On the M/F Divide & the General (not +) Solution: The Flying Buttress Theory of Trans “Out”clusion
**** This post is meant for adults. Viewer discretion is advised. ******
People often claim that transgender women are mentally-ill or confused, that when we disagree with you when you claim that “a man is an adult male,” that we do not know what we are talking about. But do you know what you are talking about? Because it is you who disagree with yourself.
If you do know what you are talking about, maybe we wouldn’t disagree with you. So let’s assume that you are right, and take your definition at face value.
According to your definition, I would be a man, a full and complete man. So, great, let’s go along with that. No matter what I do, no matter how I dress, how I act, how I love, how I walk, or how I speak — I am a man, a full and complete man, because I am an adult male, plain and simple. Being an adult male is the only criteria to being a man. Nothing I do can threaten my man-ness; its only criteria is that I be an adult, and since I am, nothing I can do will ever take away the fact that I am a full and complete man.
Great! I love me some stability in definition. If we can stick to this usage of “man” then sign me up, I’m all for it. Let me walk through the world as a plain and simple man, knowing I can never ever possibly be a woman — for girls and boys are different.
But it is the second definition of man which you use, a definition which you hide, which you use imprecisely and loosely (“manly”, “masculine”), which you use as a cudgel to strike me on my back and make me fall flat on my face, so that all of society can laugh at me — for I believed your word! I believed you when you said I was a full and complete man, plain and simple, but now you are mocking me, telling me to stop “acting like a woman,” calling me “a girl” or “feminine.” Which makes no sense, right? I never claimed to be a woman; I embraced your definition, I am an adult male, plain and simple. Then, why are you laughing at me, calling me a girl, for the way I dress, I act, I love, I walk, I speak? None of that matters to your plain and simple definition of man. Right?
So I pick myself up, and — trusting you again (because whom else can I trust? I am alone and I want to be a part of society) — I pick up the insult of “girl” you threw at me, and attempt to rise with dignity (for I am a human too), and as I rise I take “girl” to the level of “woman” (for I am an adult). And then again, you strike me down, this time with no mockery but with absolute fury and righteous malice. I am on the floor again, and this time, you do not even allow me to call myself a girl. Only you can do that.
Indeed:
“[t]he irony of my life is prior to transition I was called a girl and after I am often called a man” (Laverne Cox).
So it becomes clear to me — while it remains latent and existentially-frustrating to you — that your definition is a con; that simply being an adult male is not enough to be a man in your eyes, despite all your bleating to the contrary (which begs the question, how do you envision yourself to be a man? what makes you a man? do you even know, or do you flip-flop?). No, in your eyes, an adult male is not a man; you lied to me. In fact, to your ideology, an adult male must become a man. Becoming anything else is an aberration, a transgression, a blasphemy. What we transgenders know — but what you do not know — is that indeed we are an aberration, a transgression, a blasphemy; but we are not so to Nature or God (which, having created all things with Love, also created us; who, having created night and day, also created dawn and dusk, and the same goes for man and woman (see: Rabbi David J. Meyer)). Instead, we are a transgression to your oh-so-humanely-flawed, oh-so-contradictory definition of masculinity. And it is your own contradiction, your own existential-frustration with your own definition, which you unleash upon me, your fetish, your helpless victim. It is your own mental illness, your own madness, which you cast upon me. I’m just in for the ride.
“This brings us back to what one could call the primal scene of anxiety that defines transgenderism. I stand in front of standard bi-gender toilets with two doors, LADIES and GENTLEMEN, and I am caught up in anxiety, not recognizing myself in any of the two choices. Again, do “normal” heterosexuals not have a similar problem? … Which man has not caught himself in momentary doubt: “Do I really have the right to enter GENTLEMEN? Am I really a man?”… “Transgender people are not traumatic for heterosexuals because they pose a threat to the established binary of gender roles but because they bring out the antagonistic tension which is constitutive of sexuality….
Slavo Zizek repudiates the red vs. blue pill debate, advocating instead for a third pill (let’s say, a purple pill) which reveals the reality in the illusion. Indeed, it is in transgender people where the terrifying reality within the illusion of the gender binary becomes apparent, for all to witness.
To recapitulate, not only do I fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal segregation, but I am also deeply affected by their reports of their suffering, and I see them not as a marginal group, which should be “tolerated” but as a group whose message is radically universal: it concerns us all; it tells the truth about all of us as sexual beings.
Transgender people are not simply marginals who disturb the … heterosexual gender norm; their message is universal, it concerns us all, they bring out the anxiety that underlies every sexual identification, its constructed/unstable character. This, of course, does not entail a cheap generalization which would cut the edge of the suffering of transgender people (“we all have anxieties and suffer in some way”); it is in transgender people that anxiety and antagonism, which otherwise remain mostly latent, break open” (Zizek 1 and 2, a male “man”).
Now, I do claim that I am not mentally-ill (at least, not in the way you think I am, but precisely in the same way you are). I do claim that there is rational truth in my rising, that I am not deluded. I can prove it too. So what truth does come out when I rise up, facing down your incessant beatings? What is the transgender woman’s truth? It is your truth; indeed, the truth of man himself.
“If one wants to analyze “normal” heterosexuality, one should begin with the anxieties that explode in transgender people” (Zizek).
You have defined “man and woman” as definite, as exclusive, with no overlap between the two; and there is no overlap because it is grounded in “male and female” which you have also defined as definite, exclusive, with no overlap. You have dismissed, denounced, or otherwise cast out from the purity of your ideology, any proof to the contrary — such as transgender people, or intersex people (of whom there are at least 150 million, most who actually do undergo gender mutilation as infants, surgeries which often harm them more than heal them, which scar them biologically and mentally, for life). You have dismissed all this living proof as mentally-ill, or biologically-flawed, all so that you can cast them out of your mind and hold on to your ideology. What delusion! Is this refusal of reality not a mental illness of your own?
Do you not see how deranged your “alpha” men look when they go on podcasts to relive their high school glory days, play smear the queer, who bleat on about “stupid transgenders” who don’t know that “men are men”? Who tell virgin women to wait for them while they go around like whores until they begin balding and then suddenly, they are “ready” to settle down (indeed, they will never be ready). Who claim that their whore-like behavior is what makes them men, and damned be the women who deny this! indeed, that it makes them not only men but high-value (?) men, super-duper manly men better than the rest of men (who are, in their eyes, more like women than men). Who argue that the women who are disgusted by them are simply modern feminist mannish-women who don’t know a thing about what makes a man a man. But my own mother — the most traditional of kitchen-wives — would be disgusted by them too! Likely, their own mothers (if they are still in the picture) would be too! Would they dare say such things to their faces? No, they would cower; like the boys they are.
It does not come as a surprise to me that most of your men are unmarried, childless, cannot hold down a girlfriend. Who cheat. On you, on themselves, on everyone (and claim it is “natural” to men). Indeed, your “men” will never be ready for a woman. Why do you listen to them? Listen to me instead — I come from a strong, traditional family, who have stayed together in Love, through the hardest of modern times. Your men do not know how to hold a woman and make her happy. I do (the secret is to hold her in your spirit).
You split womanhood in two and claimed the divorced, fallen part for yourself. Meanwhile, you flirted with the universal aspect, fetishizing it while disavowing it; because for you, to be a man means to own woman, not be under one. But of course, you do know better. You simply hide the fact that you do. In your society, you wouldn’t be a man if you didn’t.
I cannot fault you for this too much; this sort of deranged, flip-floppy thinking is what taking the M/F divide too seriously inevitably leads to. My men (Hindus) know better; and thus, they are better. Your men attempted (and failed) to destroy the woman-worshipping instinct within you. After your failure, you learned to deny, defy, and demonize that essence within you, meaning: you yourself. You are a retarded (in the truest, least-offensive sense of that term) victim of the divide, profoundly mentally-ill, a bipolar schizophrenic, and should be sympathized with — and treated — as such.
The only way you will ever get this sympathy is through the understanding which transgenders have, and can — and will — deliver to the world at large, as we once delivered it within our own societies (see: hijras, Two-Spirit shamans, gala, who were seen as sacred beings who bridged the divide, brought balance to men and women, and answered their most pressing questions about the other).
For my astrology girlies (for I have given up on the men), I like to explain it in terms of oppositions and trines.
If two aspects, or planets, are placed to the right and left of the Earth, they will pull the Earth apart. They will fight, or oppose, one another, and generate the most antagonistic of living conditions on Earth, each planet fighting for the other planet’s energy. Earth will ping-pong from each planet in pure chaos. This is what happens when you place Male and Female on opposite ends.
If you introduce a third aspect, or planet, and rearrange the three so that they surround the Earth like an equilateral triangle, then suddenly, all the energy flows. It becomes like a circle in which Male and Female retain their unique energies, but rather than fighting for domination of the Earth, they “pass through” the mediation of the Third, which is beyond and yet connected to both. The Third is what allows Male and Female to flow in and through one another in their most pure of forms. The Third completes the circle. It allows Male and Female to dance with the Earth, rather than war or tear each other apart.
Transgenders do not bring chaos. We bring flow. We always have. We do not come to destroy the essence of Male and Female; we come to come to allow them to work together. We come to bring harmony. This is what Nature people, the most traditional of all people, know. This knowledge and respect is what modern society has lost.
The only logical conclusion is that your men (who claim to hate modernity while they remain indebted to it), in holding onto the antagonistic M/F divide, simply hate women, and teach women to hate men, having come to see women as that which stops them from being full men.
“In an antagonistic (non)relationship… not only is woman not-man and vice versa, but woman is what prevents man from being fully man and vice versa” (Zizek).
But, thankfully, their M/F divide is incorrect.
“The formula … is not M/F (the clear opposition between male and female) but MF+, where + stands for the excessive element which transforms the … opposition into … antagonism. (…) The third intruding element is [inevitable]: it is not just another positive entity, but it stands for what is forever unsettling the harmony of the two….” (Zizek)
This Third “bucket” (which, at times, contains either the transgender, the queer, the fag, the “womanly man” or the “manly woman”, or whatever else the M/F dividers label any “deviant”) becomes the scapegoat of the M/F priests, who feel that there is still some disharmony within their M/F conception, but rather than reconceiving this M/F divide, rather than realizing the error in their attempt to fundamentally dis-unify men and women, rather than realize the lunacy of their conception, rather than recognizing and respecting the general Third which brings balance and flow, they instead simply create a fetishized and orphaned “+” (which is not a true, general Third — one which is part of their orbit — but is instead a castrated third-class citizen outside of their orbit) onto which they can project all their disharmony upon. The irony is that even if they eradicate us, especially if they eradicate us, they will continue to antagonize against their women (see: my post On the Grooming of Children & Preventing It).
Which is why I do not like the “bad infinity” of attempting to categorize queer and trans people through the LGBTQIA+ etc. “word salad.” I do not even like the idea of segregating transgender (etc.) people into a “category of their own in between man and woman” because this will only make our fetishization and extermination easier (an orphaned third-class pushed and pulled by either side). We will be nothing more than disgusting appendages to society, ones which you constantly play with (see: Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in drag) but refuse to respect. Instead, I like the idea of treating trans people as a “fantasy category,” a mythic subjectivity which is necessarily outside of society but which allows society to cohere.
“The great mistake in dealing with this opposition is to search for a proper measure between two extremes. What one should do instead is to bring out what both extremes share: the fantasy of a peaceful world where the agonistic tension of sexual difference disappears…” (Zizek).
Indeed, bringing out the M/F divide’s latent fantasy (of a general harmony and unity between males and females, where each finally ‘truly sees’ the other — which the lunatic modern man believes can be achieved through the M/F divide, which the modern woman knows in her gut to be untrue, instinctively-knowing herself to be Universal) is what can placate its neurotic antagonism. Bringing the fantasy out of the antagonism is the “negation of a negation” so to say (see: Hegel).
“Since no classification can satisfy all identities, should we not add to the two usual gender slots (MEN, WOMEN) a door for GENERAL GENDER? Is this not the only way to inscribe into an order of symbolic differences its constitutive antagonism?” (Zizek)
Instead of a “transgender sports league” what about a general sports league? within which folks who innately know that they are the same as everyone else can separate themselves along whatever identities they wish, play with words and express themselves freely without the terror of the M/F divide, and also without fear of fetishization or extermination (which comes as a result of the MF+ “solution”), knowing that we are still part of the universal? That at our core, we are not male or female — but One in the eyes of God? This sports league will, of course, have no bitter competition between the sexes; only fun competition through all. It will be a blessed society under God’s Universal. Those who wish to remain in the battle of the sexes can remain there. Men, to be men, must look at women through the veil; I have no interest in dropping the veil, only in revealing that it is a veil, not a wall.
This GENERAL GENDER is the Third Planet through which all the essence of Male and Female flows. It has existed since time immemorial, and no modern man can destroy it without destroying himself and his women.
Today’s women have had enough of your men who pretend that you are universally different than them, and these women are wiser than I, in that they have distanced themselves from you and your violence, just as you have distanced yourself from them and their love. I am the interlocutor, the love in the violence, trapped in your illusion as a +, and yet — knowing myself to be GENERAL — wiser for it. I know you better than you know you.
When the child is born, it is split — into either male or female. The child thinks it has lost something through this splitting, and spends all its life navigating the pain of this loss by establishing a masculine or feminine identity by which the child can become ‘whole’ again by finding themselves through the other sex (i.e. marriage). Through being a man or a woman, by fulfilling these roles, the child can cope with its self-loss and function in Society.
Sometimes, though, certain societies deny the very existence of this loss. This inevitably pushes the children into a hysteria, in which the child “knows” that there is something beyond and within itself — but runs from its own feeling, clinging desperately to being a ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Navigating life as such, with no acknowledgement of the loss and yet feeling it all around, the child/adult eventually runs into a corner, sees the falsity of its ‘purity’, and obliterates itself, finding nowhere else to run.
Other societies, however, acknowledge this loss, and they do so by recognizing a third gender category. These people (“transgenders”) are those who have obliterated themselves — and are now reinscribing themselves through the other sex which haunted them. Being a perpetual sinthommatic knotting of male and female, transgenders engage in acts of reciprocal exchange between the sexes, pacifying the battle-of-the-sexes and turning it into a dance through which each sex can understand (rather than fear) the other. These transgenders bind their Society together.
I conceptualize transgender people as the ‘flying buttress’ to human civilizations/society, the support-from-the-outside which the civilization leans on (and indeed, oppresses/strains). Indeed, the support *for* society’s binaryism. But if this oppression/strain becomes too much and the buttress breaks, so too does the edifice.
(And this is why I am vehemently opposed to the current Western trans politics of gender-abolitionism and non-binaryism; there’s actually no way for the human mind/society to abolish binaryism or to escape it, other than going psychotic. Instead, our politics should not dismiss/negate/diminish the real sexual difference, but *celebrate and expose all its aspects* so as to give more knowledge to soceity; we should be pro-binary and even hyper-binary. Like the shamans and 2-Spirits and hijras who are always seen as a litttllee crazy, but a form of cathartic craziness which allows for the rest of society to enjoy their own (obvious) delusions of achieving wholeness through the gender binary. We may be crazy/hysteric, but at least we aren’t perverse!
Using Lacan’s and Zizek’s understanding of the perverse and the hysteric psychic positions, the (m)Other Woman isn’t a phsyically-sexed position, more like an ontological and psychic position from which a person can reinscribe themselves into the symbolic order, and which trans people can position themselves from to reinscribe themselves into/through the “other” sex. So even trans men would be reinscribing themselves into maleness but **from** this (m)Other Woman psychic position. Transness is always feminine, but even women can be men!! That’s the secret. Woman can take on all forms — even that of man.
That’s why Lacan calls cis men “failed women” and that cis women are the only ones who can actually really have a ‘legible’ subject position because they are the only ones who can *pretend to be themselves* — because actually believing that “man” or “woman” are whole/’legible by themselves’ as an ethical subject position is a perverse fantasy of masculinity. It’s like the secret of women, as Lana del Rey sings: “I know what only the girls know/Lies can buy eternity.”
We trans people have to really understand that the gender-separation (although necessary) is a necessary illusion; that we, not them, are the truly universal subject — we know and embody the “lie” of cisness that cis women know but veil. We should put up the veil but operate behind the veil in our truths, for “Those who know don’t say.” But the modern transgender politics is where we are trying to take down the veil and I’m (and the rest of society) is freaking out lol because the veil is necessary in order for the symbolic order/society to function at all. Folks who try and take down the veil quite literally terrorize everyone on both sides of the veil. We can’t face direct confrontation with the void, as it were. It’s psychically catastrophic. Most trans people have gone through that catastrophe (the ego death per se) but most cis folks haven’t, and many modern trans folks haven’t either.
This is why it’s been so scary seeing transgender rights “succeed” in the 2010’s because it was purely formal/legal equality, and I saw the fully-justified silences and resentment in the eyes of “allies” everywhere.
The practical application of this would be to forge a creative unity between non-Western cultural/spiritual understandings and Western logic/legality. But this creative unity will only really emerge on the ashes of both, nd both are turning to ash now. So although it’s literally impossible to forsee what the future structures will actually look like (we are perpetually trapped in our symbolic orders/logics and the realm of the future possibility is in the terrifying/catastrophic Real which we always retreat from), we cannn understand the political drive/practice that we will need to adhere to with an almost fatalistic faith, and be on the constant lookout for new possibilities/growing buds to nurture and assess.
It’s a politics of constant vigilance for the budding particulars out of the ashes of the failed universals. and to creatively restructure and unify these particulars into being nurtured by whatever we see around us. And to grieve, of course. grieving is crucial, or we’ll just habitually try and recreate the failures without understanding that they are dead, dead, dead!
And so, to bring it back to the flying buttress analogy, transgenders “guard the corner” of forbidden psychic knowledge and with this, become the crucial support for the construction of all of soceity. I am very much against the Western transgender phenomenon of encouraging children to become transgender without understanding that it is to live a life on the outside. Indeed, this is the absolute opposite of the essence of the transgender experience. Trans people who have ‘made the plunge’ so to say soon come to realize that the fantasy of ‘becoming the other sex’ was a failed and flawed fantasy. We are *necesarily* on the outside, the flying buttress — we are fetishistically disavowed by Society so that, by using us as a support-from-the-outside, Society can function and cohere.
Necessarily on the outside, we are disavowed by non-trans people— and this disavowal is the origin of Society; it is a reactive structure which *puts Society into motion and allows it to begin functioning* by putting people into social and productive roles. This is *a good thing.* It is the unpaid and indeed, unpayable debt which Society owes to trans people, but which the West has arrogantly shunted aside, and refused to recognize.
A deeply and sublimely ethical position to be in, for sure, as Zizek says. And nonWestern trans people (like the hijras who bless newborn babies with the blessing that the baby will never grow up to be like them) accept and embrace this, and do their part to “guard the corner” and prevent wandering folks from following their path (unless, of course, there is no stopping them). Thus, in nonWestern tradition, trans folks both prevent people from careless transitioning, and provide a home and community for those who do/did.
Their very public presence prevents others from running themselves into the corner, because they bring out the opposition of the sexes and transform it into something understandable. People are less compelled to run themselves into the corner to discover the secrets of themselves/gender, because the transgenders have revealed these secrets. Indeed, if one wants to limit the number of transgender people in their Society, the solution is to recognize a third gender space. Denying transgenderism would only cause more people to run blindly into the corner. Eradicating transgender people would result in our absolutely limitless and terrifying flourishing.
Let us get to curing us of this mental illness, for it is terrorizing not only you, but also me, your women, and all of society — due to your power to make us adopt your frustrated definitions. What is your cure? My public (general) recognition is the cure, because it is only then when I can speak our truth clearly, the truth which you cannot speak (and it’s okay, you need not; such is my responsibility) which will allow flow and harmony to finally be.
In sum, what I am proposing is this:
In the modern Western nuclear family (“daddy-mommy-and-me” to use Freud’s formula), in which the child is not primarily “raised by a village” but by a mother-father, what is posited as the “truth” of gender is M/F. What Zizek’s analysis shows us is that what actually comes to be is that the individual child sees themselves as — and represses — the “/” caught in between, the dark abyss of the divide itself. To add on, in the M/F fantasy, both M and F remain ungrounded, defined not by any nature but only by some “big Other” who gets to decide for them, who gets to decide what makes “a man a man” or “a woman a woman.” This will be decided not on biology but purely on the dictates of the most powerful (men) in Society: the “biggest” of the terrifying “big Other”. It is extremely chaotic, neurotic, and breeding grounds for grooming children. What actually comes to play, then, is not M/F but MF+ in which the individual “/” (and society at large) comes to see the “/” individual as split and an abberation, an appendage to society. This + bears the blame of all societal discord in the battle of the sexes. It smears the queers.
What the LGBTQ+ movement accomplished was the move from MF+ to M+F, in which the + is no longer an appendage but “the bone in the throat” for the M/F fantasy, where the + is part of society. However, what they failed to accomplish is making the + understandable and structure, meaning: they failed to pull out the fundamental fantasy that trans folks share with others and failed to use this family so as to support the M and F fantasies. What this has resulted in is an “explosion” of +’s which truly do threaten to tear all of society (and even the individual M’s and F’s) apart.
The next step I propose is moving from M+F to MᴛF — the ‘flying buttress’ outside and between the M and F but which supports both.
Forgive me my ameutuerish formula, but what I propose is bringing out the “latent harmony” of M and F by making the + an adult (a “T”, which only coincidentally looks like the T for transgender). This “T” will be the hopelessly-ideal unifier, the fantasy-support by which M and F can operate in harmony, joined at the “hip” (meaning: the transcendental-yet-grounded fantasy of harmony) while also finding their place under the “big Other” by finding their relation to a small Other, which is not separate from them but within and through them. On the ground, formally, this may look like the 5-gender list (Male, Female, Trans-Male, Trans-Female, Trans) — a categorization which brings out the truths of trans people.
And I do this because I am concerned about the hasty, scientifically-unclear gender-affirming care and medications given to children who feel they don’t fit into societal expectations of M or F. Of course children feel this way. The M/F divide without any conception of the ᴛ is insane and throws all M’s and F’s into self-existential crises.
If this ᴛ was instituted, I believe children will feel more comfortable being whatever type of M or F they wish. They would not fear becoming a “/” or a “+”. The “ᴛ” would not only ground gender ideology but also gesture towards a transcendance of its divisions in pointing towards a “general big Other” under which all could be understood for who they are. This is a paradoxical trans politics which celebrates trans exclusion formally while embracing trans inclusion practically.
I am tired of hearing stories of my friends who “try” transitioning (usually: gender hormones) and quit after a month or year or two, go slightly crazy, and then grow to harbor a deep, unspeakable resentment towards those of us trannies who actually do fully “take the plunge” so to speak (sacrificed any chance of return to either M or F). I want the madness to end, I want gender to make sense, I want transgenders to be understood not for how we are similar to others, but for our unique insights and differences; and I believe this formula can accomplish that. More importantly, I believe this formula is right. I believe it is what actually happens in nature; the trouble is, getting the modern West to realize and recognize it. Transgender people are proof of a spiritual existence. Of course the modern West would reject us, rail against us. (They, quite literally, would not be themselves if they didn’t.)
In modern society, there quite literally is no space for the Spirit. Everything is cordoned off by its tyranny of logic. So indeed, my very existence — me simply walking in a grocery store, or going to buy a drink — is often seen by others as me “stepping on” their rights. Of course I would be, in such a society; if there is no space for me, any space I do take up is a violation.
But Spirit is eternal, immortal, and always there — and so is “transgenderism.”
The inauguration of a Third, Transgender Space in the West will revive a new (old) consciousnesses. Although the path to this True Society will be the Path of Fear (for the breaking of the M/F divide is essentially fearsome, and nothing but fear) there is nothing truly to fear (we and our children will all be the better for it) and perhaps, nothing even for us to do other than to meditate and touch grass (indeed, we should actively do nothing — not give in to the pseudo-religious fanaticisms of the M/F dividers). We live in the age of Darkness, of Evil Priests and False Prophets, where the ignorance of men reigns supreme. But after this comes the Golden Age of Truth, which was foretold to be populated by people who live authentically, androgynously. In our Complete Truth.
Now, contrary to common myth, the public recognition of such a Third space will not lead to a “mad dash” of people “trying to be transgender.” Most people like being a man, or woman; it works for them. (Although, I will argue that what doesn’t work for them is being told how to be a man or a woman by some outside despotic authority, i.e. an evil priest.) What this will lead to is a Society in all people, children and adults, men and women, happily see themselves in trans people, especially transgender women, rather than the Society we have now, in which all adults traumatically see themselves in us — and rage against this realization. It will be a society in which trans people are engaged with through arms-length intimacies, and are relied upon for our hysterical knowledge, which allow us to be us and them to be them, which is much better than forced inclusion politics which redefine sex/gender for everyone or extermination politics which define us out of existence.
Having people see themselves in, and rely upon, transgender people is not perverse; it is the opposite of perverse, and in fact, works against perversion, because it is the true realization of the Golden Rule which all religions, all spiritual traditions, hold: to see yourself in one another, especially the “rejects” of Society (who are rejected by the true perverts of religion, the evil priests). What this vision will “pervert” is the ability of these evil priests to terrify children into submission to them, to convince a child that there is only one path (theirs) to being a man or a woman. What the “MᴛF” vision will show is that those who claim such a thing are instead leading children on a straight path to Hell. Let’s take our children off of their train; the evil priests can go to Hell if they’d like, such is their own calling. But let us not allow them to pervert and groom our children into being the type of stunted, broken, agonized, warring, and above all, violent adults which these evil priests want to recruit for their own selfish political causes (see: my post On the Grooming of Children * (Actually) Preventing It”).
And let us also not convince ourselves or our children that simply because they are frustrated with M/F gender roles, that they “must be transgender,” meaning, that they must become a “+”. Becoming a + does not bring the peace or stability that some think it does. And the whole “I knew I was trans when I was 6” narrative is a myth. Transgender people form ourselves through retroactive narration of our lives; very few of us actually fully believed ourselves to be the other gender as children, but most of us retroactively reinterpret our childhoods to affirm this idea. Which is okay. That’s how we figure ourselves out. But that means that transitioning must be a retroactive move done after childhood, not during its early stages. Yes, this might yield more pain for the trans child. But this pain is an unavoidable and essential part of the trans spiritual experience. Instead of trying to avoid or preempt it, let us move through it.
Let us remain patient and kind, without jumping to wild conclusions. If Society’s people actually saw themselves in transgender women, if people understood us more, then they would not jump to any wild conclusion that any sign of gender-deviancy indicates transgenderism. In short, Society would not other-ize us, whether intentionally or accidentally.
Because this Third, Unisex, General Gender Space has always existed; we transgenders have always been there, on the outskirts of society, bringing harmony to all of you, even as you blame us for your own disarray. This is being revealed as we speak, and the better world is on its way (see: my post On the (Double) Death of America).
