Also, people have thought askance of what i said here. What can i say to this? I suppose that if you push down on something hard enough, sooner or later it's going to push back, and there's dark, nasty self-loathing stuff here which unfortunately causes a lot of collateral damage, which is really unfair on a lot of people. Granted there was some sarcasm involved which failed to come across due to the thin trickle that is mere text - one reason i make videos in fact - but many a true, or rather intentional word is spoken in "jest" of course.
So i'm sorry. I needed to get it out of my system and now, i hope, it's gone.
Oddly enough, the comments on the video are of a different tone than those made to me elsewhere. I'm interested in whether that's significant and if so how.
Things have now got a momentum to them which means i'm less focussed on the YT channel than i have been. Some of this navel-gazing should of course be going on in the privacy of my own diary rather than out here in showy Blogland, Vlogland or FB, but not all, because i need to test out ways of relating to people. The whole process seems to have triggered off an avalanche of a life change - i'm not going to call it a crisis - which affects a lot of people.
So, what to say? Well, first of all a certain wise resident of the Lathe Of Hedelinth is absolutely right in what she says (as she so often is) that it's no less prejudiced of me to tar all men by the same brush as certain men who could be said to have majorly messed people's lives up. I'm sure there is a way to be masculine in a positive way and in fact this process is probably making me less of a man-hater because i now realise that the shoes i thought i was walking thousands of miles in have turned out not to be the ones bought from the aisle in the shoe shop i'd previously assumed, or rather they were, but the shelf-stacker had put them in the wrong place. I've been to two men's groups, and in both cases i found they seemed to be talking about stuff i couldn't relate to at all. Rather than be down on them for that, i should maybe extend them some understanding from my newly-acknowledged position. Possibly they seemed to be talking a foreign language to me because they were in fact foreigners, though how this works exactly i don't know because i've had all the same sort of cultural and physiological influence as they've had and biology is not destiny.
My assumption has long been that the reason i hate being male so much is psychodynamic and political rather than any myth of being female in a man's body, partly because of Janice Raymond's writing. I now think Raymond was wrong and didn't know what she was talking about, although she had every excuse at the time to suppose she did because the information wasn't available. It's rather like the aspartame problem: how was anyone to know a simple dipeptide which could be expected to be generated in the digestive tract naturally from ordinary food would turn out to be so spectacularly harmful? Nevertheless it was, but by then a whole industry had grown up around it and things had become rather complicated (incidentally that's honestly what i believe - there was no ill intention in the development of the sweetener at all). Similarly, how was Raymond, who is clearly a very sympathetic person passionately committed to fighting for women's liberation, supposed to know about medical research which wouldn't take place for at least sixteen years after the publication of 'The Transsexual Empire'? Though i plan to return to it, why she's wrong would take me too far from this: the man-hating and adoption of such perspectives is in fact not the cause of my gender dysphoria at all, but the effect, and it's also really unfair of me to impose that negativity on other men. I may hate being male but i wanted to be OK with it and see that as healthy, and if other men feel OK about their maleness, that in itself is not a reason to want to, well, castrate them. It's my issue, not theirs.
This is what i now think has happened with me regarding my issues with other men. It's a fact that i have been very anti-male in my time and even now i can't see anything positive about being male, although that must emphatically be separated from the fact that as human beings men are not problematic, so it's more a crisis of masculinity than anything else. However, i now feel that rather than my dysphoria arising from a rational assessment of masculinity, or even a desire to please women (which i've also thought in the past), it's the other way round: my gender dysphoria is the cause of my man-hating. I have taken my pre-existent unease with being male and used it to adopt anti-male attitudes, and my dislike of men is a projection - i dislike my own maleness so i dislike it in others. This is really unfair of me, and i want to apologise to anyone reading this entry who has been affected by that, but i didn't know. Now i do.
How does this operate? Well, my view is that for whatever reason i was able to intuit a mismatch between my gross (ha-ha) phenotype and my genotypes, which led to a visceral self-hatred that i then projected onto the rest of you. It's fascinating and tempting to speculate how the heck that intuition happened, and also tempting to give in to an obsessive checking and re-checking ritual with blood films, but of course now i can resist that more easily.
My current hypotheses are that it's either linked to a cellular memory-type process or - actually i have no idea. I am aware that the path of least resistance in my behaviour is for some reason usually more female than male - 90% of herbalists are female, which is one of many examples - but i can't really say i have a good idea of how that can operate. However it does, it is currently outside conventional medical explanations and maybe even naturalism itself so far as i can tell. This is revolutionary - it completely reverses my map of the world in an important way.
Time marches on of course, so i've made more videos. Here's the latest, which is on vegan diets:
This is what i now think has happened with me regarding my issues with other men. It's a fact that i have been very anti-male in my time and even now i can't see anything positive about being male, although that must emphatically be separated from the fact that as human beings men are not problematic, so it's more a crisis of masculinity than anything else. However, i now feel that rather than my dysphoria arising from a rational assessment of masculinity, or even a desire to please women (which i've also thought in the past), it's the other way round: my gender dysphoria is the cause of my man-hating. I have taken my pre-existent unease with being male and used it to adopt anti-male attitudes, and my dislike of men is a projection - i dislike my own maleness so i dislike it in others. This is really unfair of me, and i want to apologise to anyone reading this entry who has been affected by that, but i didn't know. Now i do.
How does this operate? Well, my view is that for whatever reason i was able to intuit a mismatch between my gross (ha-ha) phenotype and my genotypes, which led to a visceral self-hatred that i then projected onto the rest of you. It's fascinating and tempting to speculate how the heck that intuition happened, and also tempting to give in to an obsessive checking and re-checking ritual with blood films, but of course now i can resist that more easily.
My current hypotheses are that it's either linked to a cellular memory-type process or - actually i have no idea. I am aware that the path of least resistance in my behaviour is for some reason usually more female than male - 90% of herbalists are female, which is one of many examples - but i can't really say i have a good idea of how that can operate. However it does, it is currently outside conventional medical explanations and maybe even naturalism itself so far as i can tell. This is revolutionary - it completely reverses my map of the world in an important way.
Time marches on of course, so i've made more videos. Here's the latest, which is on vegan diets:
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