Venus

First of all, there's this:

This is Venus as she would look were she to be terraformed, although of course that would be a tall order and this assumes that for some reason there'd be a massive ice cap or two, which seems a bit silly.

What's this about then?  OK.

Terraforming has long struck me as a form of cosmic vandalism.  You take a perfectly nice, balanced planet with vapourised sulphuric acid cascading down from the skies, an atmosphere which could be used to clean toilets, a surface like the bottom of the Marianas Trench and you make it into a little mimsy garden planet you can grow hyacinths on.  Not at all sure about that.  It seems a bit like spraypainting an ad onto Mount Everest.  Then again, there are a couple of places in this solar system which seem a bit unoccupied and vaguely suitable for people and the rest of our biosphere to live on.  It does seem like a disrespectful and self-centred thing to do to a scary planet like Venus.  The other one's Mars, of course.

Without going into too much detail, suppose it is possible though.  Suppose also that life on this planet really is doomed, that unless something dramatic is done, not only we but everything else here is going to be pushing up the daisies in short order, and out there, there's the solution of kicking nine types of hell out of a neighbouring planet, which let's face it is probably lifeless, until it will support our kind of life.  It's a life or death situation, and to support the only life, so far as anyone knows, which exists in the entire Universe.  Would it not then be time to take up the cudgels, screw up one's courage and just do it?  I mean, you would, wouldn't you?  The choice is between a solar system with one planet supporting life and one with none which, for all we know, is in an entirely lifeless Universe.  Those are the stakes.  I really think, given that, you really would go for it and terraform Venus.  In particular considering that it may well have started off as an Earth-like planet which could bear life before everything went pear-shaped, the oceans boiled into space and the rocks released greenhouse gases which made damn' well sure there would be no tomorrow for anything that might have lived on that world.

Who wouldn't?

Incidentally, as I'm sure you're aware, all human embryos start out physically female.

A Shaky Epistemological Edifice

Some time in the 'eighties, my friend Nick and I explored a deserted grand pile of a building in rural Yorkshire.  It was clearly quite unstable structurally and we had to creep around while the occasional bit of masonry hurtled to the floor all about us.  Somehow we managed to avoid death or injury, unless all this is merely a fantasy of a dying brain in a body crushed beneath an eighteenth century fireplace or staircase.  I imagine it isn't.

This is how I feel about the current state of my epistemology.  In case you don't know, epistemology is the study of knowledge.  You might have noticed that my views on gender are rather peculiar and seem to imply absurdities, and of course when something implies absurdities, it should usually be rejected.  Note that "should" by the way - I'll be coming back to it.

Alternatively, one could just reject reductio ad absurdum .  That's the logical process whereby a proposition is proved to be false by assuming it to be true and attempting to demonstrate that it implies a contradiction.  I am now very close to this with my view of the nature of gender as being an immutable fact about the history of how one has been perceived by others, because that now seems to entail that people who are 100% anatomically and physiologically of one sex and are also cisgender can be of a different gender.  That's at least counter-intuitive and could even be absurd.

So far so coolly logical and philosophical.  For me, the overthinker par excellence, this is more than an abstract philosophical problem though, because I'm afraid to draw an alternative conclusion which says that gender is mutable over time or susceptible to the input of the gendered individual concerned.  In other words, if at any time I decide there's some validity in the idea that someone can change their gender or that it's possible for anyone to change their gender by presenting as a different one, I'm in big trouble because in all this confusion and mess there's that person I love - Liz.  It's also possible that anything I tweak or examine philosophically is going to change this view.  And then what am I supposed to do?  If I decide gender can be changed, doesn't that at least suggest that I should change mine?

My response is now to shrink from examining my life and "overthinking", but that in itself constitutes a problem because in doing so, I am denying another part of my identity - the philosopher.  That would leave me as far from integrity as my former attempt to live in harmony with my gender.  But I'm scared.

This is where "should" comes back.  That "should" back there is not really an ethical word, but simply one which says that it would be logical to reject the absurd statement.  There's another "should", a proper ethical one this time.  Should I just follow logic here, even if logic means I demolish my view of gender and let in the possibility that gender reassignment is conceivable?

Every time I use a pronoun which corresponds with a trans or gender dysphoric person's self-image and desire, I am acutely aware of the shaky ground on which I stand epistemologically.  I acknowledge their belief system in that respect as utterly valid and, well, true, and it feels patronising to think otherwise, no matter how quietly, but the fact is that if I applied that to myself, I'd be letting in the idea that I'm being inconsistent.  The disturbing thing is that when I hear the suggestion that gender reassignment is not only conceivable but possible, it makes me feel hope, and when someone refers to me as "she" it makes me happy, and it shouldn't, even if that view turns out to be the one with all its ducks in a row, because that view could destroy our marriage.

So much for factual truth.  What about the emotional truth?  Well, the emotional truth is that the thought that I might be female makes me happy even if it's impossible or even incoherent, and even that's dangerous.  So all I can think of doing about this is to stop thinking about it, but that just leaves us in a shaky epistemologu like the house Nick and I visited back in the day, or for that matter 118 Fosse Road South come to think of it.

It is at least clear that the fundamental problem is between me and Liz and nowhere else.

Don't know what to do, basically.

Externalist Child, Internalist Father

I described my externalist view of gender in the last entry.  To summarise, my view of gender is that it's an external fact which cannot be altered, like date of birth.  This leads me to the rather absurd conclusion that a man can in theory have a fully functional female reproductive system unless he's a gender dysphoric female-assigned person.  If old age is the accumulation of health problems and pure old age doesn't exist, the resolution of health problems is a limited form of rejuvenation, but it doesn't alter date of birth.  So that's my position:  I cannot change gender any more than I can change my date of birth, although it's possible to adopt a different calendar.

This is similar to mathematical Platonism, and there are other examples of this out there in the world, as it were.  Mathematical Platonism is the view that mathematics is discovered rather than invented.  This view is also reflected in my belief that there are no inventions, only discoveries - inventions exist "out there" in an "invention space" and are found rather like Columbus would've found America if there hadn't been people living there already.  Then again, maybe America was discovered by the first person who realised it was a set of landmasses.

So that's all fine, or rather not fine but rather a downer, as it makes gender identity disorder a manageable rather than a curable condition.  Clearly it's not a very life-affirming view.  Then again, my view of my gender dysphoria is that being biologically male constitutes a health problem for me rather than me looking at myself as a person of one gender trapped in the body of another.

Well, it turns out that whereas I'm mathematically Platonist, my father's not.  He believes maths is invented.  A similar view to that would be an internalist view of gender - that your gender is something you invent and therefore may conceivably have control over.  Therefore, if my father's view of gender is similar to his view of the nature of mathematics, rather oddly, he could consistently believe that people can change gender but I can't believe that consistently.  This raises another issue about subjective experience of one's own gender, i.e. the emotional and therefore perhaps more authentic experience of it.

A Clarification

I came on here today to post something about my view of the nature of gender as a concept, which seems to be different than many other people's and leads to confusion, and there was an interesting comment from someone about this.  I want to clarify my position as a result, but I'll start by addressing the issue I initially planned to do.

I'm externalist about gender identity.  What I mean by that is that I see gender as independent of both biology and subjectivity.  This is the illustration I've thought of, and it's a bit circular, so I apologise for that, but this is how it works.

First, a non-gender based example.  It's currently 2014.  Suppose someone born in 1914 were to receive some kind of medical treatment which restored them perfectly to the state their body was in when they were in 1934.  All the health problems and disabilities they have acquired in their century of life are resolved.  They would then be a centenarian with the body of a twenty year old.  They would not be someone born in 1994.  Nothing at all could ever make them literally twenty years old again, unless we're talking about something like time travel or moving close to the speed of light.  Nonetheless, there are such things as facelifts and other more internal therapies which can resolve health problems and make someone "younger".  Those quotes can never be removed by medicine or surgery though.

Now transfer this over to gender with another thought experiment.  Someone gives birth to a child, becoming that child's mother.  That is literally who they are and it's not an alterable title in any meaningful sense.  They later have gender reassignment.  Not the kind that actually exists but a more profound form which gives them male fertility, testicles, a penis and the ability to be physically indistinguishable from a cisgender man down to a chromosomal level, including the absence of Barr bodies, the presence of a single Y chromosome and a single X chromosome in every diploid cell in their body, and so on, with normal androgen receptors and the like.  That person is still the child's mother and not the father because of the history of their relationship and not their biology.  Even after both mother and child have died, that person is still the child's mother, even if both bodies no longer exist in any way.

That is what gender is like.  I might be referred to as Amanda nowadays, people call me "she" and so on, and in theory I could have my genitals modified to create a vagina and labia and remove the testes, but that wouldn't make me female any more than perfect rejuvenation would change my date of birth.  Even after I'm dead and my body has completely vanished, I will be male.  Even if I had a fully functional female reproductive system and bore a child, I would be male.

However, there is a problem with this view because not only is it potentially depressing to me, but also it's a mental health hazard to others.  It's a strongly expressed rejection of the idea that gender is a mutable psychological phenomenon which is unhelpful to gender dysphoric people, and that is quite interesting because it juxtaposes the personal and the political in a particularly poignant way.  From the viewpoint of the phenomenal field, that doesn't help.

Now to address the comment properly (sorry, I can't remember your name):  of course I look male, which is what can be expected considering that I am!  However, that's not how I see my situation.  I am not transitioning, and I cannot transition, because that reflects epistemological confusion and is an incoherent desire which is not so much impossible as nonsensical.  Having said that, there are things I can do to address my predicament.  For instance, I can change my bank stationery so that they don't remind me of the fact that I'm male and therefore insult me every time I see them by having a boy's name on them.  Right now, from a subjective perspective when I look at, for example, my library card and see "Mr" on it, it might as well have a four-letter word on it.  If your name was a swear word, I think you might want to change it, and in fact people often do.  As far as I know, there are no Hitlers in German-speaking countries nowadays for obvious reasons.  In order to dodge reductio ad Hitleram here, I'd better think of another example, a mild one perhaps.  If your name was "Bastard", you might want to change it.

From a physical perspective, the situation is slightly different.  It's more like an endocrine problem which leads to mental health issues for me than  anything else.  If I had an underactive thyroid, that might make me depressed, not just due to awareness that I was unwell but because the low thyroxin  would have that effect on my mood.  The second point is more significant.  Similarly, for some reason I don't understand, the former levels of androgens and oestrogens in my body, which were probably typical for a man in his forties, seem to have cause mental health issues for me, for instance depression, anxiety, a phobia, a couple of paraphilias, obsessive tendencies and so on.  Those are the issues I'm trying to address and the fact that I am also distressed by the fact that my body was hairy and muscular and had a penis and testicles is a side issue.  It's less of a side issue that there are organs in my body which secrete the very hormones which make me ill.  Someone with Addison's disease, myxoedema or diabetes will probably always have those conditions, but all of them can be managed, but not resolved, by appropriate medication.  That's my situation as I understand it.  I can't explain why it is, but it really does seem to be the way things are.  No idea why.

Regarding dress, all I'm doing really is wearing clothes I like and feel comfortable in without regard to what strikes me as a bizarre and arbitrary categorisation into clothing appropriate for particular configurations of genitalia.  I'm fully aware that I look extremely masculine but that's beside the point.  My brother has a birthmark on his shin.

"Do One, Get Away From Me!"

The words of a guy standing in a doorway next to St Margaret's bus station earlier this evening, uttered rather nervously while looking at my chest.  He'd said something just before but my earphones had blocked that out, which is of course one reason for wearing them so frequently while I'm out (ha ha).

This kind of incident is actually a rarity.  I live an oddly charmed life with virtually no obvious transphobia in it, at least active transphobia, so the question arises of why this happened today.  I wasn't feeling at all underconfident, my body language wouldn't have been radiating "kick me" like it did this time last year (incidentally that literally happened once - I walked past a house and a stranger really did come out and kick me at random - this is what my world used to be like), so I'm just going to have to put it down to his problem.

It didn't bother me but it did interest me.  I have several takes on it.  First of all, he clearly wasn't expecting me to go back and talk to him, whatever it was he said in the first place.  It's a shame I missed that, as context would've been enlightening I suspect, and I suspect I also ended up being interpreted as showing bravado when in fact I was just innocently trying to be helpful - maybe he wanted a light or directions or something, was what I was thinking.  Clearly that was rather unlikely unless he was shocked by my appearance after having asked something along those lines.

It was disgust combined with fear, I think, with a soupcon of aggression.  That fear - it's tempting to suspect that he was closet GID, but I'm not going with that because it's rather facile.  That kind of statement is not falsifiable, so I'm just going to drop that.  However, maybe I'm a flying squirrel.  Allegedly there is a culture somewhere which regards flying squirrels as disgusting because they don't fit into their categories of, presumably bird or mammal, whereas presumably bats and flightless birds do, maybe.  There is said to be a theory of disgust that that which cannot be categorised easily is seen as disgusting, and to be honest I would concur with that.

Back in the day before I upended my mental desk tidy with hormonal gloop, I used to find cake disgusting for that very reason.  I had a "sweets" pigeonhole and a "bread" pigeonhole, and since cake fits into neither, I found it disgusting.  I'm sure not everyone in possession of prodigious Y chromosomes who sozzles their mind with the "wrong" steroid hormones gets this kind of tipping out effect, but it's interesting that it's happened to me and that therefore I no longer find cake disgusting, and also that he found me disgusting because I don't fit into any neat little category.  I'm in the gender uncanny valley and my appearance disgusts some people, but I'm at peace with that.  I never expected to look any better than a car crash to most people anyway - I went into that with my eyes open and I don't care, partly because I know that I was the happier and more fulfilled person in that exchange by far.  Also, when I look in the mirror I no longer want to throw up in revulsion and to myself I look a whole lot more normal than I did in the tracksuit phase (1999-2013), the leggings and T-shirts phase (1991-1999) or the jumpers and jeans phase (1983-1991), and that confidence in my appearance, regardless of how many other people may want to lose their lunch on looking at me, carries me through.

Tomorrow will hold a GP appointment, and the day after will see me complete the deed poll, after which I will officially be called Amanda Esther McIntyre Ure.

OK, let's go there

Hello people.  At this stage not only do I not care if anyone reads this but would actually prefer some people not to.  This is basically now an intermittent diary which includes only the bits I don't mind if people read or not, but it's here and here are some thoughts.

One:  This is not a panacea.  Of course it isn't.  I am in a sense running into the fire.  The other day a friend said to me that she didn't know why on Earth anyone could possibly want to be a woman although she was 100% supportive of what I'm doing, and I do trust her on that.  In my case of course, I am inserting myself into a group which is considerably more at risk of prejudice - and let's be frank, we're talking violence, murder, unemployment, medical prejudice and rad fem, well let's just say, discrimination - than women are anyway.  However, leaving that to one side, it's also no panacea in that it's not going to address all my general life problems in one go, or even at all.  I will still be in the outer darkness, economically, still be at the mercy of institutions whose interests are incompatible with human well-being and so forth.  All that will still be in place and still be a problem.  I am not waving a magic wand here.

Two:  One possible answer to the difficulties I have persuading everyone to come with me on this is to take the initiative and try to build up momentum.  To this end, I have done various things, one of which is to be rather more assertive about asking people to call me Mandy (or Amanda).  This has led to a new experience not directly related to gender, which also leads me to wonder what others I will encounter:  my birth name is Mark and can't be shortened, unlike such other male names as Andrew, Daniel or Philip.  I don't have those two or more registers in my life, or I didn't.  I am now aware that English does in fact have something a little like the tu-vous distinction, in that people may choose to use a formal or informal version of my name, each of which carry various connotations - politeness versus familiarity but also disapproval and distancing versus comfort.  I was of course aware of this before, but never experienced it as applied to me.  The approach I'm taking now I refer to, perhaps inaccurately, as "radiance":  I am the one who shines, others reflect, but not in an arrogant way so much as giving others the opportunity to shine as paid lip service to in the now defunct "wiki" to which few others contributed.

This brings me to my third point.  As mentioned above, this is not a panacea.  However, in my eagerness not to see it as such, I don't want to swing too far over to the simplistic, monochrome notion that it would solve nothing.  In fact it very probably would at least address some issues.  I recognise the insanity element here and observe it with unpanicked cool detachment - today I am aware that I have mental health issues as much as I was aware yesterday that I wasn't alone in that.  The experience I seem to be having is that the more I pursue this, the closer I get to success, feeling comfortable in my skin, happiness, assertiveness and achievement, in spite of the fact that we do live in a patriarchal society and that I am the object of ridicule and hatred, and am exacerbating this by pushing further down the line.  This leads me to a repugnant conclusion, although that repugnancy is not mine - others will feel it's a big mistake or perhaps the murder of everything they love about me, and whatever else it is, it's a one-way road - there's no going back if it turns out to be a mirage.  However, my conclusion, my current grand narrative if you will, regarding my life, is this:  My problem is that I am the wrong gender.  That's why I'm not more successful, and in fact why we're not more successful, and the answer is to address that to the maximum possible extent, and yes, it's hard to escape the idea, at least, that that means surgery in the end.

Having said that, there is one teensy escape route for the people who find this idea abhorrent:  simply because the journey I'm on usually ends there doesn't mean it has to end there for me.  That last bit could, just could, have been bolted on in an attempt to medicalise the situation.  I prefer to see this as some kind of quest of spiritual and personal development with an unknown destination.  I know what I really want though, deep down, and there's a risk of leakage if I don't pursue it which will cause more damage than actually, well, let's caricature the situation seeing as that's what I seem to be doing with the female gender, having my naughties snipped off (yes, I know that's not what they do).  It may not come to that.  In fact, it almost certainly won't, although the reasons for that are my unassertiveness and fear of losing Sarada, not my distrust of medicalisation, although that is in there somewhere.

So basically, let's be uncomplicated and frank:  I now think that most of my problems would be solved by changing gender, and that's what I want to do.

That concludes the textual portion of this blog, but there are also two photos.  There would've been some light music here too but the video's not currently public and it isn't mine.  I recited a poem on it.  So, anyway, first the chemical photo.  This is actually an analogue film camera photo:

Now for the digital one:

These images of me are remarkable in that they actually don't make me want to lose my lunch when I look at them.  Call me superficial if you like but I call that progress.

Just An Update

So where am I, who am I, all that stuff?  I would say I've gone a long way down the road and am almost literally not the same person who started this blog.  I feel very positive about what's happening.  In a way, the gender issue is secondary to the personality change, and it's not clear how that has happened.  Clearly I can trot out the hypothesis of two cell lines, but that could be imaginary or factitious.  The phenomenology of the experience, however, is not.  It does occur to me that if there are in fact two cell lines, and if they are fairly evenly mixed, it would be like dissociative personality, but then we all adopt roles don't we?  So that may be peculiar but it isn't that odd really.

This is going to be a bit rambling.  I have also found that resisting the change for the sake of the one I love leads to psychosomatic symptoms.  Basically, I either get really tense calves, start supinating and it hurts my knees - I see that as pushing down the tension at the prospect of not "getting there" as far as it'll go, or if I manage to stop doing that, I find it affects my breathing and I feel suffocated, i.e. "stifled".  This bothers me because it feels like I'm being selfish on a very deep level over which I feel I have no control, and that's very disturbing, because I really don't want to hurt the people around me but right now, the place I want to go just seems like a physically healthy place compared to where I am now.

I have a friend who is very keen on someone with a neck problem, and it makes him move his neck in a way she finds attractive, although of course that's not the only reason she fancies him. If he got his neck sorted, it wouldn't take away her interest in him.  However, what if almost everything which attracts you to someone turns out to be a disease?  What is that person supposed to do if they find a cure for that disease?

I haven't got much else to say really.  I don't know if anyone reads this blog and I can't share this entry widely because of what it's about.  Presumably there's an answer to this somewhere.  I don't know.  Bye.