Chill Pill

We could all do with being a little nicer and more relaxed and I find that retiring has made me realized how much I needed to work on this. The daily stress of fast-paced life now produces people who are constantly on alert largely through a digital connectedness which is unrelenting. The emails, text messages and social media posts pour in without mercy and we never get a respite.

I don't doubt for a moment that our quality of life has been bettered by technology and yet we are more impatient and easily rattled when things don't work as fast as they are supposed to. Some teachers are already complaining about generation Alpha's entitlement which they say is replete with snarky attitudes and lack of manners in the classroom. Maybe it's because we expect everything to work to our liking lest we become irritable.

I ride the metro and almost everyone has nose buried in a device which we can almost consider an extension of our anatomy (no doubt that's next) and I almost wouldn't mind if we found a way to roll back the clock and figure out ways to get our innocence back without necessarily returning to our old rotary phones.

Maybe a massive dose of societal chill pill.

Balancing act

A balancing act within a committed relationship is hard enough without one of the partners being in any way gender variant. I know all too well because I lived it with the added bonus that I was less than enthusiastically self-accepting even after I thought I was there.

Of course there is no guide book here and in the end everyone pours water into their wine to arrive at a compromise which, in many cases, pleases no one perfectly. This scenario is made only worse if the person comes out well into the relationship.

I am not the best suited to advise or even the best role model (I am alone), but will only say that arriving at a solution which respected core identity produced a more content person than one living with each foot tenuously and simultaneously in one of two camps.

Your own mileage will undoubtedly vary.

Regret rate

Using detransitioners as models as to why people shouldn't transition is as innanely stupid as saying because one person's knee surgery wasn't successful, no one else's will be. In other words, it is more agenda driven propaganda from advocates of drowning transgender people in the bathtub.

That I am friends with people who have successfully transitioned and are happy is proof enough for me. Plus when I saw the endocrinologist Dr. Morris before finally abandoning my consideration of the HRT process, he told me much the same although he confirmed not all his patients did so fully.

In fact, for those who take a carefully thought out and measured approach, the regret rate is far less than that knee surgery I used as example.

Where we are today

If at their basic root, transvestism is wanting to wear the clothes of the opposite sex and transsexualism the desire to physically embody it, how are they related if at all and are they simply offshoots of the same tree.

Both typologies have been known to experience arousal with one arguably sometimes seeking it as target while the other as side effect of a longing to be the other sex which predates puberty. I used to feel sure that Harry Benjamin's graded spectrum was correct but was unsure about the areas in the middle (specifically types III and IV) which seemed to suggest less committed forms of transsexualism.

Today I am less stringently doctrinal to following any one model as they are all imperfect attempts at formalizing observed behaviour. This is why I feel it's best to worry less about labeling oneself as finding pragmatic solutions which are the least invasive but are conducive to optimum life balance. This way there is less possibility of regret as the guardrails today have largely been removed.

Even what we assess to be very insistent trans kids need to be watched carefully because my now bearded and tall nephew finally turned out to be an openly gay man and, after burning off the princess dress phase of his childhood he became less committed to femininity.

For his part Ray Blanchard took what we used to term tranvestic fetishism (which still exists) and tried to generalize that label to all gynpephilic-leaning transsexuals through his inventing of the AGP sexual disorder. This was less well-intentioned error than an agenda driven tactic from a baby boomer gay man who, by nature of his education, was far more likely to view such anomalies as pathology. Putting everyone in the same barrel was expedient for him but it left huge holes which many if not most clinicians regularly point out today. That most Blanchard advocates are aligned with the right wing and TERFS tells you much about the intent to discredit.

In addition, most gender variant people are only marginally more educated in this topic than the general population which makes this era more a little more prone to error. However I feel this is counteracted by my great joy that people can begin to explore their identities far earlier in life.

The urbanity

North America has a housing affordability crisis and the video below explains how many older cities like Chicago built from the ground up and allowed for more dense neighborhoods to sprout which accommodated a diverse and growing population.

What we have done post war is to allow urban sprawl to increase unchecked making us slaves to cars and in many cases creating bedroom communities where access to services was via malls which are now largely dying thanks to online shopping.

I live in a pre-war dense neighborhood which mixes commerce with housing which today is unfortunately illegal to build in Canada. We need to go back to the drawing board and start over particularly with the rapidly changing nature of work and family structures....

Real life satire

 There are no words...

Dodo / Lurker

 

The Handmaid's Tale

Cate Cox couldn't wait for Texas to join the 21st century and left the state to get her needed abortion. Having embraced draconian measures thanks to hitching its wagon to the fire and brimstone fervor of its nutty evangelical base, the GOP has proven to be every bit the radical product of what happens when you lose your humanity and your common sense. For his part Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is a philandering and corrupt hypocrite, but that doesn't matter to a party whose "Orange Jesus" is himself severely morally challenged.

The Republicans' decades-old southern strategy certainly paid off in spades except now it has spawned a monster that can no longer be stopped other than at the ballot box and, if Americans value their individual rights, they won't just rely on Jack Smith to get a conviction. That is unless they prefer encroachment towards a real life version of "The Handmaid's Tale"

Self appraisal

I think a lot about how my life has changed and the lion share of it has been mental attitude which then naturally impacts the physical. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to remove preconceived ideas regarding who your were taught to be; the caveat being that we do so with an open mind and we don't talk ourselves into things without sufficient introspection.

Self labeling is fine but that does not necessarily give us a path forward. This is why other than understand that I did not intentionally create my own situation, I stopped worrying and started feeling which was what finally opened the door to an answer. Giving in to natural instincts which were always there then allowed for a proper and most importantly mature self appraisal for, if we are reflecting on core identity, this is not a game and I am an adult.

If we are too quick to self-label we potentially open ourselves up to either overestimate or underestimate where we need to be to find balance.

Question the self

I was educated to think logically and critically and to come to conclusions only when we have sufficient evidence to do so. Agendas work the other way however, where a conclusion is decided upon and evidence sought to justify it. That much of the world operates on the latter method is not all that surprising.

When I began writing I held certain ideas which were helped along via emotional investment but over time I evolved my thinking as I resolved the angst.

We should be open to have our minds changed by becoming careful students of the self. We question why we believe something about ourselves, others or the world in general and carefully examine its merit rather than simply justify it blindly as the change-averse conservative is apt to do.

Great tandem

I really like Jesse Dollemore and his wife Brittaney Page. Not only do they fully support transgender rights, but I also love their politics.

Have a listen....