I just sat down to eat a little breakfast while poking the keyboard on my Librem 14, and have not yet invested the time to review the resources that you linked me. So, you may find my perspectives to be ignorant. But, many years ago in some communications course that I had somewhere in life, I encountered a really interesting suggestion. I forget who it was, but they told me that if I am in an a disagreement or argument with someone else, the result of the discussion is more likely to be positive if I reword statements starting with “You” and especially “You are” to instead be phrased “I think you…” or “I think you are…”
For example, were I you, I might have said:
I think you are one of these people. I think you just can’t help yourself. I think you publicly reveal yourself to be someone who should be avoided.
Apparently, according to what they said in that class, there are situations where this leaves open opportunities for the other person to try to re-explain or re-examine themselves subconsciously. In some sense, maybe they are led to believe that you have reached a situation of mutually exclusive truths with “You are” statements about them; the reply may more commonly be, “No I’m not. You’re wrong!” And maybe that does not increase the likelihood of reaching a common understanding. But with “I think you are” statements they’re more likely to respond towards some conflict resolution. Maybe they didn’t want you to see them that way. The answer you get in such case might be different in a positive way.
Yeah, in hindsight when I think about it more, that was a situation where the entire imaginary virtual world that I was taking part of at the time was sold off to a rich guy that is often portrayed within the game as an exceedingly obese, money-hungry goblin. And once the sense of the innocent fabric of escapist reality is replaced by the imposed pressure of the game developers needing money now – wherein it is evident that the only reason we exist to those in the highest positions of power is to start from the base assumption that the digital reality doesn’t exist and it should be used only as an information tool to make us send money to the company – I suppose at that point it’s natural to feel like the digital reality is a parody of innocence, existing instead only for some lost desire for human vice. My male character in the game, for several years, was my digital identity. Once our digital identity is sold for a profit, and we are reminded that we do not own ourselves but are instead for sale, it creates a split wherein the video game character has a sense of “other” and not of “self.” In that world of lost identity, it is entertaining when being mistreated by the machine to respond to the machine in kind, perhaps, as if a form of asking for help – therein, having the game be about a female character that is both attractive and also does anything I say regardless of how stupid or bad my instructions are, becomes enjoyable. If I tell the female character to remove her armor, she removes her armor. If I tell the video game character to dance for me, she dances for me. In much the same way that if the obese goblin who purchased the rights to the game tells the player to open their wallets and send more money or else get kicked out of the game, they all open their wallets and send money. Everyone is manipulated everyone else for short term gain instead of having a good time. And thus, pretending to live in some kind of “Lord of the Rings” fantasy world is replaced by mutual antagonism and the destruction of one’s digital identity.
I’m not certain that I ever really thought through it that way before. Maybe I was “thinking out loud” and I hope that this has not wasted your time. But I am now even more convinced that you are correct: that my experience playing the female video game character was even more irrelevant than I thought at first.
In the physical world outside the computer, for about the last year and a half I have existed in a social space where the other people are politically anti-trans because they are told to feel as such. Prior to that, for about two years, I existed in a social space where the other people were in favor that everyone should be whatever they want and we should be supportive of LGBTQ because hating people is wrong.
So this might come from my current manipulation, and maybe I want to ask a question that you feel it is emotionally unsafe for you to answer. If it’s like that, I guess I would say, don’t answer. Nobody should get hurt.
But during my formative years, I would say the sex ed at my school was lacking. They fired the sex ed teacher during my year because of some school board politics, and she was replaced with someone afraid to cover the same content basically, probably for fear of losing their job. As such, there was a period of time for me where my desired identity and my physical reality diverged; I had been raised as a religious protestant Christian by what I would largely say were incredibly friendly and supportive people and my desired identity was to be what I was raised to be. I liked these people who raised me. But because there was no sex ed, I desired to be an entity without sexuality and to think of myself as the mind or expression of day to day life. The stability of that, and of who I wanted to pretend to be – one unaffected for example by the sight of attractive women – was at odds with my physical reality. The physical reality was a programming to pursue the opportunity to see the secret beauty of women and get pleasure from it, if possible.
I was never able to deprogram that. In my physical body’s experience, it is impossible to shut off that part of desire totally from existing, even if I can ignore it sometimes for long periods of time at a time. By contrast, what I do have control over to deprogram is to stop identifying as a protestant Christian and instead identify as a religiously agnostic human being who does whatever I want. This eliminates internal conflict so that I can live happily, and live with myself. I can identify as someone with no religious faith and then I get along well with others, and I am internally consistent in their eyes. But I cannot identify as one with no interest in women, because even if I act that way among the people I care about the most then I would go and secretly trying to find ways to feel good about my desire for women in ways and in places where no one else looks. Claiming to identify that way would cause me to become inconsistent, as though I were a lie as a person. And I hate being a lie as a person. I prefer social friendships that are totally honest, where my identity is the same as what I am.
Because of this experience, although I think people should be allowed to act however they want, I am able to be swayed by folks who say kids should not be allowed to take hormone blocking drugs because of the kids’ desire to identify differently than what they are physically. Because, in some manner of thinking, I believe that at a certain age in my formative years people could have convinced me to take drugs like that if such drugs had existed, because of how much I would have wanted to remain identifying as a socially consistent religious Christian child with no sexuality. But even if they had been able to convince me at that age to chemically hack my body to match the identity I desired back then, it would have been wrong for me. Because in my case, the human evolution was smarter than my brain and consciousness. In my personal body’s experience, it’s better and more enjoyable to say religion is misinformed and instead identify as one who is attracted to women than to identify as what gender-less child I would have wanted at that age.
So, now that I blabbed about my personal experience, I think that gets to my question – in a world where obviously people should be allowed to dress however they want and act however they want and say whatever they want, do you believe that the need for hormone treatments to be available is some mostly universally accepted thing among trans people, or is that a psyop I was presented with to make those people seem crazy to me? And, if it is not a psyop but actually a universally accepted position that such treatments should be allowed when young, how do you know if a kid is wrong about their identity during their formative years? Because I was wrong at that age. So, we cannot say all kids are right. How is that to be measured?