Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I don’t joke much on this site, but I do have a sense of humor, and sometimes it is quite good. Not sure that’s the case here, but I at least find that image amusing.
Think about it. Ponder it. Consult your own experience, your own feelings.
My hypothesis: in the present climate changing genders has become a socially acceptable and in general laudable means of avoiding intrinsic, deep seated emotional difficulties faced by people who are, I suspect, either severely traumatized, or narcotized by addiction to social media.
The process of “transitioning” is so intrinsically difficult that it can occupy one’s own attention for a considerable period of time, as well as one’s audience, where social media is concerned.
But the process has an end. You can get as far as you can get. Then all the feelings you were running from come back. You did not, in the end, escape, and by putting all your emotional eggs in that particular basket, you have created a dead end from which it seems there is no escape.
This is not true, of course, but I think that feeling leads to a lot of suicides. As I have no doubt commented, people who fully transition have something like 4x the suicide rate of our national average, which itself is absurdly high.
Emotional health always, I feel, starts where you are at. For any person at the end of that road, they simply have to remember who they were before. The sexual part is not the primary part. The feelings, the sensations, the images, and the thoughts that went with them: that is primary.
I truly feel left wing paranoia and compulsion is pushing a lot of good kids down dangerous and–for some of them–fatal paths, with no real compensating benefits. It is not wrong to point this out. Transgenders do not scare me. I am not phobic, to use the overused, and generally abused word.
I don’t like being yelled at, and I feel no compulsion to try and feel what I am told by lunatics to feel, or to think what deranged people want me to think. I think that is a simple enough position.
This would explain why it is so hard to change pedophiles, since what they are actually addicted to is particular form of power.
Here is a proposition and and conclusion:
Power elevates testosterone, presumably in both men and women, although likely much more in men. Testosterone, in turn, helps counter feelings of shame.
Conclusion: those who seek power over others do so because it is a sort of drug which muted their chronic feelings of shame. Power is, as they say, a drug, and as a drug, like all drugs, it numbs unmanageable emotions.
If this is true, shame based societies will tend to be inherently violent. We (I) tend to think of Japan’s China in this way easily, but I would add at least Russia, Britain and Germany. In all, losing face is losing status is losing testosterone is a de facto attack and processed as such by the limbic system.
A clear corollary is that the “natural”, default moral code needs to be empowering, not emasculating. It needs to be possible to conform and still get your needs met in publicly acceptable ways. If you have a public and a private face, then the system is unintelligent which is forcing you into hypocrisy.
And in my view, a hypocrisy which still sees people getting their needs met somehow is better than one in which the saints feel constant biological pressure which is never properly and directly resolved.
But what farmers discuss at breakfast, in small cafes, at church: this to, is culture. This is the invisible culture, as seen from the big cities. The big cities forget and denigrate these people, the little people. But they are who put Trump in office.
In large measure the shock of his victory came not just from intentionally distorted polls, but from a false vision of what “American Culture”. The elites want to conflate it with their regressive, violent visions. They want license to hate those who are different, and the charge of bigotry gives them that. But by and large this charge is a lie, and while it rallies the dancing munchkins around the communal bonfire, it alienated and polarized the very people whose opposition kept them out of power.
I will comment, too, that it seems a reasonably robust empirical sociological finding that most people are happier and more relaxed living with people whose culture, whose thoughts and behavior are consistent and shared. Jews living with Jews. Blacks living with blacks. Polish immigrants living with Polish immigrants.
If you think about it, shame is our main signaling emotion. If we are doing everything right, and are u traumatized, then we feel little shame. We are happy, by default.
But in uncertain waters, where the “right” thing to do is unclear, then low grade shame becomes a constant companion and breeds, I think, a passion for conformity. This is the power of political correctness, in that it proves a template, not really to avoid shame, but to channel it as anger, and as a part of a group. This is a psychic balm whose cost is emotional independence, and a more or less formal renunciation of any chance of ever feeling completely calm or complete as a person.