The Rise of the Dream-State Part 2 of 3: Transhumanism, Postgenderism, Brain-Centricism, Psychic Fragmentation


All 3 parts as PDF
“Transhumanism and Transgenderism enjoy a close relationship due to mutual interest in enhancement technology.”
–Hank Pellissier, “Transhumanism and Transgenderism

The overlap between transgenderism and transhumanism is fundamental, and because of that it seems to be invisible to many people. I think this overlap between the rejection of gender and the rejection of the body (and therefore of humanness) shows an underlying fabric to modern ideology. This is probably why so many intelligent people support the “trans” movement without really understanding it. With transhumanism, the message is writ large enough that no one can miss it.

The above quote comes from The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. This is their Mission Statement:

“The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is a nonprofit think tank which promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a ‘technoprogressive’ orientation. Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives–especially ‘human enhancement technologies’–the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.”

The site promotes “Posthuman Gender: A Non-Binary Future,” and states that “Transhumanists extoll transgender people as prescient pioneers of morphological freedom and technological enhancement” (Benjamin Abbott). Postgenderism has its own Wikipedia page. It is described there as

“a diverse social, political and cultural movement whose adherents affirm the voluntary elimination of gender in the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology and assistive reproductive technologies. Advocates of postgenderism argue that the presence of gender roles, social stratification, and cogno-physical disparities and differences are generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Given the radical potential for advanced assistive reproductive options, postgenderists believe that sex for reproductive purposes will either become obsolete, or that all post-gendered humans will have the ability, if they so choose, to both carry a pregnancy to term and ‘father’ a child, which, postgenderists believe, would have the effect of eliminating the need for definite genders in such a society.

“Postgenderism as a cultural phenomenon has roots in feminism, masculism, along with the androgyny, metrosexual/technosexual and transgender movements. However, it has been through the application of transhumanist philosophy that postgenderists have conceived the potential for actual morphological changes to the members of the human species and how future humans in a postgender society will reproduce. In this sense, it is an offshoot of transhumanism, posthumanism, and futurism.”

Apparently, one of the earliest expressions of postgenderism was Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex:

“[The] end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. . . . The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally” (1970, p. 11).

Wikipedia’s description continues:

“In regard to potential assistive reproductive technologies, it is believed that reproduction can continue to happen outside of conventional methods, namely intercourse and artificial insemination. Advances such as human cloning, parthenogenesis and artificial wombs may significantly extend the potential for human reproduction. Many argue that posthuman space will be more virtual than real. Individuals may consist of uploaded minds living as data patterns on supercomputers or users engaged in completely immersive virtual realities. Postgenderists contend that these types of existences are not gender-specific thus allowing individuals to morph their virtual appearances and sexuality at will.”


Both transhumanism and the majority (though not all) of the arguments for transgenderism as a lifestyle seem to be dependent on a pretty much total (100% total in the case of transhumanism) denial of the existence of the unconscious, i.e., the psyche. This is more than a little strange, if we consider that the idea of an identity-self independent of biology most obviously corresponds with the religious idea of the soul, and soul = psyche. Yet the new trans-ideology is secular and irreligious, even anti-religious or (dare I say) “satanic,” insofar as it effectively denies the existence of any reality beyond that of the personal self and its (culturally conditioned) preferences.

So what is this identity-self that’s supposedly independent of biology? What is it that is supposed to have the “right” to be able to “choose” what sexual or other identity it is given, by society, surgery, and technology? Who is this hypothetical “person” in search of a true identity independent of the cruel impositions of biology and/or a blind and indifferent God?
The question of the need for sex-change related to “being a woman in a man’s body” (or vice versa) surely requires the existence of something pre-existing conception, or at least pre-existing the determination of gender in the fetus, albeit a mysterious something that itself has gender (or sex). The idea that souls are gendered is not one I’ve heard of in metaphysical or religious systems, and as far as I know, people who believe in reincarnation generally believe they have had (or that it is usual to have had) past lives as both sexes.

For various reasons, however, the existence of a soul-psyche (which one trans-commenter at this blog called “ephemeral rubbish”) would seem to throw into disarray most if not all of the arguments for surgically and chemically induced sex change as a 100% healthy life choice. Not the least of these reasons is that a psychological view invariably brings up questions as to what may have caused an individual to feel they were born in the wrong gender body–what sort of early trauma, sexual interference, psychic enmeshment with a parent, or other cultural factors might be behind such feelings.

At best, the “trans” argument is zero psychology and all biology, and yet it is largely reliant on the biology of the brain, i.e., on neurology. It argues that biology–in some individuals–is literally divided against itself, that the brain has somehow ended up in the wrong gender body. In this imagined confusion of interests, the brain is boss, and the body becomes its bitch, to be re-engineered into whatever forms best suit the brain’s particular needs. Where those needs come from, if not biology (i.e., the body), is left unaddressed. In fact, as the psychologist quoted in part one testified, all such essential questions go out the window once the notion of a choosing identity-self independent of biology replaces that of an unconscious psyche indwelling the body, or trying to, and as the many, myriad ways in which that psyche can become fragmented through trauma are redacted by the Sovereign Identity Police.


The Trans-Agenda is everywhere. The primary newspeak-doublethink premise of the Identity Police is, like my brother’s satanic credo: you are what you pretend to be. There is no biological difference between the sexes, they argue, because biology is a state of mind. Do not try to ask, “If there is no difference then why do you need a sex change or hormonal treatment?” To do so will only identify you as a thought criminal in need of correction and re-orientation. The only acceptable response to the Identity Police is “Lovely, lovely, lovely!”

So what are the real world results of the trans-mantra of “Don’t dream it, be it”? Besides the socially enforced insanity that gives male predators access to female bathrooms simply if they wear a dress (or say they are women), and access to children by self-identifying as six-year old girls, and so on; besides the countless children being roped into corporate greed-fueled medical programs for sexual reorientation; there is also a growing pressure for the rest of us–otherwise impartial observers to a fascinating cultural trend that threatens to pull the rug out from underneath our every idea of what is real or true–caught inside an ever-shrinking social space where it becomes harder and harder to say–or even think–the things we feel are true for us to say and think. These of course are the things most essential for us to say, even to the point it may be tempting to say them when there is no one specific to say them to, to say: “No, I will not accept this version of reality simply because I am told I must, or that I am filled with hate if I do not accept and affirm it. I will not ‘get with the program’ when the program is designed to strip me of those last cubic centimeters between my ears (or is that legs?) that even George Orwell let Winston Smith keep. In a word: No.”

What I am personally saying No to is not people who want to relieve their suffering via medical-corporate intervention. I have neither the power nor any business telling these people what they should or should not do to or with their bodies. What I am saying No to is much larger than that. I am saying No to the essential goal of Total Disembodiment, to the drive to become digitalized data with synthetic bodies, or synthetic bodies with digital data, or whatever the technology is offering us. I am saying No to those toxic ancestral fragments that wish to ride us like donkeys into an eternal life of living hell in which every last vestige of humanness has been replaced by an inorganic machine’s idea of perfected identity freedom of choice. I am saying no to a Brave New World, cerca 1984, in which humans have become the unrecognized endangered species on the planet and where our conquerors are invisible, subtle, and pervasive. I am saying No to the rise of the Dream State–without any illusions that my No will make the slightest bit of difference to anyone but myself; but content that that difference is enough.

*

Photo of gender reassignment surgery taken down on request, for being too “shocking.”

munchausen
“Why one has to have a body, I don’t know. A necessary appendage to the head, I suppose. I always wished I didn’t have a body. I suppose everyone does.”
–Paul Bowles, in 1984

From the–admittedly problematic–more metaphysical view, there are questions about whether a person experiencing gender-identity confusion might be possessed by the soul of an ancestor or other non-physical/inorganic entities with their own agendas, and so forth. As far as I know, none of these questions are being raised in the mainstream debate about transgender, since they are “unscientific” questions, and never mind that the idea of a gendered self is itself rather unscientific. The scientific or pseudo-scientific rationale for transgender surgery and chemical intervention has to do with–surprise surprise–the brain, and the belief that sometimes a person may be biologically hardwired wrong, as a male brain in a female body or vice versa. Here are some of the arguments I found in a huffy Huffington Post article, one that is admittedly mostly ideological gas, posing as science: “Do Your Homework, Dr. Ablow”:

“Gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender), sexual orientation (hetero-, homo-, or bisexuality), pedophilia, and the risks for neuropsychiatric disorders are programmed into our brain during early development. There is no proof that postnatal social environment has any crucial effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.” Swaab and Bao, Neuroscience in the 21st century, 2013

[Why is it important to stress this “no proof for environmental factors”? The same reason the Wikipedia page on homosexuality insists–countless times–that homosexuality is never caused by negative environmental factors (while admitting it might relate to positive ones): because the goal is normalization, and the means is the abolishment of all psychological interpretations of human behavior in favor of purely mechanistic ones that, paradoxically, emphasize the idea of human beings’ right to choose to pursue their happiness.]

“However, when the process of genital development and of brain sexual development does not match the same sex, females with a male brain and vice versa can arise. These transsexual people have problems with their gender identity and have the conviction of being born in the wrong body.” Worrell, Master Thesis, Faculty of Medicine, Universiteit Utrecht, 2010
“It thus appears conceivable that due to local hormone dependent changes during development at least some areas of the brain may follow a different course than the genitals during the process of sexual differentiation. A partial or even complete brain-body sex reversal may eventually be the result.” Kruijver, Dissertation, Faculty of Medicine, University of Amsterdam, 2004

The author of the article concludes by saying “It’s very unlikely that we will develop a ‘soul-o-meter’ that measures the gender of a person’s inner essence. However, the body of evidence showing biological origins of gender dysphoria, of having a mis-matched brain and body, is overwhelming.”

This is basically a lie. There may be some evidence but there is also lots of evidence showing the reverse, that there is really no such thing as “brain-gender.” When it comes to brains, there seems to be a free market on theories. See for example “Debunking the ‘gender brain’ myth,” from August 2013: “many pop science presentations claim that neuroscience has shown important differences between boys’ and girls’ brains, and sometimes suggest the two should be taught differently, and possibly separately. “These commentators appear to be getting a lot of attention” [but] there are three problems with this trend, which can have damaging consequences–not only in classrooms, but at home and work. [C]laims are often made on the basis of isolated brain imaging studies that have not been replicated, and in some cases have found to be wrong.”

Or “Men and women do not have different brains, claims neuroscientist,” from Mar 2014: “Neuroscientist Prof Gina Rippon claims male and female brains only differ because of the relentless ‘drip, drip, drip’ of gender stereotyping. . . .  ‘The bottom line is that saying there are differences in male and female brains is just not true. There is pretty compelling evidence that any differences are tiny and are the result of environment not biology,’ said Prof Rippon. . . . ‘What often isn’t picked up on is how plastic and permeable the brain is. It is changing throughout out [sic] lifetime.’”

Or “The brains of men and women aren’t really that different, study finds,” from Science Mag November 2015: “The majority of the brains were a mosaic of male and female structures, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
And from the New Scientist that same month, “A welcome blow to the myth of distinct male and female brains”: “A major study that undermines the damaging idea that male and female brains are fundamentally different could be a game-changer, says Gina Rippon. One of the biggest barriers to equality is crumbling, thanks to a study that blows away the misconception that male and female brains are distinct. . . . Continuing to think in terms of simple male-female dichotomies is flying in the face of the evidence and will lead to poor research and misleading findings.”

And so on. Ironically, this data is probably as ideologically fueled as the data supporting gendered brains. For people still interested in the cause of women’s rights and asserting their absolute equality to men, these findings are cited as “an overwhelming body of evidence” that there is no difference between women and men outside of their reproductive organs. I don’t personally believe that either, and fortunately, none of my arguments depend on proving or disproving the idea of “brain gender.” For one thing, even if someone’s brain might sometimes be hard-wired for a different gender body than the one it ends up in, this still leaves the question of how and why (to what end) unanswered.

A more complex and nuanced attempt to source the transsexual phenomenon in human brains is Ramachandra’s work on phantom penises:

‘‘We hypothesise that, perhaps due to a dissociation during embryological development, the brains of transsexuals are ‘hard-wired’ in manner, which is opposite to that of their external morphological sex. In other words, they are not merely being metaphorical when they claim there is a mismatch between their internal gender-identity and their external somatic gender.

We also predict that some female-to-male transsexuals will have a phantom penis even although there is not one physically there. We believe that this is an easily testable hypothesis, which, if correct, would offer insights into both the basis of transsexuality and provide farther evidence that we have a gender specific body image, with a strong innate component that is ‘hard-wired’ into our brains. This would furnish us with a better understanding the mechanism by which nature and nurture interact to link the brain-based internal body image with external sexual morphology. We would emphasise here that transsexuality should not be regarded as ‘abnormal’ but instead as part of the spectrum of human behaviour.’’

This last line seems a little odd for a scientific paper and suggests that, once again, there is an ideological motivation (or funding) behind Ramachandra’s research. The question of normality and abnormality is a sociological and philosophical question, but it is beyond the scope of science, which works by proving hypotheses via amassing empirical data, not by making social judgments. Showing a psychological and social phenomenon as having correlations with observable brain function does not prove it is normal, obviously; to do that one would first have to prove that the particular brain function being correlated to is itself normal. And if making a case for commonality equaled normality, then it could be argued that child sexual abuse or domestic murder is normal. The only way I know of to prove normality, so-called, is to show that it has some evolutionary or social benefit. So far, I know of no evidence being offered for the social or evolutionary benefits of transsexuals, besides, ‘‘live and let live’’ and ‘‘variety is the spice of life,’’ which, while laudable sentiments, fall short of scientific arguments.

Nonetheless, Ramachandra’s proposal of an infant body-image whose gender sometimes contradicts the biological gender of the infant is certainly an interesting one. But once again, no cause is being offered for this strange phenomenon; a curious anomaly is being presented as the cause of another curious anomaly, then signed off with a nonscientific assertion aimed at promoting tolerance of social anomalies (once again, I am not arguing against tolerance of social anomalies, only pointing out that this isn’t a scientific question but a moral, social, and philosophical one). In an interview given by Ramachandra, he presents his phantom penis hypothesis and then talks at length about mirror neurons (a subject of much interest to me, which I have written about elsewhere).

I am not entirely clear as to what connection he is drawing between infant body image and mirror neurons, but it does raise the possibility of this body image (whether or not it is at odds with the infant’s biology) being sourced outside of itself (as Lacan suggests when he equates body image with the development of ego, during the mirror stage of a child’s development). As Ramachandra describes them, mirror neurons ‘‘dissolve the barrier between you and other people.’’ How much more might this be the case with an infant watching its mother, out of whose body it emerged, and with whom it is still psychically entangled? Of course, there are many variables to consider here, and much of this information is new to me. I am currently just ‘‘brain-storming’’ in an attempt to keep this exploration as comprehensive as possible, and with the hope of more fully exploring these ideas later.

Regarding all the brain talk so popular today, a fundamental problem, in my view, is that it fails to address the (particularly western) assumption that we can be more fully identified with our brains than our bodies, i.e., that our brains determine how we experience ourselves more than our total bodies do. This is a very recent idea, and one for which there is no particular basis, only an unquestioned emphasis on neuroscience in explorations of consciousness, and the assumption which led to that emphasis. (Investigate closely many of the brain-centric arguments and you will find yourself alone inside an empty circle of logic.) Very few traditions besides the modern western scientific (or scientistic) one sees the brain as the sole center of consciousness, and there is plenty of evidence for the heart, intestines, and other organs–not to mention the cells of the body–containing awareness. This seems to me so self-evident that it feels odd even to have to write it down. But for some reason, we in the west are quite sold on the idea of the brain as the location of the “self.” Probably because it is located behind our faces.

*


As others, such as Jordan Peterson, have pointed out, there is an inherent contradiction in the entire rationale of transgenderism, which is that it rests on the assertion that an individual can be whatever sex they say they are–even without the surgery–because sex-gender is a state of mind. But if this is really the case, why are transsexuals insisting on the need–and the right–for surgery and hormones? For that matter, why insist that others go along with our beliefs if we are so sure of it ourselves? The transgender movement is contingent not merely on a few individuals changing their gender, but on changing everyone else’s ideas about–and experience of–gender. In this sense, the transgender movement may be a kind of delivery device designed–consciously or not–to infiltrate society and upturn one of the last bastions of certainty we have left–that of our biological makeup and function. If so, then what appears to be the means (normalizing gender confusion) may in fact be the end.

In the meantime, there is a massive amount of data–albeit largely denied, suppressed, or ignored by mainstream commentators–that points towards centuries of psychological and emotional incest, child sexual abuse both organized and random, and government programs of trauma-based mind control for the creation of alters or sub-personalities. There is evidence that all of this suffuses our culture at the deepest and widest of levels, and that no one born into our world is immune to it. So to imagine that a phenomenon such as transgenderism, transsexuality, or gender confusion emerged whole and pristine from inside our culture, without in any way being symptomatic of it, is a feat of doublethink of Promethean proportions.

What sort of society embraces a program of corporate-financed mutilation and drug dependency posing as spiritual emancipation and individual empowerment? One that is made up of traumatized and fragmented individuals who can’t tell the difference between wholeness and fragmentation, and who prefer to get behind technology that allows for the effective suppression of all fragments that interfere with the will of the fragment most driven–or socially empowered–to create its own reality. The fragment that chooses to reign in hell, rather than serve in heaven.

Of course, there is still the possibility that gender confusion, as a more flamboyant and lurid expression of neurodiversity in general, is something other than, or as well as, a pathological response to a fractured culture and is really a spiritual-alchemical solution to it. But if so, then we might well ask why it is currently feeding into the very same economic and political social engineering programs that most benefit from perpetuating the fragmentation? We might also ask, what is the evolutionary gain of individuals born into the wrong gender body who must then have surgery to fix the mistake? The only systems this seems to benefit are corporate systems of control such as the medical, governmental, and media industry. It’s certainly feasible–likely even–that such anomalies might have something to bring to the species in terms of an experience of dual-sex consciousness inside a single-sex body.

Some people have claimed this in relation to Native American beliefs, suggesting a correlation between transsexual types and shaman types. But those early forerunners–if they existed–didn’t have surgery to switch sexes, and surely the point of such an anomalous experience of consciousness is not to switch from one sex to the other, but to find a way to reconcile that tension and allow for the harmonization of masculine and feminine principles within the body? (And anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense for these two-spirit people to be surgically transformed into hermaphrodites?) If we are to believe that Nature/consciousness is attempting to mutate and evolve in some way via this gender confusion, then how exactly is it a good thing for human ingenuity to intervene and “correct” Nature’s experiment by surgically altering the bodies involved? Is it all about proving once again how necessary humans are to get Nature back on track–back towards capitalist expansion, space travel, chemical dependency, and total disembodiment?


Transhumanism, little and large, does away with all these annoying questions by bringing it down to a viewpoint in which the body is simply a machine that can be tinkered with however necessary or possible, in order to better suit the needs of its “driver.” But in the absence of a soul-psyche or unconscious self (or Self), who or what is this driver? The answer, once again, is the constructed identity or socialized alter-self. But if this constructed social identity is a fragment of the greater psyche, then on its own terms (as an autonomous, independent self), it’s not even real because it’s only an unconscious vehicle for the greater drives of psyche and body. While it remains unconscious and under the delusion of a separate autonomous existence, its wants and needs cannot be healthy or constructive wants and needs. They are drives rooted in trauma, a fight-or-flight reaction that was so severely and repeatedly triggered in early childhood that it got stuck at the “on” position, until the body armor became the wo/man, the fragment the whole.

I grew up watching it happen (I think we all did, but then we forgot). I have seen the consequences up close and personal. My late brother’s credo was: “I am a lie who points to the truth, and the truth is that we are exactly what we pretend to be.” I agree with the part about the lie, but I don’t hear any truth in it. All I hear is a shrill and protracted wail of human despair, hoping desperately to pass for a victory cry.

Part three.

60 thoughts on “The Rise of the Dream-State Part 2 of 3: Transhumanism, Postgenderism, Brain-Centricism, Psychic Fragmentation”

  1. I find it interesting that you addressed some of the issues discussed in the comments in Part 1, including the Native American concept of two-spirit people. And your views are interesting and unique. There’s no one else that I’m aware of that is addressing this issue to this extent and taking all angles into consideration and with such a thoughtful and unique perspective.
    I would also like to bring up another issue, the transgenders in Thailand. According to some forums, there are gang-related violence issues and one comment claims high suicide rates, although I don’t have statistics. Also, Thailand may be one of the countries with a high transgender rate per capita, and perhaps some of the cultural / societal issues there may shed some light on the motivations for such surgeries?
    http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/forums/OtherGround/Violent-gangs-of-Ladyboys-assaulting-tourists:2555802-3
    Violent gangs of “Ladyboys” assaulting tourists
    “Many of them have psychological issues and the suicide rate in the transgender community is much higher than the general population. You also have issues with criminality and drug abuse.”

    Reply
    • René Guyon (cited in another comment here) was born at Sedan, Ardennes, and was involved in writing legal codes for Siam (present Thailand) and was the head judge of the supreme court of that country where he was given Thai name Phichan Bunyong (Thai: พิชาญ บุญยง).
      No idea if there’s any meaningful connection there, but perhaps Thailand was a center of early experimentation?

      Reply
  2. Just so that you know, I don’t support non-genders or post-gender or non embodiment or any of that stuff. There are only two genders, masculine and feminine and two sexes which are associated with these, and anomalies. The existence of intersex forms and anomalies in no way contradicts the basic binary polarity, they are just anomalies and nature’s variations or errors.
    Transhumanists may like to cite transsexuals as support for their cause, but they have no more right to do this than Gender Studies theorists have to co-opt us to their agendas.
    Most transsexuals just want to alleviate the stress of living in a body of the wrong sex/gender from what they strongly feel or desire. I don’t think the majority want to deconstruct gender or nonsense like that, they just want to reduce the internal dissonance.
    I believe most transsexuals would dissociate themselves from the ‘transgender movement’ because we see ourselves as anomalies in a two gendered world that we just want to be more comfortable in whereas transgenders seem to want to make gender anything they want to. Doubtless people will find this difficult to understand, but I stand by that assertion.

    Reply
  3. BTW I seem to recall that Ramachandran suggests that it is a developmental error in foetal neuronal development. You haven’t read the research paper, but this is such a well circulated and accepted hypothesis in this field that I suppose he probably didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
    I think I mentioned it in a previous comment. Interruption of optimum foetal hormonal stimulation can lead to a failure of development of the appropriate neural structures at that particular point of foetal development.
    There was a lot of work done on this in the sixties around rats which had their in utero hormones messed with and all varieties of homosexual and non standard behaviours were produced in the offspring, such as lesbian rats and so forth. It is not a massive extension to apply this to Ramachandran’s mapping hypothesis and he mentions it in the 2007 study which I cited on the previous page.

    Reply
  4. I would say that your entirely speculative remarks about centuries of incest and abuse impacting itself on the psychic fragmentation you ascribe to the trans phenomenon are well, entirely speculative. It’s kind of bizarre.
    I don’t really think you have fully understood that there are a wide variety of conditions all being conflated under the same umbrella. Someone who has a strong neural disposition to gender dysphoria on the basis of innate neural mapping will have an entirely different psychology to someone who arrives at their transgenderism because they were abused as a child or dressed up or whatever.
    Surely this is obvious? I return to my call for a taxonomy of trans categories so that their false conflation can be avoided.
    I’m rather concerned at your projection about trauma and fragmentation and so forth. I never suffered any early childhood traumas. In fact my early childhood was really good and I think back on it with immense fondness. There is simply nothing to get hold of. It truly did arise sui generis within my own being. Perhaps it was some drug my mother took to ease her pregnancy. I’m just glad she didn’t take thalidomide.

    Reply
    • “I never suffered any early childhood traumas.”…..There is not a human being alive who did not suffer trauma just by being born into this Life, however loving their family environment was or is.. Just being a small child in human society where teachers, adults, and people all around are so disconnected from their natural state of presence is traumatising enough to a young child who has not yet individuated….and many children never separate from their mothers energetically so they never fully individuate. And when that happens separation from others is the overriding inner belief/felt experience. What else is the ego/mask/ false identity developed for if not to protect a vulnerable, natural state of openness from what the now (experienced)separate embodied state perceives as a threat to its very existence? It (the mask) is a needed construct to cope with life until adulthood. For someone who is also struggling with feelings of self acceptance, the added burden of believing they are in the “wrong” body and lacking self love as most of us do/did (in fact the whole human race is struggling with lack of self love)the
      trauma is not hard to see or understand and accept?

      Reply
    • I attempted to read as many of your comments as I could. Since I don’t know much about the transgender subject. But, on one hand you say Jasun is projecting the “trauma model” on the subject. Then, you say that there is a wide variety of conditions that make up the transgender subject.
      I may not agree with every point or piece of evidence Jasun is making. But I believe his writing is addressing a part of this subject that gets ignored and at the extreme, maligned by people and groups.
      As someone who doesn’t know much about this issue, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that there are for some reason, biological events that occur that would make certain people have different gender traits then what was expected.
      But, to discount other events that create a similar surface outcome doesn’t add to your case.

      Reply
      • I wish people would try to get what I say. I’m not discounting social influences, trauma or whatever in some cases. However, in a full taxonomy of the subject we should include other aetiologies, of the kind I suggest.
        I find it utterly extraordinary that people are determined to try to get rid of any biological or neurological influence on this condition. Why is it so problematic for you?
        I don’t deny that trauma may be the cause for some, but to suggest that it is the cause of all is not very scientific when a broader taxonomy is available.

        Reply
  5. I really don’t think that showing a snapshot of a sex reassignment operation is of any use here other than to shock your readers into horror at the existence of transsexuals or our medical treatment.
    I personally would prefer that you took it down but you will do as you like.
    I’ve never seen a picture from a hip replacement operation, or even an appendectomy. But I bet they look gruesome. Would you try and shock someone with that?
    You had a few pics on the first page which I thought were a bit gratuitous as well. That one of Roman Polanski comes to mind. Since Polanski is a renowned pedophile who has been on the run for nearly fifty years this is incredibly provocative, associating transsexuals with him. This is really complex and muddy and you have only made it muddier. This is the kind of thing which colours my understanding of your position.
    To coin a term from the left, you seem to be doing a lot of hard work to ‘other’ transsexuals. You seem to want to burrow into our psyches and expose our failure to deal with whatever it is you think we should deal with, with imputation of ‘psychic fragmentation’ and the like. Clearly we are mentally deficient or unstable rather than suffering from a birth defect. That would be too simple. I am reminded of the once proposed social aetiology of schizophrenia, and yet now it is understood to be almost entirely endogenously arising from inherited neural types.
    All you achieve is to demonstrate how you obviously haven’t really engaged with the subject from the point of view of those of us who have experienced it and so far as I can tell I’m the only transsexual that you have communicated with, and you get triggered when I challenge your views.

    Reply
    • “I really don’t think that showing a snapshot of a sex reassignment operation is of any use here other than to shock your readers into horror at the existence of transsexuals or our medical treatment”
      I have to agree with you Claire here. I found that picture shocking and it stirred up feelings of sadness/anger in the same manner of seeing a photo of a woman having a cosmetic surgery op or vaginal cosmetic surgery would make me feel. Claire, I have to be honest with you and admit I still can not understand why a transsexual person needs or wishes to mutilate a part of their body in order to “be” a transsexual which they already are unless that body part felt “disgusting” or “wrong” which is still a belief, not a truth…The fact that the body’s energetic meridians and polarities are traumatised by any operation on the body also comes into the picture for me.. For example, the doctor says It would be a good option for me to have a hysterectomy because of certain reasons because there is no knowledge within western medicine about the disruption of chi within the body and the effects that has on energetic balance. (I can not understand why someone would have cosmetic surgery either because it still comes down to learning self love and acceptance)….but, as I understand and someone mentioned in the other thread , the Native American and other cultures did not slice off body parts. They celebrated the unique attributes and qualities of the individuals within the sacred holding of that particular tribe. The surgical chopping off body parts is so part of Western Materialistic thinking, but then we are living in the West right now so it is what we are all learning to balance. So …….anyway, it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand why people choose to do a lot of things, there are plenty of choices I make which others think are equally difficult to comprehend. That’s what makes it/Life so incredible and the people we meet on the way so inspiring in their differences of expression !

      Reply
  6. Does brain gender exist?
    Thought experiment: Where do lions and elephants get their gendered behaviour from?
    Social learning?
    Inherited brain structures?
    This is a question I have repeatedly put to Gender Studies people. Where do our instinctual behaviours arise from?
    If gendered behaviour, including mating behaviour are socially transmitted, then when were they first acquired? Of course they get overlaid with culture, but then where did that come from? It all comes back to biology, which the left deny.
    If they are not encoded in inherited neural structures then where do they come from? Instinctual behaviours are, instinctual, not acquired, that is the whole point. Evolutionary survival adaptation. Reproduction is the basis for all of this, and requires complementary sexes, with appropriate instincts. Social acquisition of these sorts of behaviours would be entirely too unreliable and so they are encoded as instincts, unconscious drives. Don’t people even understand this?

    Reply
    • I get what you’re saying. There’s a joke a friend of mine made – when someone asks you the sex of your dog, you don’t say “well, I don’t know, because they don’t speak, so they haven’t told me their gender.”
      However, human brains *are* different to lion brains. We have something over-laying instinctual drives. Whether that’s social conditioning and/or brain structure or both…
      Humans clearly do have an instinct to reproduce – women and men behave differently when the woman is ovulating for example. Ovulation is not hidden in humans as we often see suggested. That does not mean all women carry this instinct through life and have babies – because we make the decision not to, intellectually or otherwise. Or the instinct is channeled into another kind of creation.
      Plants have a sex too – the example a friend gives is male and female cannabis plants – ask your gender studies liberals about that. 🙂

      Reply
  7. The remarks about centuries of incest and abuse are very far from speculative, see Lloyd de Mause “The Origins of War in Child Abuse,” “The Emotional Life of Nations” and other works. http://psychohistory.com/
    Coming to this blog and reading a current piece without any background is like starting to watch Game of Thrones several seasons in and expecting to follow it ~ like the person who commented on Jimmy Savile scandal being bullshit! I can’t complain because it’s nice to have new readers, but nor is there any way to precede each new essay with a “previously on Auticulture” summation. Perhaps I will update the About page. The work I do is grounded in a deep, many-years investigation into organized child sexual abuse as the primary component of centuries-long programs of psycho-social & cultural engineering applying methods of psychic fragmentation through induced trauma, based on ancient psychological principles known to occult/intelligence groups throughout history and more recently entering into conventional historical timeline via such groups and programs as the Fabian Society & MK-ULTRA. Just about everything I write about is embedded in that deep background context and most of my readers and listeners are fully aware of it and firmly along for the ride. (Or as that recent commenter will see it, they have drunk the Kool-Aid.)
    My own experience indicates that the number of people who have suffered extreme childhood trauma is very high but that the majority of these people have no recall of it, this being the nature of trauma.
    I do not consider neurology as an “aetiological” explanation for anything, but only as a record of the effects of trauma and generational abuse that turns children into “poison containers.” In the occult science of traumagenesis, rewiring the brain is a, or the, primary aim of the sexual abuse and corresponds with the softer, more psychological reality of psychic fragmentation. On this latter subject I recommend to the serious researcher or reader Donald Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma, and/or my own Prisoner of Infinity, serialized at this blog. My own investigative journey of discovery regarding my personal involvement in these programs of abuse, and how they pervade our culture at every level making no one immune to the effects, is mapped in POI, Occult Yorkshire (also serialized at this blog), Seen & Not Seen (published in 2015 and available as a PDF at my website), and various essays and podcasts from the past several years.
    It’s a common trait for people who come to a discussion late to want to express their opinions regardless of how familiar they are with the subjects being discussed, or the context in which they are. It doesn’t show much respect for the author or the others engaged in the discussion, however, and the ignorance (using the word in its literal meaning, not as a slight) of such commenters inevitably shows itself in the end. In such cases, I advise reading more, commenting less. It is time-wasting and generally counter-productive for me to be explaining every decision I make, every time someone questions it.
    [Reading it back that last sounds more snarky than I meant it. It’s a characteristic of autists, this one anyhow, that we like to be matter of fact about things, and that’s all I mean to be doing here.]

    Reply
  8. Interesting series. It’s frightening to think these people really hate their bodies so much – not transsexuals, but transhumanists and post-gender people. They really think technologically-based reproduction is gonna be better than natural reproduction? The food we make with technology kills us, but we think we’re gonna crack men having babies without issue?
    One point I don’t agree with is the bathrooms thing. I agree that it’s being pushed in a bizarre way by the media, but why should we care what bathroom people go in? The idea that somehow rapists, gropers or pedophiles are going to get at children in the bathroom if they can claim to be the opposite sex is a weird idea. Do we have problems with men harassing male children and women harassing female children in bathrooms? Don’t 99.99999% of bathroom trips just involve people going to the bathroom?
    The media blitz on the issue looks to me like an attempt to hasten history by forcing dialectic. I find your comment about men gaining access to little girls just by wearing a dress to be hysterical. If someone wants to hurt a child, they don’t need to access the child in the bathroom, and having access to the bathroom doesn’t significantly increase the danger does it? If someone’s already willing to break the law, couldn’t they go in the other sex’s bathroom?
    I liked the rest though, because I do think it’s a valid question to ask – should we be validating these people? What if they’re just delusional and hurt? That this trend could be reaction to our f-ed up society or a purposeful attack on humanity by social engineers seems like a crucial issue, and I think whether the former is true or not, the latter “attack” is almost certainly happening.
    Also, while I find Cosmic Claire’s comments a little derailing, I think she may have one valid point. Maybe there are some people who just have mixed up wiring, and separately this explosion of trans people is caused by what you’re saying or maybe other causes like plastics. I get why she would be a little put off by the articles, but if she’s against this transhuman & trans BS, can’t she understand that the articles are dissecting that and not “genuine transsexualism?” (assuming she’s right)

    Reply
    • It is hysterical, maybe in both senses of the word. I was aware of that paragraph being “risky” (risking sensationalism). but it is true about men, or man, identifying as six-year old girl, and it does follow from that, that such a person could demand their right to be included with other six-year-old girls and treated the same way.
      http://www.mediaite.com/online/meet-the-52-year-old-father-who-identifies-a-6-year-old-girl/
      I really wanted to show just how far into crazyland this sort of ideological identity policing could be taking us.

      Reply
      • Huh… never heard of people identifying as an age or as a child. I missed that you wrote they could potentially gain access to children by identifying as a little girl (thought you just said by identifying as a woman). In light of that, I think you have a fair enough point. I don’t think people now take identification as a child seriously, but I also don’t see any reason why the craziness wouldn’t go that far in a few decades or maybe less.

        Reply
    • I just wanted to add something about your comments re “bathroom thing”. ….. I have had direct experience of this problem so can vouch that there’s some fire behind the smoke….

      Reply
  9. In other “news” on mediaite.com, Neil deGrasse Tyson Accidentally Tweets About That Time He Fell While Trying to Take Off His Pants.
    Agree that we’ve entered “crazyland”, but perhaps not for the same reasons as the blog’s author. 🙂

    Reply
  10. Your analysis and research are tip top on this but your choice to post the gruesome photo of genitals is traumatizing and horrendous.
    It hit me like a bolt and i thought why would Jasun who knows all about triggers trauma and images ability to harm include that? Not necessary. I want to forward this to colleagues but cannot because of this picture. Nobody needs to see this. I cannot erase it from my mind. It is no different than the guerrilla tactics in sex ed shocking kids psyches with vulgar sexual photos of diseased genitals from the CDC. I wish i could send this to my list, because the transexual transhumanist issue is so pertinant.

    Reply
    • I took the photo out yesterday after Claire complained.
      The reason I included it was not to shock: it was to remind readers of the visceral reality of transitioning, the reality of the body and what is done to it.
      To me being squeamish about this can be similar to a meat-eater not wanting to see how the meat gets to them. I didn’t mind taking it down however because I agree it was unpleasant to look at, & I do like to keep the imagery artistic! Anyway, the post is now trigger-free.

      Reply
  11. BIID:TRANSABLED…….legs being cut off, woman being allowed to be made blind by the medical community…..the list goes on…..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x55IuSyIyQ8…..this man states, after his leg has been chopped of that he feels better for being as he “should be”…..http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3256029/Woman-dreamed-blind-DRAIN-CLEANER-poured-eyes-fulfil-lifelong-wish-says-happier-ever.html….“I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth,” Shuping told the Daily Mail. “When there’s nobody around you who feels the same way, you start to think that you’re crazy. But I don’t think I’m crazy, I just have a disorder”
    (I know some people think it is “ethereal rubbish” but karma and past lives for a Being may well be part of the picture because so many people (myself included) are “recalling” prior life streams of experience ……)as well as the toxic crap in our environment…..
    I am in no way doubting that this BIID phenomenon is occurring but why…..a kind off mass hypnotism/hysterical reaction to the out of alignment beliefs we have about being an energetically balanced human being? (we only make decisions and take the actions we believe will make us feel better)
    Is it just that in the past when we had certain feelings about ourselves/bodies it remained as that. feelings and thoughts. But now permission is given to carry those thoughts into actions and thereby pave the way for a whole new level of behaviours and expression..which then creates the new field of experience which then changes consciousness……
    (And Steiner in 1919 spoke of the preparation for the incarnation of Ahrimanic forces which this is , because it brings about division and confusion)

    Reply
  12. I don’t think I called it “ephemeral rubbish”, I called it “ethereal rubbish”, but perhaps I meant to say “etheric”, if that helps.
    What I meant was I disagree with the long-inherited cultural baggage assumption of the existence of something not bound by a measurable physical reality, rightfully superseding things that are in fact now measurable, and also ones self-understanding and self-awareness in this life.
    Anyway how is it supposed to work? The existence of a physical biological Y-chromosome is the god-given signal that proves that you are somehow intrinsically linked to a non-physical but decidedly masculine eternal soul, so that if you ‘choose’ to inhabit a feminine body on earth or ‘choose’ to behave in female ways, you are breaking your covenant with God and are eternally damned?
    So no, I don’t think there is a soul existing pre-conception, but I do think there is a subconscious psyche, but that the psyche is likely an emergent result of a bunch of physical brain-cells, cells which are initially grown and laid down in the womb, probably a few months after conception, from which our instinctual behavioural drives and basic emotions are derived, and that these behaviours belong to a naturally sexually dimorphic continuum, and are differentially expressed in different people according to both pre- and post-natal hormonal conditions, but once in place cannot really be drastically altered through psychological counselling or social conditioning alone.
    No I don’t believe we can or should have the right to freely ‘choose’ our sex or gender, as though working from an originally blank canvas, or driven by social-status game desires or early childhood experiences alone. I believe certain people are from-birth pretty much biologically compelled to think and act one way or another, and even, though rather occasionally, in ways contrary to what others expect of them based on their chromosomes or genital configuration, and that when placed in ever-more restrictive environments which prevent them expressing their instinctual emotional behaviour, will become increasingly socially and psychologically dysfunctional over time, often to the point of even harming themselves or others.
    So yes I believe in things like psychological repression, fragmentation, and projection and psycho-somatic derived illness, and I believe that a lot of the cause of the extreme techno-futurist transhumanist agenda is based on that rejection of the supposed ‘limitations’ of the physical body, limitations that are culturally imposed, but it is largely as a result of over population and over-industrialisation causing us to en-masse repress our more basic emotions in real life and so endlessly seek increasing expressive freedom and technological utopianism in a seemingly boundless cyberspace.
    I don’t think we should attempt to define our psychological ‘selves’ by external experiences or possessions, of which the body is just one rather obvious totally-malleable physical totem. I’m not really in favour of excessive capitalism selling people on the malleability of their social gender presentation by breast augmentation or liposuction, face-lifts or extreme exercise and weight-training regimes or even more extreme things like purely cosmetic genital modifications. There is not a psychic ‘self’ as distinct from the physical body, and we should not be so-encouraged to think in those ways, there is only really the body and what it needs, mediated by limitations imposed on our behaviours, collectively enforced by cultural conditioning, so that we can collectively contribute to making a complex technological society work, which does have some benefits in terms of quality of life and diversity of arts, culture and entertainment.
    I believe that we have a tendency to take things too far, and we are also caught in a cultural trap where we don’t even get the chance to properly discover ourselves before we are placed on the never-ending treadmill of educational, physical, sexual, capitalist achievement or home-ownership ladder climbing, and all the people being so forced to attempt to extract their little piece of the pie, are creating a system so collectively-dysfunctional that it becomes almost unlivable by anyone, except perhaps for those that were lucky enough to inherit the ownership of the so-called ‘means of production’ and so not get quite so caught up in the system, but even they are probably constantly on the defensive trying to dodge regulations and increasingly demanding employees and consumers and so also feeling stretched and overly-defensive in every direction.
    I believe that a lot of people are growing up feeling socially rejected, and become rejecting their body, and so becoming rejected of their own psyche, and seeking to escape their own negative emotions through so-called political activism, projecting all their own personal and psychological difficulties as having been caused by someone else, when they maybe don’t even understand what their own needs really are, ‘I’m hurting in some indefinable way, so I want to make you hurt or you be socially deferential to me’, or how they could probably be met without such massive disruptive social change or increasingly frantic attempts at social status-building as an overcompensation for a more primal psychic wound.
    http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
    And erm yeah, even Ted Kaczynski at one point also wanted a sex change and was on the verge of seeing a doctor, before feeling really embarrassed and totally rejecting the idea, and possibly rejecting a large portion of his psyche at the same time, and we all know how far off the rails he eventually fell, so much that he started sending out letter bombs and demanding to have his manifesto be published in the national newspapers.
    So I also believe in the existence of neuro-developmental defects/conditions, such as autism and also transgenderism, which seem rather inextricably linked, are just one of the many causes of a current general social malaise, which by greater understanding of the actual biology of sexual/gender differentiation we can find some solutions for, solutions other than just ever-tightening the cage we are building around ourselves and continually policing each others thoughts and behaviours.
    http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/2/116.long
    https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2040-2392-2-15
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22173769
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25524786
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27870420
    https://epath2017.exordo.com/files/papers/198/presentation_files/1/Lab_EPATH_Presentation.pptx
    If it can be determined that a lot of these people really feel much better and are much less rejecting of their own bodies and of their felt culturally-imposed societal role, when administered cross-sex hormones, and allowed to wear different clothes, and perform different social roles, then I don’t think that people should really stand in their way, on the belief that they have some kind of pre-existing eternal soul which can somehow be tarnished by ‘bad’ sex-role behaviour in this life, or that they just hold delusional beliefs about their own emotion or instinctual pre-conscious behaviours and thought patterns.
    The chances are these people actually do know what they are thinking and feeling, even if they lack the tools or maturity to adequately explain how they think or feel when they are young.
    I mean if you’ve actually seen a film like ‘Boy Meets Girl’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3007302/
    do you still think that Michelle Hendley is really just a boy, with some rather intense psychological adjustment problems, who is for some inexplicable reason really brilliant and totally natural at acting like a girl, but should just have been given better therapy, so he would have become less rejecting of his healthy genitals?
    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5956399/resumephotos?ref_=nm_ov_resph
    http://www.teenvogue.com/story/michelle-hendley-transgender-actress-interview
    https://consequenceofsound.net/2015/05/boy-meets-girl-michelle-hendley/
    Is Michelle Hendley really just a regular boy who is, for some strange psychological reason, freely choosing to spend his entire life dressing and acting like a girl just to be famous, or is he a boy born with an extremely developmentally abnormal subconscious psyche, making him naturally excessively feminine in posture, body language, behaviour, thought process and emotions, and also a homosexual to boot, or, from ‘her’ own perspective, really just a regular girl born with some of the wrong parts down below? Who should get to decide that, God, you, her parents, or her?
    TL;DR;
    It’s perhaps premature to tell someone young ‘We can’t help you the way you think you want to be helped because you are only rejecting of your perfectly healthy body / your social gender assignment, due to adverse cultural/psychological factors alone, and we obviously know what’s really good for you in the long term much better than you do at your currently insufficient level of maturity’, when it’s maybe more a case of a rather small number of cases of ‘We acknowledge that your body/mind is somewhat developmentally abnormal due to adverse biological conditions, and likely compounded by rather intense social conditioning when you were young, and if you truly think and feel like you are the opposite sex, then maybe you are in fact the opposite sex, in most of the ways that really count, and we can help you on your way to live a different life if you are demonstrably committed to undertaking a rather difficult and somewhat dangerous path, to hopefully greater eventual physical health and psychological wholeness’.
    http://aebrain.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/when-worlds-collide.html
    At what age is someone mature enough to make that kind of long-term decision for themselves? I don’t know, but I’d say if you are mature enough to consent to have sex, something that also has potentially life-long consequences, then you are also mature enough to express your own sexual preference, and your social gender presentation is one significant component of that.

    Reply
  13. What do you people think about homosexuality? is it abnormal? is it caused by childhood issues? psychic fragmentation? should a gay person seek counseling?
    What do you people think about all other forms of cosmetic surgery? if someone thinks their nose is ugly, is it ok to have a nose job or should they go into counseling to work on their self-esteem? should they just try to accept that God wanted them to have an ugly nose for reasons that can only be divulged in the after-life?

    Reply
    • This phenomenon is conventionally framed as a Left/Right issue, or Prog/Conserv, Religious/Scientific – all the same really. Such narrow framing doesn’t help us to understand it, (or who we are and where we are at) and is in itself a self-limiting, narrow-band, social construction and feedback loop.
      There are aspect of collective human psycho-physiology that I think are too often ignored or unrecognized and that I haven’t seen addressed with regards the trans phenomenon, so here goes:
      One is neoteny:

      Many prominent evolutionary theorists propose that neoteny has been a key feature in human evolution. Stephen Jay Gould believed that the “evolutionary story” of humans is one where we have been “retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors”.[12] J. B. S. Haldane mirrors Gould’s hypothesis by stating a “major evolutionary trend in human beings” is “greater prolongation of childhood and retardation of maturity.”[5] Delbert D. Thiessen said that “neoteny becomes more apparent as early primates evolved into later forms” and that primates have been “evolving toward flat face.”[13] However, in light of some groups using arguments based around neoteny to support racism, Gould also argued “that the whole enterprise of ranking groups by degree of neoteny is fundamentally unjustified” (Gould, 1996, pg. 150).[14]
      Doug Jones, a visiting scholar in anthropology at Cornell University, said that human evolution’s trend toward neoteny may have been caused by sexual selection in human evolution for neotenous facial traits in women by men with the resulting neoteny in male faces being a “by-product” of sexual selection for neotenous female faces. Jones said that this type of sexual selection “likely” had a major role in human evolution once a larger proportion of women lived past the age of menopause. This increasing proportion of women who were too old to reproduce resulted in a greater variance in fecundity in the population of women, and it resulted in a greater sexual selection for indicators of youthful fecundity in women by men.[15]
      [..]
      The developmental psychologist Helmuth Nyborg said that a testable hypothesis can be made using his General Trait Covariance-Androgen/Estrogen (GTC-A/E) model with regards to “neoteny”. Nyborg said that the hypothesis is that “feminized”, slower maturing, “neotenic” “androtypes” will differ from “masculinized”, faster maturing “androtypes” by having bigger brains, more fragile skulls, bigger hips, narrower shoulders, less physical strength, live in cities (as opposed to living in the countryside) and by receiving higher performance scores on ability tests. Nyborg said that if the predictions made by this hypothesis are true, then the “material basis” of the differences would be “explained”. Nyborg said that some ecological situations would favor the survival and reproduction of the “masculinized,” faster maturing “androtypes” due to their “sheer brutal force” while other ecological situations would favor the survival and reproduction of the “feminized,” slower maturing, “neotenic” “androtypes” due to their “subtle tactics.”[26]
      Aldo Poiani who is an evolutionary ecologist at Monash University, Australia,[27] said that he agrees that neoteny in humans may have become “accelerated” through “two-way sexual selection” whereby females have been choosing smart males as mates and males have been choosing smart females as mates.[28]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans

      tldr: Women are more neotenous than men, generally. Perhaps transexuals are more (M->F) or less (F->M) neotenous than their gender cohort?
      More:
      Neoteny, Autism, and Evolution
      Social Transformation and Biological Evolution
      http://www.neoteny.org/what-is-neoteny/
      Two is Imitative Behavior or Mimicry/Mirroring and especially Girard’s mimetic double bind:
      [This is an aspect of humaness that is mostly submerged beneath our Western mythology of individual, sovereign, autonomous, self-made independence – except in the field of Public Relations and Marketing who know it well – see Early Adopter]
      Imitation is also a form of social learning that leads to the “development of traditions, and ultimately our culture. It allows for the transfer of information (behaviours, customs, etc.) between individuals and down generations without the need for genetic inheritance.”[2] The word imitation can be applied in many contexts, ranging from animal training to politics.[3][4]. The term generally refers to conscious behavior; subconscious imitation is termed mirroring.[5]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation

      “Mimicry is a crucial part of social intelligence,” study researcher Piotr Winkielman, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement. “But it is not enough to simply know how to mimic. It’s also important to know when and when not to.”
      In the study, Winkielman and colleagues asked participants to watch several videos of staged interviews between two people. Some participants viewed videos in which the interviewer was friendly to the other person, and others saw videos in which that same interviewer was unfriendly.
      The interviewees in the videos either mimicked or did not mimic the interviewer’s simple mannerisms, including leg-crossing or chin-touching. Participants were not instructed to watch for mimicry and reported no awareness of it. After watching each video, participants evaluated the person interviewed in the video on general competence, likability and trustworthiness.
      The participants rated the interviewees who mimicked the behavior of the unfriendly interviewer as less competent than those who didn’t mirror him. This suggests that, in the eyes of the outside observers, imitating an undesirable model incurs reputational costs, according to the study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of journal Psychological Science.
      “The success of mirroring depends on mirroring the right people at the right time for the right reasons,” Winkielman said. “Sometimes the socially intelligent thing to do is not to imitate.”
      http://www.livescience.com/15332-mirroring-behavior-downside.html

      René Girard, in his literary theory of mimetic desire,[13] proposes what he calls a “model-obstacle”, a role model who demonstrates an object of desire and yet, in possessing that object, becomes a rival who obstructs fulfillment of the desire.[14] According to Girard, the “internal mediation” of this mimetic dynamic “operates along the same lines as what Gregory Bateson called the ‘double bind’.”[15] Girard found in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, a precursor to mimetic desire.[16] “The individual who ‘adjusts’ has managed to relegate the two contradictory injunctions of the double bind—to imitate and not to imitate—to two different domains of application. This is, he divides reality in such a way as to neutralize the double bind.”[17] While critical of Freud’s doctrine of the unconscious mind, Girard sees the ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, and key elements of Freud’s Oedipus complex, patricidal and incestuous desire, to serve as prototypes for his own analysis of the mimetic double bind.[17]
      Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind—a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives—is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.
      Bateson is undoubtedly correct in believing that the effects of the double bind on the child are particularly devastating. All the grown-up voices around him, beginning with those of the father and mother (voices which, in our society at least, speak for the culture with the force of established authority) exclaim in a variety of accents, “Imitate us!” “Imitate me!” “I bear the secret of life, of true being!” The more attentive the child is to these seductive words, and the more earnestly he responds to the suggestions emanating from all sides, the more devastating will be the eventual conflicts. The child possesses no perspective that will allow him to see things as they are. He has no basis for reasoned judgements, no means of foreseeing the metamorphosis of his model into a rival. This model’s opposition reverberates in his mind like a terrible condemnation; he can only regard it as an act of excommunication. The future orientation of his desires—that is, the choice of his future models—will be significantly affected by the dichotomies of his childhood. In fact, these models will determine the shape of his personality.
      If desire is allowed its own bent, its mimetic nature will almost always lead it into a double bind. The unchanneled mimetic impulse hurls itself blindly against the obstacle of a conflicting desire. It invites its own rebuffs and these rebuffs will in turn strengthen the mimetic inclination. We have, then, a self-perpetuating process, constantly increasing in simplicity and fervor. Whenever the disciple borrows from his model what he believes to be the “true” object, he tries to possess that truth by desiring precisely what this model desires. Whenever he sees himself closest to the supreme goal, he comes into violent conflict with a rival. By a mental shortcut that is both eminently logical and self-defeating, he convinces himself that the violence itself is the most distinctive attribute of this supreme goal! Ever afterward, violence will invariably awaken desire…
      — René Girard, Violence and the Sacred “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double”, pp.156–157
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind#Girard.27s_mimetic_double_bind

      Also relevant:
      CRAZY LIKE US
      The Globalization of the American Psyche
      By Ethan Watters
      Watters travels to Hong Kong to find that Anorexia has risen over the last two decades not only because of western fashion and diet crazes, but because we exported the idea of the illness itself. He retraces the last steps of a young woman whose death introduced the province to this deadly eating disorder. The news reports surrounding this single death – which relied almost exclusively on American experts – made an entire generation of young Chinese women more vulnerable to the disease. Watters suggests that this uncomfortable truth – that experts can unintentionally spread the very illnesses they hope to treat – may explain the rise of eating disorders in America as well.
      http://www.skidmore.edu/international_affairs/american-psyche.php
      THE CHAMELEON EFFECT: The Perception-Behavior and Social Interaction
      Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
      1999, Vol. 76, No. 6,
      http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/chameleon.pdf
      I better stop there – wall-o-text! Just these last points:
      3.The heart (and perhaps other organs) are a satellites of the brain and part of our hormonal system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9kQBAH1nK4 and https://www.heartmath.org/resources/downloads/science-of-the-heart/?submenuheader=3
      4. Influential Pentagon Sociologist, William Sims Bainbridge on desirable transformations of future humans:
      “Techniques such as genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, ‘safe’ organisms.”
      https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/bainbridge20090820
      5. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was subjected to an experimental mind control program at Harvard when he was just 16: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/impromptu-man/201205/harvards-experiment-the-unabomber-class-62
      and http://nymag.com/news/features/conspiracy-theories/cia-mind-control/
      and https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/
      and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2vUaTKntzY

      Reply
      • There’s material here for a deep n’ wide social analysis, re: transsexuals, neoteny, mimesis, rivalry, identity-slash-gender wars, destabilization, as being ingredients in the sort of long-term social engineering programs that have been (very) partially mapped/hypothesized at this blog. I don’t doubt these principles are known & applied by high-level think tanks and that transgender is one (primary) intended result (inc. dodgy drugs with “unforeseen” side effects, food additives, etc.). Bateson may have been a witting social engineer (acc. to Jan Irvin he was), Girard more like an independent scholar whose ideas have either partially exposed some of these designs or proven highly useful to them (or both).
        I’d balk at citing Ethan Watters about anything at all, however; as the author of: Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria (University of California Press), and (maybe not so bad) Therapy’s Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today’s Walking Worried, he got the ear-marks of a spook in academia.

        Reply
    • Homosexuality is a complex phenomenon. Research on animals in the 60s found that certain in utero hormone imbalances could induce homosexual behaviour when the animals matured. This is just a fact.
      But also things like single sex environments can lead to the dominant individuals performing homosexual acts on the less dominant, not only in animals but in humans, such as boarding schools and prisons.
      So socialisation can be a factor, and with the media promotion of homosexuality this has obviously increased.
      If we had a stronger social model of gender behaviour it would probably decrease in prevalence.
      As to other forms of cosmetic surgery, to pose those questions is in my view authoritarian. If someone wants their nose corrected from being bent or something like that, then who’s business is it except between them and their doctor?
      To say ‘Is it okay to …’ is sticking your nose in (sorry about the pun) where it has no business being.

      Reply
  14. I’m glad the question of “should” has come up, and that VC has made the observations about meridians and whatnot. It has helped to clarify what may be a primary cause of misunderstanding at this and the last thread.
    My approach as a researcher-writer is never, ever, to cast judgment about what someone should or shouldn’t do or in terms of morality. Morals come and go and we have no idea what will be considered morally fine tomorrow that is seen as an abomination today, or vice versa (i.e., homosexuality).
    As I mentioned in a previous comment, the “is” determines the “ought,” not the other way around. In other words, when a practice becomes more and more easily available to us, via technology or other means (public bathrooms?), social mores change to accommodate that practice. The obvious example is pornography. once immoral, now just normal, the reason being everyone has access to it & there’s vast amounts of money to be made, and so on. Torture porn is now endorsed by Quentin Tarantino, and only “squares” talk about the harmful effects of media. And so on.
    Those who have read Occult Yorkshire or my recent essays on Pizzagate & pedophilia (which also address the homosexuality question, see here: https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2016/11/23/vicious-circles-angry-squares-pedophilia-scapegoating-taboo-social-control-part-one/) should know that I don’t even try to make a moral judgment (a should or should not) about (what we see today as) the worse crimes against human beings imaginable. The facts must suffice, and the facts include observable psychological causes and consequences.
    However, since our culture, language, and thinking is geared towards moral judgment (both of self and of the other), often simply presenting facts or theories is seen as including a moral judgment, as suggested by Claire’s many reactions to my comments, and to the essays themselves. We simply aren’t accustomed to a non-moralistic standpoint, and we will automatically read into it our own pre-judgments. I suspect this would happen even if what I wrote was 100% clear of unconscious judgments, which of course it isn’t. Nor am I claiming I don’t have opinions and feelings that amount to judgments, or would if I expressed them; only that I do my best not to let them color or shape the arguments I am making.
    The causes and consequences of child sexual abuse make abundantly clear to me that, if there is any basis for the term “pathology,” then it applies here. At the same time, I am also at pains to trace the continuum between any such pathology and what we think of as healthy and normal behavior, desires, and perceptions. This continuum is traceable as and through the causes and consequences of trauma, which as VC points out, no one on the planet is immune to. This doesn’t make it all a big blur – obviously some traumas are worse than others, and some adaptive behaviors are more pathological (harmful to the self and to others) than others.
    I get into this in part 3, but a primary point for me is that one of the effects of early trauma is dissociation, desensitization, and a numbing of both the psyche and the body. This means that behaviors that would otherwise be palpably harmful to ourselves feel normal and even pleasant (stimming, cutting, etc). And that we can pollute both our body and our psyche while pursuing the “happiness” of a trauma-created identity-mind, blissfully oblivious to the harm we are doing. As I mention in part 3, my own biggest regret is getting tattoos. I don’t know how this messed up the meridians in my body, but I certainly would like to know, and if someone told me I hope I wouldn’t assume they were making some sort of moral judgment upon me (or that I would do the same on my former self). It’s true that it might only intensify my regret, but them’s the breaks when we are seeking consciousness, integration, and wholeness. The main goal for me is seeing the deepest unconscious reality driving my actions and the correspondingly unforeseen consequences of them.
    None of us know just how deep and dark and painful a journey that is going to be. If we did, I doubt anyone would ever make it.

    Reply
    • Pornography is not considered normal in Saudi Arabia. Neither is homosexuality in several countries and by religions.
      Quentin Tarantino endorses torture porn? He also endorsed senseless violence in his films. Have you incorporated that into your daily life? Maybe he has ulterior motives. Maybe he’s just trying to shock people for money. Or maybe he’s not an enlightened human being that we should be influenced by.
      The fact that “morals come and go”, as you put it, is not necessarily a good thing either. In fact, it’s almost certainly a bad thing in my opinion. Homosexuality has existed forever. Yet the fact that we as a human race still cannot come to a consensus about whether it’s acceptable behavior is indicative of the fact that we are living “in the dark ages” in terms of our understanding and in terms of how truth gets disseminated in society and how easily the masses can be lead to believe whatever whoever is disseminating information wants people to believe.
      You’re publishing a three-part blog and you’re not going to take a stand either way on this issue? Seems rather odd to me that someone is going to do some investigative research on a topic and not take a stand either way. Again, it isn’t about “passing judgment”. It’s about taking (conflicting) information and then expressing which information is more plausible to you.
      Do you believe the transgender phenomenon is caused mostly by childhood trauma and abuse? I don’t. I’m not convinced of that. Because all that does is take us back to societies that claimed that homosexuality was mental illness. But many gays are probably more well-adjusted human beings than most straights.
      So I do encourage you to take a stand on this issue, Jasun. Or if you think there isn’t enough information available to make any conclusive decisions, then at least point out in which areas do you think need to be investigated further to ultimately determine if transgenders are basically acting out in normal ways or not.

      Reply
      • I already have pointed out areas to explore further.
        I don’t really agree about this notion of the dark ages. Sounds like typical neoliberal arrogance. One man’s progress is another man’s decay.

        Reply
        • Well, but you are the self-proclaimed “researcher” on the topic.
          Why do I need to go through the hard work of exploring further?
          Is exploring a topic meant to be a process that never ends and we never come to a definitive understanding of anything?
          Research is supposed to have a thesis followed by evidence to back up the thesis.
          So if all you’re doing is giving me links to explore, then this ain’t research. Don’t call yourself a researcher. Just call yourself a blogger and I’ll have more respect for you.

          Reply
          • Make up your mind, dude. You wrote “at least point out in which areas do you think need to be investigated further,” and when I point out that I have already done so, you use it as an opportunity to try and belittle me. I suggest you re-read the new About page again, three or four times if that’s what it takes. I have already addressed there your recent comments here.
            I’d be curious to hear what other readers & listeners think about my “taking a stand.” I suspect most of them would agree that this is very much what I am doing by addressing these thorny subjects, have been doing for several years now. To come along with almost no background knowledge of that and start telling me what to do to earn your respect is pretty hilarious, don’t you think?
            I think by taking a stand you mean taking a firm moral position, which really means you want to stick an ideological tag on me and decide whether I am friend or foe. But equating morality with ideology is the very point I tried to address before, another one which you ignored. Having strong opinions about stuff and equating that with morality doesn’t equal taking a stand; it just makes you an ideologue.
            Morality (i.e., ethical standards of behavior) can only come about through embodiment, that is, a healthy psyche in a healthy body. When a body is full of toxins and a psyche is fragmented, there’s no possibility of balance, and no way to act ethically, much less decide what morality is in any social or collective sense. Your own snarky posts that combine ignorance with arrogance (a toxic brew) exhibit the sort of fragmentation I’m continuously addressing in my writing and podcasts.
            I am trying to be nice here, BTW, but you aren’t making it very easy.

          • I exhibit fragmentation? Bwahahahahahaa. You’re amusing.
            I’m fairly ethical in my daily life, actually. Thanks for your concern. Are you?

      • homosexuality exists among non-humans (‘animals’). Is this a sort of ‘mass-mind’ response to overpopulation? Was homosexuality as common in, say, the bronze age? I know it existed and there are references to it in Egyptian and Hebrew literature at the least.
        I think we’re spirit embodied in matter.
        “Consume my heart away; sick with desire
        And fastened to a dying animal
        It knows not what it is; and gather me
        Into the artifice of eternity.”
        So, we’re subject to the effects of physicality – we’re lashed to a dying animal. The animal is the result of an evolutionary strategy that involved sexual reproduction. As opposed to sporulation or something. Maybe someone can write a novel where a space traveler encounters beings that reproduce like flowers and there are attendant controversies about it that our earthling protaganist finds completely insane. Feel free to steal my idea.

        Reply
    • Thing is Jasun, that I have never regretted having sex reassignment surgery, and I’m about 30 years on from that.
      I think it’s the imputation of past trauma, unconsciousness of what is really going on inside me and what appear to be claims that this is a false identity constructed from my trauma which I reject.
      Why is it so hard to take on board the experience of someone who has traversed this journey with a modicum of success?

      Reply
  15. “What sort of society embraces a program of corporate-financed mutilation and drug dependency posing as spiritual emancipation and individual empowerment?” – wow. That’s an interesting way to put it.
    Re: brain sex. Well, the brain is nothing if not plastic. So, yes, a woman’s brain and a man’s brain might be different, due to their differing experiences of life *from the point of* birth. We know that young girls from birth are treated differently than young boys – how we speak to them, what we let them do, what we say about them to others. All of this is environmental impact on the development of the brain. The brain continues to develop into early adult, and all the time being influenced by and adapting to the surrounding environment.
    It would be very hard to pull apart what we’re born with and how are brain are influenced by our experiences. You’d have to examine those removed from this culture as the control….and that would create a certain influence in itself.
    Then there’s hormones – produced by ovaries in the female or testes in the male. If you are born with ovaries or testes this will impact your biology and, to an extent, your brain. The menstrual cycle changes the female brain over the course of a month. The male brain changes on a 24 hour pattern instead. The reason we don’t really discuss this much is that such details are always assumed to be judgmental i.e. if you say the menstrual cycle effects a woman’s brain you are saying she is somehow lesser than a man, less capable or whatever. This is understandable, we have a long history of oppressive ideology being proven out and justified by so-called Science. But, of course, as a statement it does not suggest anything like that.
    Hormones impact who we are attracted to, who is attracted to us (pheromones) and our sexuality to an extent – of course, there are other factors, but hormones are in the mix.
    When a trans person takes synthetic hormones (which are not the same as the hormones the body produces) it is not *just* the body that changes – the “brain” does too (as a controller for thoughts/behavior). Read Testo Junkie or listen to this: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/220/testosterone?act=2
    A recent study showed how the birth control pill (synthetic hormones) can change the actual physical make-up and structure of the brain of teen girls.
    Perhaps you didn’t catch this, but Caitlyn Jenner said she had a “female soul” – now, I believe Caitlyn is religious so that goes someway to explain the discussion of souls, but of course the next question should always be, what does that entail? For Caitlyn it apparently entails long hair, manicures, cosmetics, plastic surgery, dresses – all socially-sanctioned signifiers of social-constructed femininity.
    I haven’t read all the comments here yet, but has anyone who claims to have a female brain in a male body had their natural hormone levels tested? I am now thinking of how many men are experiencing a decrease in free testosterone (hence the marketing of “T” to so-called “cis” men). The environment also impacts our hormone levels (from the womb onwards, actually) – synthetic estrogens in everything from plastics to pesticides are changing our hormonal make up every day.

    Reply
    • You asked about anyone who had had their hormone levels tested.
      I did. When at the age of 19 I sought medical help for my transsexualism (in the mid ’70s) I was given some tests and when they came back the doctor looked at me with a curious gaze and asked me if I was already taking female hormones as my oestrogen levels were so much elevated from what they should have been. Soya wasn’t common at the time, and there was much less contamination by hormones in the environment, so this was endogenous.
      I didn’t go for full reassignment for some years after that as I was not able to cope with it all at such a young age, but when I finally did some years later, I expect that this had some influence on the consultant’s treatment of me.
      So my brain was already feminised, or at least becoming so at that age.

      Reply
  16. A bit about the ‘DES’ miscarriage prevention situation
    https://www.change.org/p/the-us-food-and-drug-administration-fda-acknowledge-that-hormone-treatment-during-pregnancy-can-cause-intersex-and-transgender
    https://assets.change.org/photos/4/mn/vw/IemNvwqRKnpWbha-800×450-noPad.jpg?1449899500
    Not the only cause, though probably the most significant one for those over 45, such as Caitlyn Jenner.
    For those currently under 35, well we were born well after the introduction of the contraceptive pill, which though supposedly not taken during pregnancy, probably has a lot of impact on who ends up getting pregnant by whom, and at what age they allow that to happen, which are all factors which change the usual reproductive equation somewhat.
    Yes, I agree, male testosterone levels naturally drop due to ageing, there are lots of environmental factors which effect hormone levels, synthetic estrogens like in soya products, and those can effect behaviour, and yes it naturally runs in cycles, but while most men might develop a beer gut or something, they won’t suddenly announce that they want to become women or that they’ve always felt that way since they were quite small children but were previously too afraid to speak out. So there must be some other underlying factor at work in more extreme cases.

    Reply
  17. RE: synthetic estrogens like in soya products
    http://www.naturalnews.com/052832_atrazine_endocrine-disrupting_chemicals_sex_changes.html
    Chemicals in the water are turning male fish into females… is the same thing happening in humans?
    It is thought that the natural excretion of synthetic estrogen from birth control pills can be one of the leading causes of sex changes in fish, with male fish becoming feminized once they come into contact with the chemical.
    RE: tesosterone levels
    http://www.naturalnews.com/044972_testosterone_levels_fetal_development_pregnancy.html
    Men’s testosterone levels determined in mother’s womb
    If you are a man, the odds are stacked against you. Today’s world is a literal toxic minefield of feminizing chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and fluoride that overload men’s systems with estrogen, potentially leading to low testosterone. And a new study has revealed that men’s exposure to such chemicals while in the womb can permanently alter their baseline testosterone levels as adults
    ————————————————————————–
    Being somewhat of a conspiracy theorist myself, I wonder how much of this addition of chemicals that negatively affect testosterone levels in our food, medicine, water is intentional?

    Reply
  18. Just read something interesting. It’s a personal testimony from a transgender person. They essentially consider it to be some kind of mental disorder brought on by childhood trauma / abuse. Another interesting point that I had not considered and not sure if anyone has mentioned is that after 8 years, they reversed the procedure and apparently many transgenders do this?
    http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/16/i-used-to-be-transgender-heres-my-take-on-kids-who-think-they-are-transgender/
    I lived as a transgender, Laura Jensen, female, for eight years. While studying psychology in a university program, I discovered that trans kids most often are suffering from a variety of disorders, starting with depression—the result of personal loss, broken families, sexual abuse, and unstable homes. Deep depression leads kids to want to be someone other than who they are.
    That information sure resonated with me.
    Finally, I had discovered the madness of the transgender life. It is a fabrication born of mental disorders.
    The transgender life is often the direct result of early childhood difficulty or trauma. Assisting a young child into the fabricated ideology of a transgender life is not helping the child sort out what is real and what is fiction.
    The likelihood that the child known as Stormi is suffering from separation anxiety or some other psychological disorder cannot be ignored. Stormi is living in a foster home. While it may be safe and necessary, foster care is intended to separate the child from the birth parent. This can lead to psychological disorders like separation anxiety disorder.
    Separation anxiety disorder and other psychological disorders can masquerade as gender dysphoria, leading caregivers and medical practitioners to misdiagnose and not provide proper or effective psychotherapies.
    Thankfully, like me, many transgender persons return to the gender they once shed. Slowly they restore the life that was lost.

    Reply
    • The point here is not whether some pseudo-transsexuals detransition, but why more don’t.
      Look at the Lynn Conway article on prevalence and you will see that there are tons of transsexuals who never regret or detransition.
      Of course there are people who do this out of trauma or whatever. I have known some likely candidates. But this doesn’t prove that no-one should ever do it. I took to it like a duck to water. I’ve had a doctor ask me if my periods are regular. I’ve had a radiologist ask if I had had an hysterectomy because she couldn’t find my uterus when performing a pelvic examination. I’ve had people freak out when I disclosed to them. On one occasion when I said I was TS a man asked me if I wanted to be a man. These kind of things indicate to me that I’m doing alright in how I appear.
      All I’m trying to demonstrate is that there are people who benefit from transition. But there are plenty who don’t, and the social promotion of transgendersim [sic] is to blame for this. As I have said repeatedly on many occasions the way that I see this is one in which Cultural Marxism has exploited a genuine phenomenon in order to break down concepts of gender in society, in a Saul Alinsky manner. I have no desire to change social gender norms, but only to be able to fit into them in as unnoticed a manner as possible.

      Reply
  19. Forgot to add this comment, from the same blog entry as the previous post:
    http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/16/i-used-to-be-transgender-heres-my-take-on-kids-who-think-they-are-transgender/
    The three men who came up with the idea of changing boys into girls and making transgenders, Alfred Kinsey, Harry Benjamin, and John Money, were pedophilia advocates. (For more of the history, see “Sex Change” Surgery: What Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and You Should Know.)

    Reply
    • This is the same Harry Benjamin who oversaw the “transitioning” of Lynn Conway (the DARPA-employed trans-advocate):

      “After learning of the pioneering research of Harry Benjamin in treating transsexuals[19] and realising that genital reaffirmation surgery was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression from gender dysphoria, Conway contacted Benjamin, who agreed to providing counseling and prescribe hormones. Under Benjamin’s care, Conway began her gender transition.”

      (Wikipedia, sourcelink LA Times: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Media/Through%20the%20Gender%20Labyrinth.pdf)

      “In 1948, in San Francisco, Benjamin was asked by Alfred Kinsey, a fellow sexologist, to see a child who “wanted to become a girl” despite being born male; the mother wished for help that would assist rather than thwart the child. Kinsey had encountered the child as a result of his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was published that year. Kinsey and Benjamin had seen nothing of the like previously. This child rapidly led Benjamin to understand that there was a different condition to that of transvestism, under which adults who had such needs had been classified to that time.[4]
      Despite the psychiatrists with whom Benjamin involved in the case not agreeing on a path of treatment, Benjamin eventually decided to treat the child with estrogen (Premarin, introduced in 1941), which had a “calming effect”, and helped arrange for the mother and child to go to Germany, where surgery to assist the child could be performed but, from there, they ceased to maintain contact, to Benjamin’s regret. However, Benjamin continued to refine his understanding and went on to treat several hundred patients with similar needs in a similar manner, often without accepting any payment. . . . Benjamin’s patients regarded him as a man of immense caring, respect and kindness, and many kept in touch with him until his death.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Benjamin

      Yet Kinsey oversaw the systematized sexual abuse of children as part of his “research” by which he amassed the “evidence” of child sexuality which was instrumental in kick-starting the sexual revolution of the 1960s. See: https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/child-abuse-as-sex-magick-sexual-research-aleister-crowley-alfred-kinsey-occult-yorkshire-14/
      Benjamin was associates with Rene Guyon, a French jurist best known for The Ethics of Sexual Acts, which Benjamin wrote the foreword to. The Rene Guyon Society is named after him, though apparently he did not found the society nor was he involved with it. The René Guyon Society is said to have advocated sexual relationships with children. The entity’s motto is said to have been “sex before eight, or else it’s too late.” According to some sources it was based in Beverly Hills, California. Along with the North American Man/Boy Love Association) as an organization “challenging the assertion that sexual abuse is bad because of its effects on children.”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Guyon_Society

      Reply
      • I don’t know why you put the word ‘transitioning’ in quotes, it suggests that she didn’t really transition, which is obviously not the case. Are you using the quotes to question the concept of transitioning?
        I would suggest that if Guyon was neither the founder or involved with the society named after him that to impute anything from that society to him would be improper, and thus to anyone associated with him.
        And it may well have broken medical ethics to give premarin to that child, but I don’t see any substantive evidence here that he was actually a paedophile. Association with Kinsey is merely circumstantial evidence, guilt by association.
        It is true that Benjamin did indeed go on to help many transsexuals, and I myself came across material from the International Gender Dysphoria Association (I think it was called then) of which he was the President or Chair, back in the 1970s. I haven’t studied him in depth, but his work would seem to challenge that of John Money who asserted that gender identity was entirely socialised and attempted to prove this with the atrocious case of David Reimer, which I go into in my Radio 3Fourteen interview with Lana Lokteff. The significant point here is that the discredited Money argued that gender was not inborn and could be taught. A seminal source for the Gender Studies movement who also believe this lie.
        Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1920s was the first person to scientifically study the subject and some of the first sex reassignment operations were done under his supervision, the case of Lily Elbe being the most well known.
        Sorry to repeat myself, but the assertion that all trans phenomena result from social trauma at an early age is both unsubstantiated, and contradicted by other available evidence. Also I find it bizarre to find that someone asserts this about me without any knowledge of my life. Imputation of personal responsibility for this in the absence of any actual evidence is something I must contest.

        Reply
    • I’m aware of Money and Kinsey as very disreputable people, but the inclusion of Harry Benjamin with them is something I had not come across before. Do you have a link to support this comment?

      Reply
  20. As far as I’m concerned, my gender was reassigned when I was circumcised as an infant. How’s that for a provocative statement?
    That snipping-away of that “more feminine part” of my penis made me into a little bitch; a bitch to the State for a significant chunk of my life; a whining little soldier for the Id-Entity who used my unconscious rage (or, rather, who IS my unconscious rage) to further It’s agenda of remaining as deeply passive as possible for as long as possible. And this is the case, IMO, for any and all baby boys who have been ritually circumcised by the medical industry or the religion industry. It is only until much later in life that they will each have the opportunity to move beyond that bitchiness, if they each work through that unconscious rage around having been physically separated from that crucial physical “feminine part’ (a.k.a. foreskin) , which is just too much for most to deal with.
    The transhumanism agenda and postgenderism agenda can only thrive and grow in/across the global petri dish (as it does today) when more than half of baby boys are genitally mutilated for so-called “medical reasons”, without any social uproar, in the so-called “most powerful country in the world” … The U.S. of A. …. which is indeed the case right now.
    This is what I would add — and do add — to Jasun’s thesis, here.

    Reply
      • I don’t connect castration to it in any way, symbolic or otherwise.
        Castration is the removal of the “masculine part”, not the “feminine part”.

        Reply
        • then you may be missing the forest for the trees
          what’s so feminine about the foreskin? that it’s a piece of skin?
          OTOH, the notion that castration desensitizes the penis to make “warriors” who can more easily rape women in war would fit with that idea. Turning the penis into a sword is also a kind of symbolic castration, replacing an organ with a weapon, like a prosthetic body part.

          Reply
          • Well it does seem odd that a few have speculated that the ritual act of circumcision as being a symbolic menstruation or even a return of the feminine to the masculine by combining the two.
            Though to be honest the idea of gender bending/fluidity & mutilation of the body for some sort of “higher” purpose (Circumcision itself being considered one of the oldest planned surgical procedures in the history of humanity) doesn’t seem to be a stranger in just about any culture in some form that has graced this planet. This however does beg the question on the so called mind/body divide & even further on noumenal-psyche/phenomena-cell one since even Nature does not stand so cut & dry in this muddle.
            Still, great article which brings much to ponder.
            Cheers.
            HoD

  21. I know this is not really what the article is about, but a theory that I have been contemplating and probably beyond our ability to comprehend fully at present.
    The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics as I understand it, says when faced with a choice, the Universe will choose all choices.
    Maybe, and it is a big maybe, at conception when faced with the choice of either male or female, it chooses both and we exist as both male and female versions.
    If there is a shift into multi-dimensionality then it may explain the confusion within the soul as these two aspects meet.
    Or maybe a load of rubbish. Just asking questions.

    Reply
  22. It seems like the previous blog I posted is possibly inaccurate in terms of sex change surgery being pioneered in the US by the three aforementioned individuals, as may be the wikipedia claim that the first sex change in the US took place in 1966 at John Hopkins. Is Wikipedia deliberately hiding something?
    According to this, it dates bate to at least the 18th century.
    https://newrepublic.com/article/119475/sex-change-surgery-18th-century
    >> Eight pages long, with three illustrations of the child’s anatomy, the pamphlet may describe one of the earliest instances of sex-change surgery. The first case that I found (in America) was in the 1840s …

    Reply
  23. Just posting a few parts from an article I just stumbled upon. I wasn’t searching for this. But I must say I find it quite shocking. I didn’t realize how politically complex this situation has or is in the process of becoming.
    http://www.returnofkings.com/122884/canadian-government-passes-law-that-defines-abuse-as-not-encouraging-a-childs-transsexualism
    Since these are codified in law, it means that social workers must discuss sexual matters with children, in order to determine their placement on the spectrum of 72 genders, or if they like to dress as a member of the opposite sex, which would indicate that they are a potential tranny, and therefore must be raised in a manner which encourages trannyism.
    These questions will be posed to children as young as 5, who are not sexual in any way, other than possessing a nonfunctioning penis or vagina, as well as teens in the newly-expanded age bracket of 16-18, when hormones are at their strongest, and youthful brains are at their most susceptible. The mere introduction of ideas of gender fluidity or questioning the sexual diversity of a child’s desires can be enough to trigger young minds to have nontraditional sexual thoughts, which would be fully reinforced and encouraged by the government, schools, and peer group.
    5. Government can seize children from families who don’t believe in gender theory
    is that if a child has certain gender feelings that are not supported or actively opposed by one’s parents (which could potentially mean telling your 13 year old that no, you are not a pansexual attack helicopter), this could be considered…
    …a form of abuse, when a child identifies one way and a caregiver is saying no, you need to do this differently… If it’s abuse, and if it’s within the definition, a child can be removed from that environment and placed into protection where the abuse stops.

    Reply
    • Let me make it clear if it is not already that I entirely reject this position of Canadian law. In fact, I find it terrifying that they can claim such powers.
      Sensitive observation and assessment of children who express trans wishes is one thing, but for the state to interfere in this way is staggering and utterly authoritarian. There will be consequences, and I won’t be surprised if in some future years the children who have been subject to this take legal action for reparations against the state for forcing this on them.
      Children should not be encouraged to ‘Question their gender’, and gender nonconformity should be considered something out of the ordinary which is not normal or desirable. Frankly, if I could have done without being transsexual, I would have, but I could not shake it. If it arises spontaneously then see what happens. If it is totally resistant to change or extinction, then go for it as the last resort.

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  24. Just Googled definition of pathology (brain/mush etc). Merriam Webster dictionary popup window offered what was trending… “Transgenderism”.
    Intriguing and informative research. Much appreciated.

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  25. honey your hero girard (who also happens to be one of mine) ~denies~ the existence of the unconscious and similar freudian / jungian ephemera
    a simple point on mimesis will follow: you seem to understand that how we co-ordinate our desires and our selves, (girard would use the term ‘holons’ over selves to express the un-autonomy of such a field, see ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world’) happens in a social field of relations.
    within this field, according to a girardian point of view, how we dress, how we give emotional support, what we can talk about, what sorts of things we can be interested in, how we look, how we express our sexuality, how we express love, how we express joy, how we write, how we talk, how we dance, how we sing, how we cook, almost entirely everything about ourselves, all these things,
    ALL of these things verge or hinge upon something as arbitrary as having certain genitals. you talk about mimesis and yet somehow seem to fail to see this simple point. why the fuck should who someone is to SO LARGE AN EXTENT be determined by their genitals? Well, the answer, is, mimesis. we know this
    this is all many trans people are saying, and maybe some of them (who are also most likely to be homeless, unemployed, facing a whole barrage of social discriminations), just some of them, who desire more autonomy over their battered holon, than a mimetically-gender-obsessed society allows them, should be left in peace
    a final point. physically transitioning is a decidedly western trans narrative
    what am i saying? do some more research, listen more, make more non-white friends maybe lol
    Mariha

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  26. also if you are talking about something like the ‘mainstream transgender movement’ then yeah cool it would have all sorts of neo-liberal problems
    but if you are talking about everyday trans people, especially non-white ones, you seem to me really disconnected.
    and quite a lot of them would be autistic or neurodivergent, a higher percentage than most other groups

    Reply

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