Katyal to the rescue?

Tariffs begin in earnest tomorrow in the US and TACO has set Brazil's tariffs at 50% which means whoever likes their coffee from there will see the price shoot up.

Suppliers up to now were selling inventory but as those stocks disappear the consumer will get hit very badly. Whoever didn't understand who pays tariffs will understand it very soon as it hits their pocketbook. 

In the meantime Republicans are trying to redistrict Texas so they can gain seats for the midterms. If you can't win fairly then cheat. Governors Newsom and Pritzker have been threatening to do the same in California and Illinois. 

Neal katyal is arguing before the courts that TACO cannot impose tariffs without congress who is the only body with the power to do that. Too bad this awful supreme court gave TACO all that power. 

Katyal will have to argue in front of an 11 judge panel in Washington DC that this is not war time and TACO cannot bypass congress. If he succeeds it's bye bye tariffs for TACO but I highly doubt that he will convince the judges given the supreme court's bad move. 

No president has ever been given the power to tariff and certainly no one close to being as painfully stupid as Trump should ever have it.

Trauma free

I notice the ponytails in front me at the cash but the voice was a little deep and then realize she is transgender after my radar is fully functional. My friend and I had come for brunch and I very discreetly point her out to him in admiration. 

These kids are trauma free and I note how some of them don't worry about the old binary all that much. She was dressed much like my daughter once would with an oversize checkered shirt, jean shorts with wrist bands adorned arms and sneakers. Maybe in her early 20's, she was with another girl who was perhaps her girlfriend.

She sits at a table far enough away where I can note the calm and complete lack of unecessary self-awareness.

All I can think is God bless them.

TACO

Mark Carney wants to recognize statehood for Palestine and so TACO wants to get even by ramping up the trade war with even higher tariffs. He wants to have his own population pay even more to penalize Canada which makes absolutely no sense. He wants to implode his own economy.

TACO says do as I say or I make my own people suffer. 

Idiot.

We move forward

I've discovered that transition isn't the process of going from point A to point B; far from it. It is instead a constantly shifting journey of self discovery where you are tweaking a formula to become the most authentic version of yourself. 

In that regard everyone is in transition; not just transgender people. 

It's been a complex road made more so by having being born in the early 60's, but we cannot become stuck through obstacles of our own making. We continue forward with the idea that limitations are mostly self imposed through fear. 

Whatever transition means for you will be right presuming that with each step there is a better version of the self emerging from a restrictive shell.

Growth isn't always easy or fun but, if after the discomfort we emerge victorious, all will have been worth it.

The alternative is stagnation.

The little boy

A former Green Beret in Gaza had a 5 year old Palestinian boy who had walked 12 kms to get food come up to him.  The former soldier gave him something to eat and he was so thankful that he clasped the man's face with bony emaciated hands and very earnestly said thank you in English. 

The soldier told him "the world cares about you" 

Then the boy heard rounds and ran only to be shot by IDF soldiers firing into a crowd and within moments he was dead.

Tariff woes

Even if you manufacture cars within the US, tariffs on imported steel, aluminum as well as on manufactured parts coming from elsewhere will kill your profit. Who knew?

Way to go Donnie!

Religion as bludgeon

The use of religion as weapon by ignorant people fascinates me. They use their belief system as a bludgeon to hate on others rather than to love which is the antithesis of what a good person should be. 

I watch podcasts or call in shows where people use irrational arguments to defend their views using simple phrases like "It's in the Bible" which for a critical thinking atheist is an invitation to pounce like the red matador cape is to the bull.

Matt Dillahunty is formidable in that way and you better not have lapses of logic when you face him. When something isn't provable the best answer is to say "We don't know that" rather than argue without proof. He's locked heads with Jordan Peterson before and come out of it looking far better because of his calm disdain and immunity to Peterson's affinity for word salad.

Matt asks his callers for their pronouns when they call in to his show and unsurpsingly the callers often leave them out and put some other word that tips their hand as transphobes. They hold a core belief that their faith should be held over others in judgement as Matt slowly but surely embarrasses and dismantles them with cold intellect during their conversation.

It never fails.

Experiments

While I don't believe in "transgender as contagion" as sold by some criticals, I do acknowledge that more people than ever experiment with their gender expression. 

Sure enough, on a recent call-in-show, a father was explaining to the transgender hosts how a friend of his transgender daughter had begun to play with gender through their association. It may not have been deeply rooted but it felt right for them and was eventually dropped but it certainly need not have been. 

This issue bears no consequence on tending to the dysphoria of transgender people whose numbers remain miniscule as a percentage of the total population. 

As gender variance becomes more visible, this experimentation shows how definitions can become broader and more diluted which could confuse many people. It demonstrates how gender variance can have multiple motivations many of which are ostensibly harmless provided the person is aware of what it means for them.

Malice

If you doubted whether there was any malice within the Blanchard movement, the title and the cover of J Michael Bailey's book would remove all doubt. 

The image on the front of the 2003 screed "The Man who Would Be Queen" showed a pair of hairy legs nested inside women's pumps while the contents presented a kind of "Blanchard for Dummies" summation of the work started by the duo of Freund and Blanchard in the early 80's. It added to the existing literary defense of Blanchard's ideas by Anne Lawrence whose book "Men Trapped in Men's Bodies" explained how a fetish (AGP) was primarily responsible for her transition (something only she knows for sure).

I've read both books front to back.

Bailey's tone was decidedly salacious, simplistic and most of all unscientific. It basically made fun of people whose lives had been made duly complicated thanks to a society that refused to understand or have much sympathy. Transitioned people like the brilliant Lynn Conway weren't having it and wrote about it on their websites. 

Things have improved in numerous ways and gotten worse in others since the early 2000's but there is no doubt that malice was part of the playbook which contrasted sharply with the clinicians who had worked in this area for years. Blanchard took a different route to Germans Magnus Herschfeld who began at the turn of the 20th century and Harry Benjamin who died in 1986 just in time to miss all the toxicity. 

Blanchard and Bailey still turn up on gender critical podcasts like used car salesmen but the world has moved past them. They will remain part of the historical record but not much more.

Brace for impact

If I only base myself on comments on the Trump trade deals, a significant amount of people still don't understand how tariffs work but they are going to find out the hard way. Going from 1 to 2% in January to now 15% is going to hurt quite a bit as Americans import many things from the rest of the world. 

The snake oil salesman told them he would lower their grocery bills but a short visit to Cosco or Walmart will break that illusion. 

The democrats are at a low point in popularity which is also not surprising. Having adopted a corporatist philosophy in the late 80's and early 90's, they distanced themselves from working people who are understandably frustrated that they can't keep up. Many Obama voters became Trump voters after an intelligent but fundamentally Neoliberal president failed to deliver what they needed in dismantling some of the oligarchy. 

Trump is a symptom of a bigger problem which was brewing for a long time and his second election is going to cost the average citizen very dearly. More broadly, the whole world will feel the sting of protectionist policies which ultimately benefit no one. You don't give a toddler the keys to the family car without consequences.

They say that things need to get a whole lot worse before they get better. So let's just brace ourselves for impact.

Pantyhose

"It's so hot" says Wendy "I hope you don't wear pantyhose!" 

"Are you kidding me? I haven't worn them since before I was 40. They would tear as I pulled them up plus you can't breathe in them!" 

"Young women can't be bothered and mine would always snag" she says back. 

Wendy is in her seventies and I see her frequently. We will talk on the bus or run into each other at the grocery store like we did this time. 

It's been hotter than Hades. Last thing I need in my life is pantyhose; hopefully for the rest of my natural life.

Definitely not for the wedding this weekend to be sure.

Consequences?

The minister of foreign affairs for Australia was recently asked why Candace Owens was refused entry into the country where she was to have a series of speaking engagements. He said: 

"The interests of Australia are best served when she is somewhere else" 

Owens is being sued by Emmanuel Macron for very public harassment of his wife Brigitte who she accuses of having being born male. Were that even to be true, one wonders why that is so important to Candace but that is a question best addressed between her and a psychiatrist. 

Owens better hope she is correct because if she loses her case it could cost her dearly financially. 

When you stick your neck out this far and you are proven wrong, there are bound to be consequences.

Branded

Humans tend to like branding themselves but it's a double edge sword. It can bring us belonging and community but also can constrain us and wedge us into boxes."I am this" or "I am that" are phrases never far from our lips and are often steeped in comparison so we can be identified with someone else or in opposition to them. 

Defining oneself outside of a clan becomes mandatory if we seek authenticity otherwise we risk becoming subject to its orthodoxy. It's not that everything which they espouse is wrong but we can lose objectivity and adopt ideas just to belong. 

I have always embraced free thinking as much as possible because it meant I could stay on the periphery and not succumb to ideas without having reflected sufficiently. It bought me time to analyze. We find ourselves much better in solitude without outside influence.

How I define myself has never been more devoid of societal pressure or influence because the internal work has been done and am in less need of a group to help tell me who I am.

Purpose

 

Spare change

The search for spare change has become a full time job for many which is a sign of our social decay. Sure, a certain percentage of these people are scammers but not all by a long shot. These people have fallen off the grid and don't know how to get on again. 

Many have a variety of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, untreated schizophrenia, etc and have been left to fend for themselves. As the rest of society struggles increasingly to feed and house themselves the most disenfranchised are invariably going to grow in number. 

This is a global epidemic and the US is about to see their situation worsen by leaps and bounds as tariffs plus the cutting of services to the poorest citizens hits like a Mack truck. Ironically it will be blue collar Trump voters that bear the brunt. Right now they are celebrating Trump's dealmaking on Fox News comment sections which breaks your heart.

I expect buyers remorse will hit a crescendo but when it's too late for many.

Venn diagram

My sister called me yesterday because my brother-in-law had suggested mentioning me during the welcome part of the upcoming father of the groom wedding speech. Besides the out of town guests, he was going say a special welcome to Joanna. 

My sister suspected I wouldn't want that and she was correct. She put me on speaker and I told them that their support was more than enough. I'm not special and for me just attending was another green checkmark. 

Family will surprise you both ways because people are who they are. We talked about our history and how we grew up in a house with love but not a lot of demonstrable affection. My parents were creatures of their era.

Even a year ago I would have had trepidation attending a big family affair because my new life largely resides outside the old one. Yes, there is a Venn diagram of overlap but it was anchored in one on one coffees and lunches. 

This was different.

The clothes are ready but, far more importantly, so is the psychology.

Windmills

When I read this Youtube comment I had a belly laugh. The person was responding to Trump saying in Scotland that he wanted to get rid of windmills: 

"Forget windmills, if we could harness the power of stupidity this guy could power all of Europe" 

Touche! 

According to this latest EU deal Americans will now have to pay 15% on all imported goods from Europe and Europe pays nothing on US imports but will invest in American economy. US consumers will now pay a 15% tax both on Japanese and European goods thus making their lives more expensive than they already were. Yes, the money goes into government coffers but the average citizen bears the brunt.

Even if you buy a US made product there are a lot of imported components that go into them including raw materials like steel and aluminum which are now subject to tariffs. No matter how you slice it Americans will still pay more.

Idiot is too tame a word for this f#ing dipshit.

I guess you get what you vote for.

Continuum

Sex and gender are distinct and both reside on a continuum. On the sex front we have all kinds of intersex conditions where ambiguous genitalia and chromosome anomalies defy the concept of the perfect binary. 

On the gender front we have liberated expression and identity which means that youth openly flaunt rules that used to keep people trapped into distinct silos. These kids come in different shades and not all of them identify as transgender. The common theme between them is that they live openly and unabashedly as themselves. 

Gender criticals are continually flummoxed because they need to maintain the attack in a battle they are losing to a population that increasingly doesn't care and even has gender variant people within their own families. 

Their "Transgender ideology" descriptor presumes that there is a global cabal hell bent on destroying society when in reality we have freed people to become more genuine versions of themselves. The ideology actually comes from the criticals because gender variance plays against the world view they espouse; one where the natural divergences of people are simply stomped out by force. If that isn't ideology I don't know what is since biology everywhere else operates on a continuum.

There is no social contagion but instead of revealing of a spectrum which has always existed but was suppressed from view and we have simply lifted the shroud. We used to hit people with rulers who used their left hand to write until we stopped and left handedness invariably went up.

Human beings are complex as are their proclivities and inclinations. To assume otherwise is simply being willfully ignorant. 

We live and let live.

Those who know better

The businessman with the acumen to bankrupt casinos is setting US trade policy. If that doesn't send shivers down your spine not a lot will. 

Trump keeps using language that he is charging countries tariffs which is nonsense. The country ships their goods and a tax is charged at the port of entry to the importer by the government. The importer then invariably passes the extra cost on to the consumer. 

This is not rocket science. 

What is infinitely more disturbing is that he gets away with it and allowed to burn down the building. 

Yes, there are the uninformed hoards but there are those who know better and say nothing which is even worse. 

Trump is an imbecile but Scott Bessent isn't and knows better.

Only you

If a definition is too broad it isn't particularly helpful. Not only that, because if we search for identity via a definition we are attacking the question from the wrong angle. 

Asking "am I trans?" Is like asking "can you tell me who I am?" 

No one else can answer that but you. 

A more appropriate exploration would be:

"How do I live a more honest, authentic and balanced life?" 

Again, something only you can answer.

It won't be pretty

If you aren't convinced that human beings as a collective are hopeless you haven't been paying attention particularly over the last decade. All the cracks in our societal foundation are exposed and we can see how geopolitical challenges are bringing out the worst in many of us. 

The most notable example is the US imploding right before our eyes as culture wars along party lines are destroying what is left of the country. The two party system having failed the population, people are looking for vengeance for what happened to their ability to have a reasonably prosperous life. Livelihoods have been sacrificed at the altar of an oligarchy which enriched itself through neoliberal policies and there will be hell to pay. 

There is conflict everywhere as unfounded conspiracies try to blame current world problems on anything but the complex reality we face. The world economic order is broken and too many people face an uncertain future while a tiny fraction live in opulence. 

This is a bomb waiting to go off. 

I wish people were kinder and more intelligent but the demographics aren't about to improve anytime soon. When you put populations under pressure you introduce volatility which simply begs for conflict. 

As we reshape society for the future a series of shocks will continue to happen until it's done and it won't be pretty.

Buyer beware

Older transgender people are right to be reticent about relationships (presuming they aren't in one). The people that they pair with were just as programmed as they were regarding sex and gender which means that whatever progress they have made on their own risks being compromised or even reversed. 

There are many things that can be negotiated but who you are isn't one of them. In that sense, at this age I am an immovable object simply because it took so long to get here. 

For youth it's a different story since their approach to sex and gender is infinitely more malleable. You could say they haven't been spoiled through an indoctrination which made our lives considerably more difficult. 

A 25 year old Gail (who I met last year) didn't have an issue with her partner's transition which in my era would have almost certainly meant instant rejection.

At this age I also know that I am responsible for my own well being and happiness. If anything, as a natural problem solver, I might end up being a fixer for someone else's trauma in addition to bending the knee on the identity front. 

I've met and know of couples where the existing gender variance is tolerated and even celebrated but I'm too far along on the spectrum and I would very much suffer were I to be put in their situation.

Not to mention, I simply know too much about life.

No faking identity

An identity cannot be faked and, while we can modify the external shell, it is the internal self that will most affect everything about us. If we understand who we are, the movements, the expression, the confidence and the aura will show clearly to the rest of the world. 

If I put someone in a costume it will show because they know they are in a costume. They cannot adopt something which is foreign as if it were a second skin. Yes they can have fun with it but it won't feel like who they are; as if they are not presenting the real them. 

No amount of clothing or makeup can provide us with identity but it can form part of the expression of who we are. Without that internal work it might always feel a little uncomfortable and inauthentic.

Long before I had gone deep into the psyche I used to work on faking it but it never worked properly because until I believed in who I was, I wasn't going to convince anyone else. The external presentation was there but not the psychology.

Before labeling yourself figure out who you are first.

Explaining things to cats

I so admire the patience of these two guys to deal with the talking points of this caller of which there are many.

Talking to a cat would be far more productive....

You never know

In a quiet residential neighborhood in British Columbia yesterday two people in their sixties are found dead along with their dog. All have been shot.

In a neighboring house the culprit is found dead from a self-inflicted wound. 

Apparently these neighbors had differences over the years over parking and perhaps other disputes but it boiled over into this. The police had been called at 7:30 pm to resolve  dispute which they thought was settled once they departed. Hours later they came back to a burned out car, flames in the garage and the couple dead inside. 

This is perhaps a sign of where we are as a society. Emotions are boiling over and distress, depression and anxiety are building to fever pitch in some people. 

You never know what someone is carrying inside them.

Let's be careful

If gender identity were only about social norms John Money would have been correct and David Reimer would have accepted his sex reassignment and childhood rearing as a female. Hence to simplify this issue to only socialization risks being simplistic. If there is some biological predisposition involved, this is why some are very much helped by transition. 

I see gender criticals only talk about social gender norms which seem to ignore the biology. The reason is they are trying to sell medical transition as being unnecessary. The Metaphor of Gender channel seems to be doing just that in arguing that dysphoria can be reduced to norms.

If there were no biology involved at all, then yes, transition would not be an issue since the person would live as they wish and ignore gender norms which some people do.

The problem for many transgender people is that this is not enough. 

Those who read my writing know that I am the last person to push for medical transition when it's not warranted, but to reduce being transgender to only a social choice is to denigrate what people go through. 

Those who want to bend social norms for a myriad of reasons are free to do so but they are typically not the ones reflecting on medical transition.

I'm not in the mood!

https://youtube.com/shorts/Bp45YOlbVo0?si=-Fa61Y5AY313crqv

You've got to be kidding

 

'Halt who goes there!"

Transvestigation affects all of society and I have seen comments from people who say they have been affected by it. Overly tall or more masculine than average women are now more suspect while some very feminine and tiny transgender women can ironically fall under the radar. 

Stupid and ignorant people are going to be with us forever and this is part of the suffering of this current era where gender policing is part of the fun for conservatives and gender criticals with nothing better to do with their time. 

Candace Owens even had a whole series on Brigitte Macron having been born male (she wasn't and now her husband is suing) and for years Michelle Obama was a target of the fringe right who accused her of being a man. 

Genetic women have been chased out of bathrooms and women's dressing rooms by people who are somehow certain that they are men looking to take advantage of women in their private spaces. 

Look at the comment section of a video on this subject and you will find many examples of people being transvestigated because they didn't fit someone's idea of what a woman or man is (yes transgender men are also targets but not nearly as much). 

Now that gender expression has been blurred more than ever in public, lots of people can have their birth sex questioned as if somehow it mattered and was someone else's business. 

The day that transgender people become the cause of problems in bathrooms or elsewhere is the day we begin to worry about it. 

The stupidity of transvestigators? That's the part that is not fixable.

Enough

 

Just be

People are more apt to smile and talk to me out of the blue these days and I must be giving off energy which encourages it. 

Sometimes it is a passing glance at the person across from you in the metro giving each of you a glimpse of each other's auras which then kicks off an exchange. 

Suddenly the young woman across from me starts to share about the bruise on her leg and we are immersed in conversation trying to drown out the hum of the metro car and its ventilation system. She tells me she is 31 and I tell to live one day at a time and enjoy the journey.

At the end of our brief overlap she gives me a soft fist bump accompanied with a sweet smile asking about the stop she needs to get off at and I tell her it's the next one. 

As hard as this always was for me I finally learned that we need just to relax and simply be. People can read it.

Not helpful

The older we currently are, the more difficulty we will have existing somewhere between the gender binary. The reason is you grew up in a world that was so restrictive you can't imagine becoming some version which doesn't fit either side. 

We aren't necessarily hopeless causes but the most pervasive and fundamental programming you received from birth was regarding your gender and that isn't something easily undone. 

Small wonder that in the past people either hid their gender variance or transitioned in stealth. 

Making things harder still is your place on the spectrum. If you are someone who is satisfied with birth sex and celebrating sporadic gender expression you should be fine. If you feel you must medically transition you also have a path you must follow. 

Being somewhere between those poles introduces reticence about what to do which makes your early childhood formation mostly unhelpful when trying to find a new baseline.

Current youth have a much more plastic view of gender and its demands and are quicker to resist adopting a mask to get by in society; a mask which, if worn long enough, is very hard to remove.

Please explain

Someone explain this to me. 

Trump hails a deal with Japan where Americans will now pay 15% on imported Japanese goods. US cars for example will now start off more expensive because of the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum plus the Japanese don't like US cars to begin with. 

How does the US win?

The Japan stock market went up only because they were expecting 25% but you can see this is seat of your pants deal making which fits Trump's messy logic.

Bottom line: American consumers pay more because they bear the brunt of the tariffs which Trumpy keeps saying he is charging other countries. Tariffs are paid by the importer.

As a side note, Lutnick, like Trump, is a moron.

Just following orders

When I was the age of my children I couldn't imagine how people would ever be as cruel again after the Jewish holocaust. After the war, the Nuremberg trials brought out a whole slew of conclusions from experts regarding the hypnosis of following orders and being a cog in a bigger wheel but it didn't explain it all. 

Today, even a perfunctory look at comments on YouTube regarding the famine in Gaza, confirms what at this age I know only too well: some people are detestable assholes. 

Of course my naiveté burned off long ago but I wasn't prepared for the combination of sheer stupidity and cruelty of this particular era. The lack of critical thinking and short sightedness almost leaves you breathless at times. 

"I'm fine with the cruelty on others as long as it doesn't impact me" 

Sometimes I despair and think it's preferable talking with dogs and cats than some people. The intelligence might be on par but at least, in the case of the animals, the cruelty is largely missing.

Interview

Ray Williams interviewed Ray Blanchard recently on his channel. I don't have the stomach to watch it but I remarked how far he came over 8 years from being transgender philosopher Rachel to detransitioner Ray who now champions 1980's conjecture. 

The DSM says we need to suffer distress to have a paraphilia and many who say they have AGP admit that it's making their life quality worse. Their self-identified fetish is bringing them distress. 

But what about people who don't have distress and transition. Do they also suffer from AGP? and therein lies Blanchard's problem who for his theory to work tried to lump everyone who isn't homosexual and wants to transition into one bucket. He turned AGP into a sexual orientation which after the initial buzz is gone turns down the excitement to what being married for 10 years feels like. Except now it's being married to yourself.

If nothing else, you have to admire Blanchard's determination to discredit transgender people.

Williams freely admits that it was primarily a sexual thing which explains why transition didn't work for him. He wasn't respecting an internal identity which is why he ultimately detransitioned. 

However, what he believes to be true or not is less important than his being in a better place.

What is right for us

Whatever is right for us should improve quality of life. It should make us a calmer and more peaceful person regardless of what it is. Mental health and self-esteem should ideally also benefit. 

This is the only guideline we should use provided that whatever decision we take doesn't harm the physical well being of others. 

Sometimes what we view as being right for us is frowned upon by society which isn't our problem. That is society's problem. 

This all sounds easier than it is but it's the truth.

Uganda miss me!

You gotta love Mamdani....

Alan Cumming on trans people

 well said Alan.....

Distancing

In some ways Trump has been good for Canada because he woke us from our stupor. The benevolent giant to the south of us turned out to be less reliable than we thought and more prone to being bamboozled than we dared imagine. 

The fact that 40% still support this monster is the stuff of nightmares for a country with collectivist tendencies in place of "don't tread on me" individualism. He could axe murder 20 people tomorrow and not make a sufficient dent in his support which is beyond disturbing.

As a result things will never go back to where they were; at least not in my lifetime for a basic trust has been broken 77 million times. 

That there are amazing Americans is beyond question but not in sufficient number to instill confidence and when we see people struggle to find their own state on a map (never mind name their governor) it makes it easier to understand how people can be manipulated. 

Canada is a social democracy with no interest in becoming an ethno-centric and neo-fascist state and hence we must distance ourselves to escape being infected by the same illness converting our neighbors into North Korea with a saccharine but vicious cross-wearing mouthpiece to match. 

We are mild mannered but far from stupid and we are pissed beyond words.

Anyone who still believes in American exceptionalism as a concept must assuredly be cured of it by now.

Measuring up

Someone recently complained to a gender therapist that they weren't getting support from the transgender community. They had been told by some that they weren't feminine enough and one person even told them they were an embarrassment to others in the community. 

To fail to understand this phenomenon is to not comprehend human nature. 

Many people make up for their self-esteem shortfalls via comparison. Thus someone else not measuring up to some standard is an opportunity to elevate themselves by thinking that at the very least they are ahead of that other person. It's one of the reasons I don't generally adhere to group think or communities. 

Transgender people are no more apt to be better people than anyone else which is why I don't care about a person's background. I care about whether the person is solid; that they are kind, charitable and compassionate. If I were to think otherwise would mean assuming that transgender people are somehow endowed with better natures than the rest of the human population. 

When I first saw Blaire White's content, my insecurity detector started beeping red alert and never stopped and she is hardly alone.

With a little help...

If you reflect on it deeply you realize you may have been helped by friends, spouses and family less than you think. We grew up thinking that people were on our side and there for us but slowly life showed us otherwise. 

It's not that people are evil it's that they are focused on their own issues and we form part of a second tier of concern. After we retire that all becomes doubly apparent because by this age we have also been graced with BS detection. 

People are hurt by their own traumas and they tend to them as best they can. So it's not about assigning them blame. This is about realizing that we are responsible for elevating ourselves and not count on others to be our therapist or savior. 

They have their own problems some much greater than our own.

Victimhood

I don't like the idea of victimhood; that we are somehow trapped by our emotions and feelings about ourselves which keep us powerless. 

Over the years I decided to give myself fuller control over who I am to feel comfortable being a person who doesn't need validation from the outside. That validation has to come from inside ourselves. 

Identity is about knowing who you are and takes into account the sum of our experiences. We try to make sense of the factors that went into our education and put them into perspective to decide what needs to change or be improved. We take ownership which then leads to raising self-esteem by making us masters over our actions instead of helpless victims. I learned long ago that the person best suited to help us is ourselves. 

Understanding our identity then helps us to protect and cherish it. That includes valuing aspects that many people may not like but are intrinsic to us and bring us value. We don't need to constantly trumpet who we are but we don't hide either. We stop asking permission to be who we are as identities are not up for approval.

We stop being victims to life.

Paying the piper

Neoliberalism banked heavily on the idea that open global markets would fix everything. By encouraging companies to move out of the country and set up shop in low cost locations they could increase profits and dump the salaries of their own countrymen. 

This of course has come back to haunt our geopolitical climate. 

The success of Trumpism has been its ability to concentrate societal anger against immigrants and minorities while the oligarchs continue to amass even more wealth. The latest GOP budget doesn't even bother hiding the fact that money is flowing upwards at the expense of programs meant to help the people most in need. These programs are being stretched to the limit because people don't have reliable wages to be able to survive.

It's a recipe for implosion. 

In the 1990's all this seemed like a good idea but as more people fell off the grid the backlash needed to be mitigated which is why Trump capitalized perfectly on that anger and distracted people many of who didn't understand the mechanics of what happened to their livelihoods. It didn't matter in the least that he was a buffoon if he could give his base the red meat they needed especially after the 2008 financial crisis had woken many of them up.

The rise of China can be attributed in large part to feeding the consumption of people who couldn't buy enough things when times were great and the iceberg was way off in the distance. 

However the iceberg is here and it's time to pay the piper.

Varia

No one makes coffee like Cafe Olimpico and today I tried their downtown location for the first time which turned out to be just as good as their old Montréal locale. 

Their allonge machiatto is the perfect blend of strong without being bitter. Good thing I got there by 7 am because the lineup showed up in no time. 

Yesterday my sister called me and said how proud and pleasantly surprised she was that I was going to her son's wedding. She had expected me to bow out and was thrilled that I was attending. There won't be any right wing extremists there which will help keep my blood pressure under control. I have zero patience for them and at 62 no longer have a filter for my tongue. 

The dress, the shoes, and the accessories are all chosen. I will just being a pair of flats in a bag just in case although my black pumps are low and square heel affairs. Still, you never know. 

If no one offers me a lift from the reception I will Uber home which turns out to be only a 15 minute ride to my home.

The suspended dagger

Setting ultimatums in a relationship can very dangerous and recently I reflected on this because it threatened to impact my daughter and her boyfriend. 

These are lines in the sand which threaten to end things if the other person doesn't comply. It can be viewed as emotional blackmail or in the best of cases a way to shake someone awake to the seriousness of a situation. 

"If you don't stop drinking I will leave you" could be seen as an ultimatum cloaked in good intention but still risk the other person taking you up on it. It's why I don't favor them as tactic and prefer negotiation without the suspended dagger looming overhead. 

Boundaries within the confines of relationships depend on the tolerance level of each person and some will see them crossed and not react. The respect is then possibly lost which could then signal the beginning of the end. 

Almost nothing is as complicated as the dynamics within couplehood and where diplomacy calls for much water being added to one's wine.

The illness model

The official transgender as illness model isn't new. It dates back to the 1980's with the work of Freund and Blanchard and when I googled Sasha Ayad's name it led me to her other channel where she parrots all the usual talking points on AGP and other trappings from his original work. 

I was almost fooled by Ayad's approach at first as she was advertising her new channel as wanting an open discussion and a "no dogma" approach only to discover that she is very much into dogma. I suspect it's a kind of soft pedaled conversion therapy that she's after as Jack Molay suggested. 

Do some people err when they transition? Yes. Is transition for everyone? No. However gender non-conformance isn't an illness and doesn't need curing and intervention should be on an "as required" basis. For some people their gender variance is almost pure expression and requires nothing but elimination of shame, guilt and secrecy. 

Ayad has appeared on many toxic channels (like Benjamin Boyce's who is positively obsessed with trans people) and has been associated with Lisa Littman's rapid onset gender dysphoria theory which sells social contagion the way the gay moral panic used to be trumpeted. If you hang around with transgender youth apparently they will infect others. 

The truth is that gender variance has been a permanent fixture in societies since the dawn of civilization. We can either leave people in peace or harass them until they are forced underground or to conform. 

Not gonna happen now but they keep trying anyway.

Sasha Ayad

Apologies but after doing some digging into Sasha Ayad in more detail I realized that she is a Blanchard disciple trying to repackage to be more palatable by appearing to be supportive.

I removed the videos.

If Jesus came back

James Talarico from Texas appeared recently on Joe Rogan and the comment section could have me despair if I didn't already know there were so many unwise and unkind people in the world. 

Talarico is a Democrat but also a man of faith who preaches charity and compassion. He believes strongly in a separation of church and state and that the government has no right dictating morality on people. He supports women's bodily autonomy and LGBTQ rights which of course went over with the Rogan audience like a lead balloon. 

Rogan has a right leaning audience who seem to embrace the kind of Christian nationalism which preaches both judgment and the blurring of politics and religion. These people can't be helped and will always exist and you just need to out vote them. The US is going to be increasingly hard pressed to do so in their current toxic environment. 

If Jesus came back and planted himself in the southern states he would be identified as a false prophet and crucified all over again for being a bleeding heart liberal who cares too much for the disenfranchised.

Of that I have little doubt.

Insight

Insight doesn't come overnight. No matter how intelligent we are, the process is iterative and requires living and reflecting to come up with personal answers. 

The version of me who first began writing publicly in 2012 no longer exists which is the way it should be if we are applying introspection to our lives. 

As I began to delve more deeply into the topic of gender variance I trusted no one; not even myself. There was popular internet opinion, a number of online therapists (some of whom were insufficiently versed in the topic) plus a venomous opposition largely based on hate and toxic theories with no empathy or useful intelligence behind it. 

Trying to make your way through this minefield takes time and patience because it is full of talking points and myths which must be carefully examined before they are either adopted or dispelled. 

To find out who we are requires disassembling early programming which wasn't useful; something which can take much time. The more we are distracted by other things, the more cumbersome it will be. It can sometimes feel like leaving a cult but we must carefully avoid entering a new one because popular cultural opinion can tempt us into following it without enough reflection. 

We find our way always with our thinking caps on and a healthy skepticism in tow.

MAGA cruelty

Stupid people aren't an anomaly, they are a permanent fixture...

Cleopatra

I can tell without a shadow of a doubt that I can go into a metro car at rush hour dressed as Cleopatra and there won't be an issue. However there is a caveat: you must be very comfortable in your skin because if not it will show and people can smell it. 

Recently I encountered three young women attending Comicon and I gave them kudos on their choice of lavish costumes which they were so happy to hear. Not a hint of self-conciousness existed between them. 

Know who you are and own it.

We don't want things

Japanese people don't want things anymore and if you infuse capital into the economy it stays in the form of cash and isn't spent. It is instead saved for a rainy day.

For economists their financial model is almost an enigma. 

The idea that we should always want more is what drove the American economy since its inception. GDP growth was the engine which signaled progress and prosperity even as we know that money doesn't buy happiness; at least it bankrolls our distractions until our time is up. Of course it becomes problematic when your capital lies in fewer and fewer hands over time.

The Japanese in the early 90's were a powerhouse of consumption until it all came crashing down and people woke from a fever and never returned to it. While Americans continued to feed on cheap shit from China they decided it wasn't giving them anything more. 

The story about the poor Mexican fisherman applies here I think. One day he is told by a rich capitalist that if he works hard and makes lots of money he will one day be able to retire and do exactly what he is doing now. 

How very apropos...

Keeping up appearences

The nuclear model of the family is over. Two parents, two kids, a pet, a house in the 'burbs with a nice garden with a picket fence dies with the generation of my children. 

A person of my generation was taught to aspire to it whether it fit us or not. It was what one was expected to do and we complied to the best of our ability. If you weren't made for the role you faked it as best you could like the lesbian wife of my first boss who later divorced him and married a woman which, to my knowledge, in her late 70's, she is still with. 

Even if you wanted to adopt that former middle class lifestyle you would need to be among the affluent. The idea of a stay at home mom with two kids now sounds like science fiction and if we go back to my mother's era with six of us it is beyond even imagination. 

If I prefer today it isn't because of the chaos. It is due to the transparency which allowed many of us to escape pretense even as others wished they could have what we once did: to fit in and keep up appearances that weren't always exactly as advertised.

Average citizen

Claudette doesn't know that I am transgender and after running into her and chatting for a bit about current politics she began to parrot a right wing talking point about woke culture and LGBTQ people. She didn't want to have their agenda imposed on her. 

I asked her how that was happening and of course she couldn't properly answer other than point to their increasing presence in media. 

She is in her mid 70's and I see her infrequently when I start my morning walk. She is also a nice person but not overly well versed in a lot of areas. For me she represents the average citizen of her generation who knows just enough to avoid being dangerous but could use educating. Progressive she is not but neither is she right wing. 

I do my part to question and challenge them without losing the friendly tone and they listen.

"I am a woke woman" I said as we parted ways and she laughs.

"Regarding Us"

"Regarding Us" is about a black transgender teacher named Veronica Hathaway who is outed after working  7 years at a Catholic school. She is let go being told that they weren't advised about her "choice" of lifestyle. 

Transgender actress Alexandra Grey does a fine job here in the role of the teacher being discriminated against and whose family has even disowned her. 

She befriends a little girl who needs help in gaining confidence after having trouble in school who herself makes friends with a gender questioning boy from Alabama whose family also does not understand. 

On Tubi and highly recommended.

Canceled

I could be wrong but after Paramount settled their suit with Trumpty Dumpty for $16 million one of the conditions might have been the cancelation of the late show with Stephen Colbert for in 10 months that show will no longer exist. Colbert called out CBS for capitulating to the slime ball president and three days later the cancelation was announced.

The late night comics particularly Colbert and Kimmel have been constant pains for the tangerine mussolini who was likely looking for revenge. Many will cancel their subscriptions to Paramount Plus in protest and will follow Colbert wherever he goes. 

In the end, the Trump regime will collapse but the shame of those who cooperated will remain and people have long memories.

Capitulation to a felon just gets you lifelong disgrace.

Gimme a catch phrase

"Transgender women are men" trumpets the comment which reveals to me straight away they aren't a thinker. 

The problem is that the term man carries a huge proportion of societal weight. Had they said transgender women start off biologically male or all fetuses start off female I would be more forgiving. 

Many people don't think very profoundly and hence nuance isn't their forte. The greys that this issue contains escape them completely because confirmation bias is much more important. 

What defines a man and a woman are heavily subject to historical era and particular society. In one culture men nurturing children is expected whereas in others it is anathema. These are aspects having nothing to do with biology.

But the more dense gender criticals aren't interested in the interplay between sex and gender. They just like the catch phrases.

Erase and start over

The best way to become ourselves is to erase and start over. What do I mean? 

Some of us (especially those who are older) might have kept a persona that we showed to the world and developed an outlet which tended to be secretive. The problem is that neither version is the real us and we are left fractured rather than whole. The people who this works for tend to be those whose cross gender expression is more playful than rooted in identity. 

To attempt a fix we erase what is expected of a man and a woman and we become our own creation. Cole Escola is one of them as is John McLean. 

Maybe your version includes transition and maybe it doesn't.

                       John McLean 

This has legs

MAGA is really upset. 

Many of them have lost friends and family over their Trump allegiance but the Epstein dossier just may be a bridge too far. Even far right extremist and Nazi Nick Fuentes has now disowned him. 

Trump only added fuel to the fire by insulting them and blaming the democrats for blowing up this case into conspiracy territory. 

This issue has legs and may finally snap a good portion of his base out of their stupor. 

Nothing has divided Americans like the Trump presidency. While some eagerly await an obituary others think he walks on water and was sent by God. I have never witnessed anything like this in my lifetime but it has definitely fine tuned my opinions on human nature in recent years like nothing else.

Cole accepts award

A true original...

Montréal summer vibes

The city I run around in every day 

Sneaky Pete

I'm addicted to the Netflix show "Sneaky Pete". The characters are engaging and the storyline weaves a complex web of intrigue where motives get cloudy and deceit for some is a game they can't help but play. 

Some people will do anything to score big and they sometimes trap themselves into situations where they need to think faster than is good for them. The double crosses and the lying are just part of the landscape.

Giovanni Ribisi is particularly good in this series as the lead and kudos to creators Bryan Cranston and Graham Yost have managed to give this show almost a "Breaking Bad" vibe.

I promise you'll get hooked and you can thank me later...

Jealousy

Gender dysphoria can take on overtones of jealousy; "I wish I could wear clothes like my sister", "I wish I could roughouse with the boys or play with tools", etc. Of course this used to be a more pronounced problem when we hadn't yet relaxed gender norms. 

As a result, people who grew up under a rigid binary were left wishing but unable to act other than in secrecy. This impacts psychology growing up which then needs addressing later. 

If the mitigation method they adopted remained stunted in secrecy the shame and guilt risked not being properly addressed and simply allowed to fester. The psychology could remain rooted in the idea that succumbing to the urges was doing something wrong. 

Here I should note that people with mild to no dysphoria have a shorter path to resolution since once they find a balance point the psychology takes care of itself over time. This is provided that they aren't surrounded by naysayers who make them feel worse about their inclinations. 

Youth don't develop these mental blockages regarding gender because they didn't need to spend years living in secret jealousy wishing they could be fully themselves.

The key is to honestly examine core motivation and coming to terms by applying a solution which then elevates self esteem thus maturing the psychology around the gender variance.

Rosie knew

 

Amiga mia

Julia is 10 years my junior and feels something is off everywhere. We can all tell that the world is in a bad place and it's infecting all facets of our lives. 

She works at the Toronto office sometimes from home and other times going to the site. It varies but the work doesn't and at 52 the routine is draining her as is the way things are done now in a "show me the bottom line" world. 

We became friends in 2017 when we overlapped on the same project and now we keep in touch with calls which she always begins with "hola amiga mia" 

She heartily approves my choice of dress for the wedding after I have sent it on whattsapp. 

I know the extreme heat isn't helping and the constant bad news on the international front does nothing but make our feeling of malaise worse. 

So we cheer each other up as best we can and I tell her to focus on herself. Take long walks, have coffee or lunch with friends, connect with strangers and call your amiga in Montréal when you need to vent.

Serene

Young transgender people who don't blend in all that well are noticeably calm and chill. This morning on the metro at rush hour she was standing maybe 3 feet from me and the riders were of course minding their own business. 

She wasn't immediately detectable but my radar didn't need to go into overdrive to notice her. Others possibly didn't detect or just couldn't care less.

It was the expression that I liked; placid and serene while off to work.

The meaning of clothes

The process of adopting traditionally  feminine clothing as your own is both slow and organic. It is tied into the neuroplasticity which allows you to accept your identity which moves in conjunction with expression. 

I used to think I had reached a plateau and was repeatedly proven to be wrong. After a while there was no novelty left but thankfully it was replaced with a rightness which felt much better. 

You feel right because you have addressed a gap that was there since early childhood and you become calmer in the process. 

I wasn't changing anything in my daily routine, only that the psychology which was lagging behind finally caught up.

Back in style

Alberta has the highest concentration of measles cases per capita in North America; over 1200 cases since March. 

This is not surprising given that Alberta has a high percentage of conservatives who don't trust government or science. There are more vaccine skeptics there than in other parts of the country. It's the Texas of Canada.

We used to be completely measles free but belief in science and doctors has gone down substantially.

Outlaws

Some people believe that being transgender means that you are transitioning from one sex/gender to another when instead, you are more liberating your expression and identity from the constraints of birth sex. In other words you aren't going from a biological male to a female but instead rejecting the idea that your birth sex automatically determines who you are. 

When people transitioned in the past there was no middle ground and male to female transsexuals were correct to live as much as possible in stealth to avoid rejection and prejudice. 

Here I will also add that being a man and woman have traditionally been loaded with all kinds of social obligation and expectations which have little to nothing to do with their biology. 

Today, transgender youth are more likely to live somewhere in between the old binary model because both men and women are more free to explore life outside of what were very strict gender roles. This is why they have adopted more terms for how they identify. 

Binary transsexuals who felt they had been subjected to a complete psycho-sexual inversion still very much exist of course and are part of the broad spectrum of humanity and always will be. 

So in a sense being a transgender person makes you a gender outlaw (as Kate Bornstein famously coined) where you have a public and transparent identity which necessarily exists outside the constraints of birth sex and the rules which used to govern it.

Drinking the Kool-aid

I never realized to what extent people were gullible until I became much older. I would see supposedly well educated people go into cults or believe in wild conspiracy theories forcing me to think about how this could happen. 

It was the process of adopting a belief and then working backwards to develop reasoning to substantiate it; sometimes not even that. My father taught to apply critical thinking to everything and that there could be no faith without reason. 

I think the problem with many people is that the urge to fit in overrides their critical thinking. It is why joining a religion invented by a science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard can happen. They need something to cling to even if it means mental gymnastics to explain it to themselves. Believing in Xenu is the inevitable conclusion of a process which starts off with a trickle and ends up in a waterfall. 

Everytime I pass a Jehovah's witness kiosk the instinct to want to wake them kicks in but I stop myself.

Without this basic need of humanity for connection, Jim Jones wouldn't have been able to take advantage of people and get them to drink Kool-aid laced with poison. 

Trumpism works in much the same way where the need for a savior overrides what your own eyes are telling you.

Funnel

For the longest time I said that I would never entertain any form of transition; not even a social one. I remember the sexologist Helene Cote (who I would see maybe once a year) telling me that it was usually those most adamantly opposed to it that would end up transitioning whereas many who came to the hospital program very gung-ho at the outset often backed out. 

It's an interesting process that can feel like entering a funnel. When you are at the rim you think no problem but as you near the spout you realize that at a certain point it becomes almost inevitable. 

I reflect on what being educated in a more open minded society as youth are today. They will be less likely to view their path as an increasingly constricting funnel because they have less reasons to push back. If anything, their danger might be being more gung-ho than they need to be because acceptance is so much higher despite there still being obstacles. 

Yesterday I watched a video of someone about my age ruminating on how to tell an immediate family which includes people who are adamantly against transgender people. They have struggled to get where they are after knowing from earliest memory that they had a gender issue. 

You could very clearly see that they were at the spout end of that funnel.

Patinkin on Gaza

 

Chess with a pigeon

I just love this comment which had the word idiot replaced with Trump supporter. The imagery is brilliant:

"Arguing with a Trump supporter is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it's victorious"

Loose thread

The Epstein files are proving to be an Achilles heel for Trump. His calculation that his base would go along with everything he did was misguided as many see this case as an important part of their desire to unmask the deep state. 

They love the idea of a Bill Clinton or Bill Gates being outed as part of a pedophile leftist elite but Trump's long association with Epstein is problematic for a false populist who leans much more into authoritarian narcissism. 

This case has divided the MAGA base so much that the cracks in the foundation are impossible to conceal. Pam Bondi's mistake of teasing revealing the list and then pulling back by saying it doesn't exist is going to hurt the regime dearly.

The Trump reaction on his toxic platform revealed he is petrified of discovery and I would not be surprised if this is the loose thread which finally unravels the entire garment. 

The MAGA base has a large contingent of Christian nationalist hypocrites who love inflicting cruelty on others and the Epstein drama would be their ultimate prize towards "owning the libs"thus justifying their conspiratorial instincts.

If the list gets out, then very likely it is the beginning of the end for Trump. 

The entire portrait

One of the hardest things to do in this life is to become a unique entity. Thus to detach ourselves from outside opinion and expectation and develop authenticity can be very difficult. 

On our journey to become authentic beings I point to several key aspects we should work on: 

- Self-respect 

- Transparency

- disregard for destructive opinion 

As I was working out how to grapple with my situation over the years, I realized that hiding was antithetical to both self-respect and transparency which only made me feel trapped. Once you begin to realize who you are, steps need to be taken to uphold that self otherwise you risk seeing yourself as flawed. 

I preferred to work outside of the LGBTQ bubble not only to ensure objectivity but also because I didn't agree with many of the viewpoints expressed within that community. We are first and foremost unique individuals with differing stories and perspectives.

It can be a little nerve wracking to work out your own thinking but it had to be done so that the narrative of my life could make sense. My experience had to be put into context and rationalized by finding out how much of what we absorb during our formative years has veracity. 

The cleanup phase I am finishing now is precisely about tying up any loose ends vis a vis my reading and reflecting over the years plus the final bits of reconciling my lived experience with the present. It's putting together any still missing pieces of the puzzle and integrate them into a more cohesive and solid psychological perspective of what it means to be transgender.

Up to now my life has been an iteration process in dealing with not aligning with my early formation. Finding authenticity meant incorporating all aspects of myself into the broader portrait of who I am which goes well beyond gender.

If you think you are dealing with an issue of identity, this exercise becomes pretty much mandatory particularly if you are older and came at acceptance through resistance.

Hug it out

Things have been better in the past between the US and Canada no thanks to the idiot, but this Quebec tourism add made me smile...

"I get it"

 

This week

Lots of things happened this week. 

Besides meeting Cecile on Wednesday, on Thursday I met Angela for coffee. She is leaving the company after 18 years. In her early 40's, she feels it's time to move especially since she will be able to work a hybrid week where part of the work is done at home and is getting a substantial increase in pay. 

Angela is one of the first people I came out to at work at least a decade ago. 

The same day I had lunch with Daniel who lives in Barcelona and works mostly with the London office. He is also in his early 40's and is challenged with his work life balance and told me he is seeing a therapist for it. 

Life is much faster than when I was their age. Both are very happy for me. 

I also texted with Danielle who is preparing for her August wedding. She and David have been tremendously supportive and we joked about having our dresses ready. She said she was looking forward to seeing me on the dance floor. 

My friend Sylvie has kindly offered to drive me to the wedding on August 2nd which is so appreciated since it is at the west end of the city. 

Next week I have lunch with a friend I have known for almost 40 years who is aware of my gender situation. He is yet another person I will not lose. 

The cleanup continues one day at a time as I settle into my new life outside of career and obligation. It's not an obvious adaptation but it gets better as you go along. 

There is nowhere to run but you no longer need or want to.