After starting to write again in 2023 it looks like I'm done here. There's been massive change since I first began blogging with my old blog at age 49.
At almost 64 and well-immersed in retirement, its time to move on to focus more on the other things that interest me.
My only advice to you is: figure out who you are and go do that.
Take very good care.
The rise of the useful idiot interviewer happened slowly and eventually gained a wide audience. You didn't need to do your homework but just be affable and entertaining. Joe Rogan became the poster boy for "I am just asking questions" while being constantly gobsmacked by everything your latest guest says.
The problem with this is the interviewer doesn't hold anyone to account. There isn't the kind of pushback you need to have because the knowledge or the research isn't there to back you up. Some years ago, Rogan interviews Jordan Peterson who just proceeds as usual to word salad his way through the whole thing except with greater ease than usual.
These podcasts are relatable to people who wouldn't normally watch dry interviewers like David Frost talk to Nixon. They ask goofy questions while playing their shtick persona for an audience who I suspect is more there for their folk hero than for the guest in question.
Theo Von and Andrew Schultz did much the same thing and captured young impressionable males looking for role models to emulate. They helped feed into the bro culture that helped get Trump a second term most everyone now regrets.
I sometimes see comments like this:
"How can I stop imagining myself as a woman" which signals distress and a lack of self-acceptance.
It is also precisely what Ray Blanchard pounced upon in the 1980's with his scared patients when he basically renamed what was then known in the manuals as transvestic fetishism (which admittedly focused more on clothing than imagining oneself having a female body) .
But here's the rub: human sexuality is very complex with many scenarios possible. One involves the imprinted child who crosses into puberty with the wish to be female since early childhood with the rest being variants of what my friend Jack Molay years ago coined as Crossdreaming. In other words, what might my life be like if I were the other sex.
Some of these variants are only temporary exploration or escapism and aren't very deeply rooted in the psyche. However other cases are much more persistent and involved fighting uphill to be accepted within societies that reject them.
Small wonder so many wanted to be healed or went underground.
Gender criticals point to this trauma as signs of mental illness which most assuredly wouldn't exist had gender variant people not been taught this is what it indeed was from the outset.
Even today gender conversion channels like The Metaphor of Gender preach a soft-pedalled and genteel gospel of gender variance as something to be healed and no, not everyone needs to transition.
The key for all these cases is to put their desire for gender variance into context and determine a landing point by repairing the underlying trauma around it.
It isn't the gender variance that needs curing but the psychology which associates it with an illness thus fostering shame, guilt and in older people secrecy.
Ray Williams, as an example, contorts himself into a pretzel by accepting he has a sexual illness that he now celebrates by trumpeting "hurray I have AGP!"
It is precisely this type of outlook that I do not believe to be the healthiest of approaches.
I could not fail at anything in life. I simply didn't allow it. However life had other ideas.
Surprises aren't always destined for failure, they are lessons that what we digested as mandatory isn't always correct. Things we were taught early on in life end up not aligning with our circuitry and yet we still adapt for fear of rejection.
To do this we build a workable personna and make sure to not let our guard down. We then follow a plan handed down by others which we discover along the way isn't exactly right for us.
This isn't just my life; this is the lives of many people who bought into scripts.
What happens after a while is that we realize we must relax the body as well as the psyche and jettison the mask. We become authentic and finally begin to look properly after the self.
We do this not just because we want to, but because we absolutely must.
Gender variant people represent a slice of the general population with the same types of personality traits we find elsewhere. In other words, we aren't special in any measured category and possess strengths and weaknesses as the unique individuals we are.
You prick us and we bleed.
This is the primary reason why I don't think of gender variant people as a block but as distinct individuals who fall within the mosaic of humanity. I have seen so much variation from person to person over the years to justify my saying this.
Interestingly, it would greatly benefit society to think this way rather than herding people into camps.
All this to say that I don't care about anything else more than whether you are a decent person with a moral compass.
Everything else pales by comparison.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did not measure success by the conventional standards of the world.
Financial wealth or societal validation were not part of his reflection. Instead, he defined it as the overcoming of one's inner chaos which could be achieved through embracing adversity. This was a catalyst for personal growth which would accompany the creation of a unique sense of purpose as well as an incorruptible value system.
The world often looks at success through a faulty prism and many of the characters we laud with having achieved it, are deeply flawed and perturbed individuals with narcissistic qualities. Their personal lives are also often in complete disarray.
In contrast, those people who reflect deeply and weigh the morality and consequences of their life decisions are less likely to succeed by the metrics of a world that values knee-jerk action. However they often tend to personify the best qualities of humanity which include empathy and charity.
We want to seek internal balance and in so doing must necessarily abandon much of what the world values and chases after.
Back when I was thinking about magic bullet theories regarding what factors (outside of deliberate choice) made people gender variant, I didn't fully realize that I was attacking the issue from the wrong angle.
Instead I should have concentrated on what stops them from being that way. In other words, what are the fabricated rules that prevented a natural spectrum from being both visible and viable.
I was operating from the wrong coordinate system that I had been raised under which was tainted with bias and artificial structure.
The human condition is naturally full of variants which if left alone surface and thrive naturally provided the person isn't traumatized. The problem is that society doesn't appreciate wild cards spoiling the models they want everyone to subscribe to.
The ingredients which go into making a human being are so varied and complex at every level of development, that it is entirely expected that the process would produce great variability; one that we see replicated everywhere in organic systems.
Instead of welcoming this entirely natural diversity of outcome, most societies (with the notable exception of many native cultures) simply rejected them. They forced people to comply and stigmatized and traumatized them for not obeying the rules.
Therefore when conservatives talk about an epidemic of gayness or transness they are really referring to a loss of control of the rules they favour. They don't want the natural variants exposed and call them unnatural when the opposite is true.
Regrettably until we educate ourselves the baseline of many if not most humans is inadvertent stupidity; one which emphasizes both a lack of critical thinking and unquestioning conformity as a baseline operating system. Today people openly trumpet their idiocy with gusto and even pride.
It is our own responsibility to fix that.
The Trump regime is now only barely able to gaslight a decreasing part of its own population. Everyone else in the world has moved on.
Europe, Mexico and Canada for example are making other arrangements but the tough talk is what the regime is going with as they bargain that it will look good at home. This despite the horrid polling. The US is also gambling that the bond market won't crash as world confidence in their country declines by the day.
This is massive hubris that is entirely unwarranted
China for its part has seen astronomical progress over the last 40 years and is now seeing the fruits of investment in technology and its workforce. The country has lifted a huge chunk of its population out of poverty and threatens to show the world what looking after your people looks like.
No the Chinese aren't perfect on human rights but then most countries have skeletons in their closets.
As the western world figures out how to mitigate the consequences of Neoliberal policies, the selling of more socialist approaches is becoming more palatable even in the US with its DSA candidates.
This is because people are getting fed up of falling behind.
My desire to want to slap people in public has waned dramatically which is very good news for me.
However, it's not because society in general is getting better behaved, but because I am learning to, better than ever, tune them out and live internally in peace.
One of the challenges we have as human beings is to find our community. We need a clan to belong to which can bring security but also potentially present us with a trap.
In order to belong we need to define ourselves as being members and sometimes shoehorn ourselves into a model that may not feel quite right.
This is human nature in spades.
My instinct has always told me to be wary of groupthink precisely because the draw to belong can potentially cloud our judgement. It's wonderful to feel part of something bigger than ourselves but that invariably comes with some warning stickers
We love labels and categories so we can fit in with the flipside being that they can serve as criteria for exclusion and even banishment.
No one can imagine my life perfectly and there are many other lives I cannot relate to. All we can do is empathize by virtue of our humanity.
My empathy is very strong for people who suffer in quiet dignity. There is something very noble in that while knowing that life doesn’t appear to be entirely fair.
The saying goes that "God gives us what we can handle" which I don't really subscribe to. I prefer to think of it as different experiences bring out different strengths and qualities in us.
Sometimes I have to stop myself from approaching another transgender person. I am tempted and then think twice because they may not appreciate such a random approach.
This afternoon it was at my closest thrift shop where I noted that one of the employees (she about the age of my kids) was clearly trans. I took note but then carried on browsing.
She had grown out her hair which was neatly gathered inside a large adorned clip. A little rouge on the cheeks was all I saw in the way of makeup.
What always stays with me is how people just mind their own business. Whether they noticed she was trans or not didn't matter but then the majority of the browsers there weren't much beyond 30.
I resisted saying hello but who knows for the next time.
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 bottled 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Within male to female gender variance 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 very 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Life used to be slower and harder but we had less anxiety and depression. People generally worked within tight-knit social structures which brought them connection and validation.
Perhaps you worked in a factory for 30 years next to people who became comrades and confidantes. That job has been outsourced to the third world or to a machine.
Even my own industry at the start of my career was slow by virtue of the advent of very clunky and limited computers. We had no choice but work more meticulously thanks to limitations we now realize were strangely helpful.
People need to be needed, seen and acknowledged. When you take that away they become despondent. When you add speed and efficiency but don't improve the other facets, you are asking for burnouts which started to happen about 10 years ago with great frequency.
We've been learning the consequences the hard way.
I probably pay more attention to American politics than is good for me. My interest was already there well before Trumpism but it spiked dramatically when I was able to see first hand, from just north of the border, how people fall for crooked despots.
I have much less doubt about how it happens now.
The soil is always ripe when a nation is in decline. Someone comes along and feeds into the desire of people who fall for slogans and quick fixes. It works particularly well when the leader shows you people you can razor focus your anger on while you are being distracted.
When Hitler came to power, Germany was in huge economic trouble. They had massive inflation and their currency kept devaluating. Under this pressure came someone who said he was going to make Germany great once again. Things only escalated from there to a catastrophic downfall.
Trump isn't Hitler but what they both share is a malevolent narcissism sourced in deeply troubled childhoods. The ultimate victims of their psychopathy are the people least deserving of it which is always the way of history. Some of these people are gullible to a point that is hard for us to fathom.
We are going to finish this era in chaos and turmoil with the US having one of the biggest downfalls. It will be their chance to rebuild again as the worst intentioned members of the boomer class which Trump belongs to, slowly expire.
But no matter the era we live in, there are traits we cannot erase from our DNA; traits which make us predictable and prone to self-sabotage.
Its just that during the golden periods, we manage to distract ourselves just enough to not fall prey to our worst instincts.
Once "what will people think of me" becomes much less important than "what do I think of myself" you have reached a critical turning point.
You are on the right track. You've turned a page.
Going back to a place you haven't been to in a long time while sporting a very different mindset can provide us with a barometer of how far we have traveled.
Before my son and I met up yesterday to see "The Odyssey" I got off at a REM stop perfectly located in front of a mall I hadn't been to in many years. I normally don't like malls but it was brutally hot and humid and the cool air was just what the doctor ordered.
Beginning in my early 20's this mall had served as part of a testing ground to figure out who I was. Yes, I had first ventured out of the house in my late teens but this had been one big step up and it was here I first encountered and dealt with people who didn't know I was transgender.
Come to think of it, I didn't know either for it was the 1980's and the language we use so readily today was barely formulated and still very much in its infancy.
This place provided me with the beginnings of courage to explore further outside of a comfort zone I had no clue had so much more room for expansion.
Walking back in there now felt like nothing special. There was no build up of nerves that have long disappeared and I simply took notes of the many changes the place had undergone.
After 20 minutes I made my way back to the REM and one stop later was perfectly timed to see my son walking in to the theater just seconds before me.
You don't want to go home again. You want to move forward but this last minute decision on my part gave me more insight than I had expected as a looking glass into my past.
At the level of the individual most people want a reasonably prosperous life. They want the basics plus friendship, perhaps love and a sense of meaning and purpose.
However as we begin to zoom out we start to see the first signs of trouble. Groups are formed which begin to exclude others. There are jealousies created and prejudicial behaviour begins to be seen.
We zoom out yet again at communities, towns, cities and countries and the same pattern is repeated but at a more complex level. We see networks form which employ both the best and the worst of human nature.
Within this framing we can see that conservatism at its core is a fear-based mindset which at every stage of history has a type of incarnation. It fears change and wants a status-quo to remain which suits the power dynamics that were working for those people albeit perhaps imperfectly.
However, at least it felt safe for them.
Conservatives tend towards exclusionary behaviours because social progress almost always implies a redistribution of power. Immigrants, women, visible minorities, etc are challenging a model that existed before.
When we introduce big shifts in the social order it brings out a radical response in the most fearful people. They form a coordinated response and suddenly a barrage of pushback at every level of society is initiated.
It is where we are now.
The Odyssey has a clear political message warning about isolationism as the bronze age came to a close. The themes were clearly applicable to today as it warned about the folly of war (which it doesn't romanticize) for less than honorable purposes.
This is obviously not meant to be just a simple adventure and the deliberate casting choices were perhaps also meant to rub against the fragile sensibilities of conservatives.
The film is brilliantly executed in many ways with scenes that are genuinely captivating and enthralling.
Bravo Mr Nolan!
I have come to conclude with great certainty that the only way to have a truly healthy relationship with another person is to first love oneself and have some possession of authenticity; perhaps not perfectly but as close as possible to it.
If this does not occur we are entering wounded and possibly ready to accept less than we deserve. We will at the same time not be able to provide the best version of ourselves to another person.
I understand that I am presenting a high bar here but I've known too many people who hobble along and toil within co-dependency where each tends to the other's wounds.
One such example would be the control freak paired with the disorganized perennial victim.
It's not possible to have perfection but when we choose partners early in life we let surface chemistry and what we determine to be compatibility cover up the more nuanced and subconscious reasons lying underneath which tie us to childhood; as example the wounded daughter looking for the substitute father figure.
It's a shame that we come to self-knowlwdge later but I suspect there is no other way.
Dr Gabor Mate talks a lot about childhood trauma and how many of our issues are sourced there. The child feels abandoned, not listened to, abused physically or verbally and so on.
The trauma leaves symptoms in adulthood which people are unable to trace to the source of the problem.
Compensation methods are then found in adulthood to mask the trauma such as always being agreeable, burying oneself in work and performance, substance abuse, etc.
I think he is very much correct and our goal should be to go to the source of the trauma directly and heal the wound with our adult lens.
Of course transgender people had a very particular kind of trauma in having to suppress identity and authenticity often for decades, but everyone likely has some childhood wounds they need to address.
When one steps off the carousel of chaos and has time to truly reflect, we realize that much work went into pleasing others and being agreeable under a system that was not only rigged but completely flawed.
We discover that much energy went into the wrong areas instead of repairing the errors inflicted upon us. As I've discovered it's never too late, but if only this version of myself could talk to my younger self.
Authenticity is problematic within the structure of a society that runs on and expects conformity.
Most of us grew up with expectation and were praised or punished by parents who themselves experienced much the same process. It becomes legacy which is passed on to successive generations until we break the chain.
Therefore becoming fully authentic is almost impossible since it requires ignoring so much of learned behaviour. If we start to determine the point of where the real us begins and the child who received training stops, we may be hard pressed to identify it.
This is why it can take years or decades to fully determine identity. We then have a type of "coming out" where we say "I don't care what anyone thinks anymore: but only after we tire of doing it so long.
Authenticity can be scary because it always risks breaking rules. It is disruptive in nature but if the alternative is to live a life full of suppression and being out of touch with the self, the answer becomes more obvious.
Dealing with an older parent can be a challenge sometimes. They have slowly become more child like and the roles have slowly reversed.
At 90 my mother repeats herself a lot and I have given up on my pronouns and dead naming because it isn't worth it. She accepts you and loves you which is enough.
My mother isn't educated but has plenty of life savvy to spare. Her prodding me out of shyness is what helped get me where I am and I will be forever grateful. It was my father who was the intellectual and counted on her earthy pragmatism as counter balance to his bookish ways..
Yes, they can frustrate us but that is because no one knows better how to push buttons we were certain by now were defective; the ones that prompted us to want to hide under furniture from the embarrassing behaviour they inflicted on us in public when we were kids.
She is well surrounded with a large family who cares and is happy to return the favour for her tireless energy.
Science doesn't work in the direction of trying to prove a hypothesis. It actually works in the direction of trying to disprove it.
We notice a phenomena, propose a theory and go about, in a sense, trying to disprove it through experimentation. The aim is to make sure we don't infect the process with wishful thinking and bias.
Pseudoscience works in reverse in that it proposes a theory which it then spends all its time looking for shreds of proof to bolster.
The earth is flat and that's all there is to it. Don't bother me with evidence to the contrary.
In pseudoscience the bias is baked in and once enough data points exist to the satisfaction of the true believer, they can stop there despite the existence of gaping holes.
What we need now is a new social contract; one which returns us to caring about each other.
The navel gazing and chasing prosperity through consumerism failed miserably as did the oversharing the most mundane details of our daily existence on social media.
No one should care about what you ate for breakfast or what your skin routine is. They should find out through living their own lives or look into what people who do it for a living recommend.
I know I don't care and I say it with all due respect because we aren't all that important.
We've made ourselves less happy than when we worked physically much harder but then those times had a greater spirit of community and didn't obsess over productivity by timing bathroom breaks.
We messed up and the clean up starts now in earnest.
First time director Rebecca Hall makes a movie about passing for white. Her mother was a black opera singer who was light-skinned and so the subject matter invited itself as a matter of personal interest.
Set in 1929, movie protagonist Irene Redfield is recognized in a very nice restaurant by former high school friend Claire who is now living her life passing as white. Irene is shocked at the transformation (blonde hair and all) even as she herself blends in well to white society under her snuggly-fitting flapper hat. Her brim is lowered at key moments when suspicion threatens her with trouble.
Irene lives a more affluent life in Harlem than most black people of her time and she and her husband can afford to have a maid. However they are still second class citizens in an America that has always had and continues to have a clear pecking order.
Claire is living in stealth but is married to a racist white man who has no idea of his wife's origins. She is getting tired of her life and the cover up and it gets increasingly complicated from there.
The parallels with transgender people invite themselves here. The hierarchy of privilege, how people use it and how messy life is in general.
The best way to remove power from ill-intentioned people is make them feel small which is accomplished by magnifying their insignificance.
When we show they don't matter it plays on their already frail egos; a problem which secure people don't have.
There is nothing more frustrating than removing whatever small grasp on power they think they have.
On another note, this blog has been regularly receiving between 5,000 and 6,000 views per day, a healthy increase which I am at a loss to explain since I have not changed my approach at all. I never have, nor will I ever chase traffic.
However, I will take it I guess.
Online positions and viewpoints on things tend to be hard line and black and white because people often have very fixed ideas on subjects despite their lack of knowledge.
If we recall Bonhoeffer's three tenets of stupidity: outsourcing critical thinking, willful ignorance and conformity, you can see why so much of what we take in fails the test.
Nuanced discussions are abandoned in favour of staunch positions that are at best flimsy. They may have an agenda or simply absorbed it from somewhere else and are now preaching it.
Being comfortable with grays is pretty much mandatory and because we don't have all the answers we must be prepared to say "I don't know"
The problem is the ego gets in the way of many people who can be derailed very easily by asking them a simple question
"Explain to me logically and clearly why you believe this?"
Gotcha.
There will be plenty of times that you doubt your transition (no matter the type) but this is not because it was the wrong thing to do. It is because you are human which means it comes with the territory.
You have largely removed yourself from the euphoria/ dysphoria roller coaster and everyday normal life gets to be routine.
That doesn't mean your existential angst goes away.That's permanent.
Little things will go wrong which will then get lumped in with your being transgender which is perfectly normal.
What would be abnormal is if you never doubted at all.
Both the internet and plenty of books are full of advice about how to control our thoughts and our minds except that they generally don't work. This doesn't prevent the authors from selling their formulas like a magic elixir.
The problem is that they advertise something that the human mind cannot adequately achieve.
Our mind fires off random thoughts at rapid pace and we cannot always process them fast enough. Many of them play on our deepest fears and insecurities.
The best we can hope for is mitigation and placing them within buckets of seriousness and prioritize them. Even then, just when we think we have achieved a method that works, some new crisis will derail our organization once again.
That is because the brain is a noise generation machine which means it's output cannot be controlled. We can work on cleaning up our personal issues but that does not mean the mind won't operate any less randomly.
It's firing tennis balls at us like a catapult and what we need to do is become a better player.
Trumpism is falling like a house of cards.
You let an incompetent crook take over the reins of your nation and he wrecks your economy with false hope of jobs coming back and promises of lowering the cost of living.
The exact opposite happens. Labour is increasingly lost to AI and tariffs sap the funds from bank accounts already depleted from the rising cost brought by inflation.
It's a cautionary tale to be sure.
I've been watching this closeup for years now. How the combination of human ignorance, stupidity, gullibility, greed and corruption work in tandem until its too late to reverse the damage.
Allies are moving on and making deals among themselves because they have little choice. The aggression from a malevolent regime needs to be mitigated and their populations protected from the insanity.
The people who supported Trump can't wash the stink off and it will remain a permanent part of their legacy. History doesn't allow you to rewrite it; certainly not in an era where everything is recorded in minute detail for digital posterity.
The whole fiasco will form part of another lesson of what not to do if you want to retain your nation's reputation and political alliances.
At Lindsey Graham's funeral an attendee sitting behind Trump was treated to one of his bowel movements and the expression of sheer disgust could not be hidden from the cameras.
It was a moment which will live on to symbolize the entire 10 years of Trump's insurgency into America's political machinery.
Pure stink.
Do I trust people? Regretably no. My life experience has taught me not to.
It's a shame this happens to us but over our lifetime we are met with deception, malice and insecurity which burns off any remaining innocence we still retained.
The more we are marked by life, the more we will be hard pressed to come back to a balance that removes the jaded fatigue we have for people in general.
We want to get some of that wonder and openness back which requires we let our guard down more than we think is wise.
Trust implies confidence that the other person has our best interest at heart and that no hidden agenda exists on their part. We also count on a lack of erratic behaviour which can keep us guessing as to when the next crisis point will arrive.
Trust must be earned and not given away so readily because I have seen too many incidents of both inadvertent and deliberate nature.
Some people come with so much drama attached to them that they become a magnet for do-gooders ready to help repair them. They move from one unwitting victim to another until they are finally discovered.
We all crave someone who gets us which comes with effort from both parties plus the willingness to drop our deadliest weapons on the floor.
We may have our share of problems as a society but at least there's never been a better time to be a unique individual.
I run around Montréal everyday and see every type of person with their own style of dressing and behaviour. No one takes particular notice of anyone else simply because there is too much variety to choose from.
People have removed the obligation that previous generations adopted and "what will the neighbours think" has been replaced by "It's none of your business".
I was walking with a neighbor recently who fretted about what to wear to a wedding. Her GenZ granddaughter told her to dress a little nicer than normal but but at the same time opt for what makes you speaks to you and says "this is me".
I second that.
The global death toll due to COVID was at minimum 7 million but likely much more since many countries stopped counting after a while.
Here we had a global pandemic not seen since the early 20th century and measures were undertaken to protect the public while experts determined how to tackle what they were facing.
The logic was to make sure we protect the most vulnerable by exercising caution through the use of measures that some now say were excessive. Had we done nothing, who knows what the death toll would have been.
In the US where 1.25 million people died (the highest of any country) Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky had the highest death rates per capita correlating well with low rates of vaccination there.
Of course now US conservatives 6 years later want to play Monday morning quarterback and say that the guidelines followed at the time were excessive and that the leading immunology expert in the country (who served under multiple presidents) was lying to them all along.
Republicans are desperate and need something to hold on to before they get clobbered in the midterms. Dr Fauci will need to be that sacrificial lamb to feed to their dumbfounded base.
It's a hail Mary pass but you have to try something to distract people from the price of groceries and gas brought to them by the current idiot running the place.
But fear not, it is 2026 and it might as well be the Salem witch trials. Different era, same level of ignorance.
I have never in my life seen so many mentally disconnected people running around in public. They are often the ones talking loudly to themselves spouting gibberish.
We can sometimes become their targets because much of their inhibitions have been greatly diminished.
Anyone can be a potential target and I have seen people storm off metro cars after having suddenly kicked a seat out of the blue in sheer frustration.
We are all fair game and I am always extremely cautious and mind my surroundings while keeping my emotions in check.
I hold my temper and don't react because it would serve no purpose to put someone in their place who isn't balanced. My built up frustration with the negative aspects of this world is best saved for better occasions.
Many people have lives that don't work at all for them and so they find ways to show their displeasure openly. Sometimes its an open diatribe in the middle of the street where people contour around them at a safe distance immersing faces into phones.
Einstein was correct when he said that society operates on a great deal of fear, greed and stupidity except that we can try hard to break that cycle and make our presence known to say that we won't stand for it.
We want to make things better.
Being transsexual didn't always come with perfect predictability as to what people would do about it. For one thing, before the 1950's there was but a tiny handful of transitions. For another, people had been living for millennia without such a possibility even existing.
Therefore the approach that each person took had a lot to do with personal and family history, personality type, religious beliefs, strength of dysphoria, etc.
In other words, there was a myriad of factors which didn't necessarily always lead to an inevitable conclusion.
Today we have turned this on its head because the climate has seen transitions contain more elective elements. There are more variations possible (including social transition) where it becomes personalized.
The medical transitions of the past tended to be those with the highest degree of inevitability; the ones that Harry Benjamin referred to as his type VI. They tended to be androphilic and very feminine in childhood which meant that things were generally more aligned in their favour to begin with.
Once society began to change we saw a wider slice of transgender people find unique paths that better fit their particular situations.
Unfortunately that has also meant increasing the number of regret cases (which gender criticals use as ammunition) despite their percentage remaining relatively small.
How we got to this point in our history is fascinating because without a breakdown of trust in governments and public institutions in general we wouldn't be here.
When we introduced the internet we democratized information. Suddenly we had the world at our fingertips but we didn't necessarily possess the skills to analyze it.
Sure, we could access all sorts of research papers, reports, studies, etc but they were also becoming fodder for conspiracy theorists who could get captive audiences and show them how the work and conclusions were flawed.
As our economies got worse for the average person that dissatisfaction was helping to build echo chambers where people could vent and blame those responsible.
I've lived long enough to know that most people are not particularly well-informed yet their opinions are quite rigid. This signals a contradiction since one's viewpoint should ideally be anchored in some knowledge.
However humans are emotional before they are rational and when you introduce uncertainty into their lives, that emotional response is magnified.
Watch any reporter stick a microphone into the face of a random passerby and we are often treated to complete nonsense.
Once we gave people the impression that they had all the keys to the knowledge center we seemed to give them false confidence along with it. Suddenly the Dunning-Kruger effect was being illustrated on a 24/7 basis.
The tribalism of this era comes from people being readily able find others who share their ideas. There is no one to tell them otherwise within their echo chambers where they find reinforcement instead of pushback.
Most people mean well but they don't understand the forces at play at a geopolitical level. They can't connect the dots and fall for strawmanning tactics of political systems that aren't necessarily functioning towards a common overall good for the largest number of people.
Historically, the masses worked under the combination of monarch and clergy to tell them what to do but with a loss of confidence in both, people have less trust that there is an ordered system looking after them.
Trumpism was a misguided cry for help particularly among the most disenfranchised of low information voters. They have now been finding out that no populist saviour will magically deliver them from all their problems.
The nature versus nurture debate has been going on forever. The inputs that go into creating a human being are understood to be sourced in both genetic predisposition as well as in social influences.
We just don't know the exact proportions of each.
However, being the product of both doesn't mean we don't have some agency over the process because we do. We can work on ourselves and allow the brain's neuroplasticity to create a modified version of the self.
New neural pathways are created which negate the idea that we can't change when we indeed can.
At the same time we should acknowledge that no one is going to come to our rescue. No specialist is going to rid us completely of childhood trauma or some other issue we need to repair. Here we are going to have to be our own best resource which we always are.
Therefore the inputs go in (including all the messy little errors of our parents) and we then take the reins for the rest of the way.
Plenty of people use distractions such as over consumption to skip this part which is a shame because a lived life is one worthy of examination.
The bus was full of camp kids going to the pool and Patricia my neighbor wasn't happy about it. It was hot and she was tired from having run morning errands.
The kids were making noise and they were a little too rowdy for her liking as she tried to show me pictures on her phone.
Patricia and I had happened to run into each other and both thought that the 11:30 bus was going to leave on time. However, suddenly the driver turns towards the passengers and tells us there is a mechanical problem and he cannot start the vehicle.
Everyone gets off.
After a short reflection, Patricia and I make our way towards a stop where another bus will get us close enough to be able to walk the rest of the way home. She has to make little rest stops along the way due to her lung capacity issue. Her health problems have been frequent of late.
We wait and talk and after a while we see the entire camp crew coming towards our stop obliging Patricia to blurt out a disappointed "oh no"
This was all a good thing for a recovering control freak like me.Things are not going my way and yet I'm fine which signaled I have improved dramatically.
Finally the other bus arrives and Patricia and I board, making sure she has a seat.
I end up smiling and talking to the young chaperones who have more youthful patience than I do. One of the young camp attendees is clearly disabled and Patricia makes eye contact and smiles at her.
When our stop comes up we weave through the crowd and one of the young counselors and I exchange smiles and she wishes me a good day.
For me it's mission accomplished and I tell Patricia that as we make our way slowly up the street towards her house. I had enjoyed both our overlap and the one with the counselors on the bus.
I hadn't anticipated any of this but just went with the flow and made the best of it. It ended up being more interesting than a routine ride home.
Perhaps there's hope for me yet.
