Hope to be wrong

My son asked my opinion about femboys yesterday. He had them summarized rather well as young men who enjoy feminization but don't necessarily have core gender identity questioning or conflicts. 

I told him that many of the older people today who identify as "crossdressers" would likely be femboys and thus live far more openly than they were allowed to at the same age. 

The femboy aesthetic is generally an ultra feminine and sexualized one; short skirts and all.

I only have one underlying concern regarding some of them which is that the euphoria (or trans joy if you prefer) that they seem intoxicated with could lead down paths they may potentially regret. 

I hope this isn't the case but I have seen a number of them go down the HRT and body modification path that at age 40 in retrospect they may look back upon as not their best decision. 

Your twenties are an interesting phase of life but not one necessarily known to be replete with deep personal insight and wisdom. 

Nevertheless, I sincerely and genuinely hope to be proven wrong and will gleefully eat crow if need be.

If I'm still around

Pete Hoekstra is the American ambassador to Canada and a generally reprehensible human being. 

His latest lie was that the recently completed Gordie Howe bridge was not entirely paid for by Canada which of course it was. The plan was for Canada to foot the bill and then to split the collected tolls evenly between Michigan and Ontario. 

Hoekstra wouldn't be in that role were he not MAGA and thus be able to lie as readily as you breathe like his puppet master. You would need to be like Trump to be found acceptable by the regime. 

Even the former Stephen Harper communication director was aghast by the fabrication. Harper led a conservative government which thankfully did not tip into criminality. 

Trump has squandered all of the capital and goodwill that Canadians had for the US. I won't be going back even long after the wicked witch is dead and I am far from being the only one. 

We just don't trust a healthy portion of your electorate.

Maybe I will change my mind after the US get their house in order again if I'm still around.

It takes generations to build trust but far less than that to destroy it.

The Traveller

 

Robby Hoffman on gender dysphoria

Explaining what should be obvious but confuses so many people. The bridges and intersections of sex, gender expression and identity have never been neat and tidy.

Well worth the watch...

Characters

Humans can be at once both deeply complex and deceptively simple beings. I am a keen observer of not only others but of my own behaviour. 

Some people seem to be themselves more readily than others with the risk that their frankness spills over into the blunt and distasteful. 

Conversely, some are so steeped in affectation that they give off an inauthentic air. 

After dealing with so many people over the years, I learned to recognize patterns and could sometimes even see hints of the wounded child we all have underneath. 

For example, the person who constantly dabbles in one upmanship gives away that they are insecure and perhaps weren't listened to as a child. 

The hardest thing about my career wasn't the work itself but instead dealing with the cast of characters and their psychologies as well as my own.

  Coffee house which used to be bank in 1910

Monologue

Studies show that 30 to 50% of people have an inner monologue running through their heads while the rest do not. Instead, the remainder use imagery or concepts they can turn to when they need to access higher cognition. 

Once again we are shown about the neurodiversity that exists in people and how each of us processes thoughts and ideas differently. 

I used to think everyone had a running monologue which has led me to think "lucky for those who don't" because I can't seem to shut mine up :)

Me, myself and I

If we all thought more in terms of "I am myself" we would be better off. 

Regretably, most of us measure ourselves through comparison which means we always fall short of some standard. This happens in every area of human affairs we can think of and is universal. 

Comparison is almost inevitable since we are taught, virtually from birth, how to assimilate. We must then spend decades unlearning this programming so we can become fully ourselves. 

Human insecurity is what drives this thirst to measure up; that and the fear of being alone. We want to be accepted for who we are but are also afraid to stray too far from acceptability of the herd.

In other words, we just can't win.

Par for the course

White Christian nationalism is currently the most dangerous movement in America. It is the US version of the Taliban and if given the chance it would set the country back at least a century. 

Every bit of progress made since the US Civil War would be wiped out. 

Eliminating the right of women to vote is only one of the draconian aims of these people who are capitalizing on end of empire woes to gain converts. 

This is yet another clear sign we are headed for a painful end of cycle to the post WW2 era. As usual, with human idiocy at the forefront. 

Every 80 to 100 years we do something astronomically stupid and then start another cycle of relative prosperity which keeps stupid people quiet and distracted for a while. 

As the US empire continues its inevitable decline, strange things will continue to happen and this one is just par for the course.

The fascinating thing about humanity is that the biggest victims for its sins are usually the ones who least deserve to be.

Collective unconcious

Carl Jung describes the collective unconscious as the whole of inherent universal traits that form part of the human experience.

They are so engrained that we cannot explain them. They simply exist during every era and every culture almost as an archetypal baseline. 

It's as if this unconscious forms part of our DNA. 

Our job is then to distinguish between and arrive at some understanding between personal consciousness and this baked-in portion such that we can achieve life balance.

Enemies

The more we disarm the better. 

Over my life I learned I needed weapons to survive but I am slowly laying them down just enough. I can still possess a bite but I only need just enough for self-protection. 

I see young transgender people almost daily (at least the ones I can detect) with loose and carefree energy which makes complete sense. They've had a less steep hill to climb; something I am extremely glad about. It means that the world has radically changed since I was their age. 

Thus I have slowly realized that advocacy for transgender people need not contain venom I slowly fomented over decades.

I need to drop indignation which just ends up harming only myself. In my deep dive exploration over the years I allowed anger to seep into the process. Yes, I was gaining confidence but at the same time letting some negativity in. 

The world isn't ever going to be completely repairable, but that doesn't mean we should allow our hope or empathy to be affected. 

We can even feel sympathy for people we were certain should be our enemies; especially when we realize they are just as flawed as everyone else if not more.

Progress

Life can often be uncertain and so we tread carefully looking for steady ground where we can find it. Knowing how to proceed isn't always obvious and our choices often unclear. 

However one thing stands out for me in that if we feel we wouldn't go back to a previous stage, we have done the right thing. Even if we aren't perfectly comfortable where we are right now, we are satisfied with the progress made. 

If we can say that about our lives then that iterative process has paid off. 

We may have been a little scared at each step, but we never felt completely stuck because we kept searching for answers and slowly progressed.