surrogate corpse

it's not that complicated, really; it's just a lie what's interesting are the underlying premises of the lie: kids can't be trusted to know their own feelings; adults know them better kids need to be protected from information; having more accurate information will make kids more confused, not less adults by and large replace the complex and scary world with a simpler, safer fantasy. children, who haven't yet learned to replace the actual world with their caretakers' preferred fantasy, are therefore dangerous most of what adults discuss in the name of "protecting children" is really about protecting adults from this danger the way we talk about trans kids is—when it's not utterly depressing—actually quite interesting for how plainly it reveals just how terrified adults are of giving kids agency over their own lives

Stylistically, it is less didactic, more playful and colorful. It is told in myths and stories, and always with a cheeky smile. Philosophically, it is both more detailed in its argumentation (there is a chapter analyzing the structure of judgment and its relation to attachment to self) and more concrete in its exposition (it looks at how Daoist ideas apply to a wide range of situations, including an entire chapter devoted to people with bodies that fall outside social norms). Politically, it is not beholden to the particular brand of primitivism that dominates the Daodejing. That is present but balanced by "yangist" (anti-participation) and "syncretist" views.

It is both. I get the sense you are concerned that, in calling "monstrous" what is monstrous, I am failing to see that it is human, and so failing to give it the sympathy that is due all humans. Not so. My sympathy is unbounded. (This is aspirational. I have my failings, my own entanglements, my own monstrousness.) Nothing less than the total liberation of all sentient beings will do. Suffering is to be removed because it is suffering, that's all. But when our all-too-human fear of suffering makes us monstrous to others (and ourselves, always also ourselves), I will call it "monstrous". The unfortunate fact is that so much of what is human is also monstrous.

Thank you, @silent thunder. I'm glad my words resonated. @liminal_luke -- You've put your finger right on it: the desire to make life simpler. The actual world is complex. This frightens us. So we construct simple false models of the world ("men are attracted to women, and women to men"; "everyone born with a penis is a man"). But the world cannot be made simple. It falsifies our models. So we torture, maim, mutilate, exile, kill everything that falls outside our comforting falsehoods. What appeals to me about Daoism—at least, Zhuangzi's Daoism—is its dogged commitment to responding to the world as it is. Zhuangzi asks for the whole world, because he knows: to ask for less is monstrous.

Depends what counts as "head-on confrontation". My experience of letting go of fear has a pretty standard form: 1. Fear appears as something more respectable, as reason, as desire, and traps me 2. I come to see behind the mask: no, that was not reason, that was not desire, that was fear 3. Seeing fear for fear, it loses its grip on me: I acknowledge it as fear and respond to it as fear. I tell the fear that I am going to do the thing it fears, but promise to take care of myself in doing so. 4. I face, not the fear, but the object of fear (divorce, transition, whatever). And, in facing it, I take care of myself. 5. Iterating this process, I come to trust myself more, and my fears come to present themselves more and more honestly. It is, really, like a scooby-doo episode: the same formula, the same mask-off reveal every time...

Yes! Fear is a proteus. Or better: a zombie fungus. It takes over and perverts everything good in you to its own ends.

Maybe. I'm not a diviner; I leave the future to sort itself. All I know is that thus far, the more I have abandoned my fear, the angrier I have gotten at the moral mediocrity that drives respectability politics. The less afraid I become of suffering—if suffering should be the consequence of my doing what I think right—the less I respect people who would rather be comfortable than good. I always understand them, in the right context I'll even be nice and patient with them. But I hope I will never be so stupid as to trust them.

My post was less about "queer" than about the rest of the post. I just used "queer" because Luke did. But it connects in this way: "queer" includes all of us, whatever it is that makes us deviant freaks. It is one struggle. Respectability politics, by contrast, divides us in two: the "good ones" who will sacrifice their brethren for table scraps, and the "bad ones" who won't. In the Haitian slave revolution, the half-black Haitians were not free, but they were put in a privileged position relative to the fully black slaves. When the revolution occurred, they largely sided with the white slaveowners. They were getting scraps; if they fought for justice they might lose even those. Every struggle is like this. Cis gays have gotten their scraps. They deserve so much better, but they also know that it can be so much worse. Just look at how things are for tranny freaks like me. If they get grouped with us, maybe they'll return to being treated like us... If trans people should be so lucky as to get the same scraps as cis gays have gotten, the same will happen to us. We too will fear to lose the too little we've gotten; we too will throw whoever replaces us to the wolves. Fear is a powerful motivator. That's why I keep returning to it. The first principle of morality is: master your fear. Everything else follows.

People say all kinds of things, what matters is what's true, as our temp-banned friend was reminding us a few pages back. (That wasn't what he was wrong about.) I think there is a fundamentally asymmetry between "we should mutilate ourselves to be appealing to normies so they'll give us crumbs of acceptance" and "I would rather be who I actually am and be hated than be accepted for what I am not". The people who say that the freaks are the barrier to acceptance are evil. I despise them. They are cowards, sell-outs, and traitors. May they fix their black and broken hearts.

How are they being excluded? By not being allowed to throw their freak brethren to the wolves for table scraps? Respectability politics is always a losing compromise. We should not have to accommodate to normie tastes and expectations to be treated with basic dignity.

I would say that the main value of "queer" and the ever-expanding acronym is that it helps separate genuine allies from the impostors who put conditions of Respectability on queer acceptance and liberation. We should make them even more ridiculous, to expose even more impostors.

one phenomenon i find rather interesting is that, even though i am quite "clocky" in appearance and don't dress high femme, homeless people asking me for money gender me correctly approaching 100% of the time gives you a perspective on the folks who find it "hard", y'know?

loved me unconditionally rather than conditionally, so that i felt safe to share with them how i was feeling when puberty hit ~~~ email signatures: empty signaling sharing pronouns at introduction: depends on context but default position is against assuming gender: ask if you're unsure. be gracious if corrected (say sorry, correct yourself, and get it right next time; don't make a big deal of it)

@Elysium If I might answer as well: fear. Many particular things held me back—things I thought or didn't think, things I knew or didn't know, things I wanted or didn't want—but underneath all of them was the same fear. The decision to transition was the decision to listen to desire rather than to fear. @Tommy If I might answer as well: yes and no. Yes, I am happy. My life is better for transitioning. I have richer friendships and relationships. I don't wake up waiting to die. I am better to the people I love. I find meaning and joy in the things I do, rather than a flat anhedonia. I laugh, loudly and often. But am I happy? I carry a tremendous sadness: the weight of 30 years of grief, long-suppressed and only now brought to the light. And I carry a tremendous anger: that grief did not just happen, it was the result of things done to me. Nor is this sadness and this anger just about me: all my friends have suffered the same; not all of them survived it. (I am lucky; I have only one dead friend.) So: am I happy? I would rather say: I am on the path to happiness. I have far to go.

yes, that's the joke ; )

you will understand me better if you read my posts as expressions of a considered, reasoned position rather than as expressions of a fettered mind in need of liberation by you : )

considered as a response to what i wrote, they are non-sequiturs considered in themselves, they contain some nice advice that i hope you will one day heed

jiujitsu is, as we all know, all about using force generated from within yourself to impose your will on another 👁️

@Salvijus Your replies to me are full of basic misunderstandings of what I am saying. I have reread my posts to see if they are unclear; I am satisfied they are not. So I encourage you to reread them again and again until you understand what they are actually saying. Until then, it is not worth engaging with you further.

the two stupidest groups of people on the planet are transphobes and trans eggs—for the same reason

@liminal_luke I in fact do have a limited sympathy for the transphobic for just this reason. But I make sure to distinguish fear insofar as it leads us to torment ourselves and fear insofar as it leads us to torment others. My sympathy for fear that leads us to torment ourselves approaches boundlessness. My sympathy for fear that leads us to torment others is sharply curtailed. It begins at the moment that the person who shows such fear indicates a genuine desire to stop hurting others and a genuine willingness to confront the fear that makes them do so. My best friend is dead because of transphobes. Nearly every trans person I know personally knows someone dead because of transphobes. I think my approach to this matter is fair.

@Salvijus Thank you for your kind words about my point being interesting. I am glad you found something worth chewing on in what I said. In your explanation of why you found it interesting, you showed a concern for "transcending fear based identity". I share that concern. So I think we have found a point of agreement that can perhaps help resolve our points of disagreement. I think that, if you genuinely want to help people transcend fear-based identity, you are going about it the wrong way. You are insistent on keeping keeping open the possibility that someone who chooses to transition is doing so on the basis of a delusion. Here is my basic critique: this insistence serves to help maintain fear-based identity. Let me explain why. My apologies in advance for the length of this message. I hope to be clear, and thorough. Everything pushes against people transitioning. Anyone who has reached the point of making that choice is doing so in the face of enormous social pressure. The depth of fear, of sheer terror, that one has to overcome to let oneself even consider it as an option is so, so much more than people who haven't stared down that choice realize. People don't stare down and overcome that terror on the basis of a distorted mind. The distortion is precisely the fear. And that fear claims reason as its ally: reason that scrutinizes, that raises doubts, that asks, "am I really trans? do I really have a right to do this? might I just be deluded?" Reason that works overtime to raise doubt, to point to all the reasons it might just be ego, to set conditions on when transition is acceptable. Reason that lies and connives to keep you from staring your desire dead on in the face. To make the choice to transition is to cut—if only for a moment—through that reasoning and that doubt with a knife, to look that screaming, wailing, hurting part of you in the face and say, "I see you. I won't look away. I'm going to take care of you." It's easy to lose that. When I knew I was trans, it was a specific moment. I saw, beyond words, the content of my desire. If I had to put it into words, it wasn't "I'm a woman" or "I'm trans", it was Rilke's "you must change your life". I saw my inarticulate but wholly genuine desire on one side, and on the other side I saw the whole horrible mass of "reasons" for what they were: terror. Then that moment faded into memory: the memory of what I saw, what I knew. And when that happened, the terror came surging back. I have never felt as scared, small, helpless, and alone as in that first hour or two after the realization. I curled up naked in bed clinging to the memory of what I saw, telling myself (did I know? was it just hope?) that if I could hold onto that through the night, the terror would vanish, that this was its last gasp. When I woke up the next morning, the terror was gone, and 20 years of depression vanished with it. Just like that. Neither has come back. I spell this out in such detail because I want you to know what the decision actually looks like that you are rather blithely suggesting might be mere delusion. The details differ from person to person, but the broad outlines are entirely common. I see the same struggle in every trans person—without exception—I have ever talked to: the struggle, against monstrous fear, to acknowledge one's deepest desire. In this struggle, fear (aided by its best ally reason) seizes on every resource at its disposal to hide that desire, to delegitimize it, to raise doubts about it. What I am hoping you will see is: you are on the side of fear. This isn't a claim about your intent. I do not believe you mean to be aiding fear. Indeed, I believe you when you say, explicitly, that you are not. It is a claim about effects. What you are doing is furnishing fear with resources. You can't hurt me, because I've made the decision and seen its effects on my life. You can't hurt me because I have long since let go of the fear you are aiding. But should you show this "concern" to any trans person still grappling with that fear, you will hurt them. You will strengthen their fear and weaken their desire. There's a general rule here. If you're a cis person, by the time someone is letting you see their struggle with gender, they're deep in that struggle. Showing "concern" that takes the form of "well is this really what you want?" can only harm them. By that time, the single best thing you can do is set the fear at ease. And the way to do that is to show them that, whatever else the rest of the world might do, you will accept and see them as they are—whatever they decide that is. Because, if they're coming to you, if they're letting you see it, that's what they need: something, anything, that will make them less afraid.

(to Maddie, not Stirling) Not just that, but you were using "identity is fake" as a means to cling to male identity! (so was i) transition is a form of letting go of identity. it can also be a way of clinging to a new identity (perhaps because it is a necessary liferaft), but that isn't essential to it. Only the relinquishing is essential.

Sometimes, when Dao pipes through the empty inner hollows of things, what it pipes is I want a pussy.

Trying to detach from identity without addressing the underlying suffering doesn't work. Some folks in this thread have been recommending spiritual detachment from identity as an alternative to transition. What they are recommending—however well-meaning they might be—is torture. How do well-meaning people come to recommend torture? By failing to understand not just gender, but also how it is that attachment to identity causes suffering. Suppose we accept that giving up attachment to identity is good. (I'm sympathetic!) Transition is, for people like you and me, a precondition for doing so. In other words: "yeah, yeah, sure, you can be non-binary... after estrogen"