be divulged. 

If we don't fix that we will not attain optimum wholeness.

This does not mean  for example, that transgender people living in stealth come out to everyone. If they have their integrity and sense of self intact, they might be better off not doing so; especially in the current stupid environment.

Too much time on their hands

In the UK, the new official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) (yes the irony in the title is delicious) as of August 2026 states that single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms across England, Scotland, and Wales should be organized by biological sex rather than acquired gender. 

This code advises that transgender individuals use gender-neutral alternatives or facilities matching their biological sex. 

The UK has opened a pandora's box here and potentially put many people in physical or psychological jeopardy. Obviously  transgender people who don't blend well will be forced into extremely awkward situations as well as gender non-conforming people who will be left wondering what to do. Some masculine presenting women for example will be left with a potential confrontation with an idiot who thinks she is male and disobeying the law.

The code cannot be fully enforced because that would require policing. Thus transgender people who have been using public toilets without incident for decades aren't going to feel compelled to abide by this code. If they already blend perfectly well into society in their gender identity and presentation, the idiocy inherent here would put them into a precarious situation just to satisfy the intended bigotry in this initiative. 

All of this will of course create problems where almost none existed before thanks to gender criticals with apparently too much time on their hands.

See why I focus so much on stupidity?

In the open

According to palliative nurses, the biggest regret of dying patients is that they didn't live life true to themselves. Instead, they lived trying to live up to the expectations of others whether that be family or society in general. 

This resonates because we are raised to conform and comply with societal norms. 

I am sensing that the next renaissance of human existence will free most people to be the most authentic versions of themselves. We are already seeing it in society as the diversity blooms beyond boundaries most of us who are older expected. 

This is the last great step in the cultural revolution of a humanity which will never be perfect. 

We will keep making mistakes but at least people will be doing it in the open.