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Second conversation with the real McCoy, on white people who want to be black, gender transference vs. racial transference, why men are trying to get into women’s bodies, the middle way between pathologizing and normalizing, straw man arguments plus ad hominin attacks, Trump & immigration, succumbing to group think, becoming what we’re accused of being, melanin zealots & Jesus freaks, how every conversation becomes about racism, police violence & immigration as racial issues, “Modern Family,” observing trends, white shame and the double standard of neoliberalism, long-term social engineering of intolerance by pushing “tolerance,” the white boogeyman, the comedy of white shaming, covens of brain bangers, the vengeance of the left, vengeance vs. justice, crowd control and traumatization effects, the United States of Trauma, one ideology to rule them, H.G. Well’s Open Conspiracy & the Fabians, a scientific society, the advantage of being a sociopath, rejecting the only true polarity of gender, getting the poor to kill each other, the threat of identity death, an invisible church of social media, the flesh matrix, laboratory earth, Strieber’s narratives, a psychological interpretation of alien abduction, the only worthwhile goal, identity reinforcement, the first straw of identity, the threat of identity flux, a new perspective, an experience of gender-free consciousness, how society does nuance, the Big Lie of Santa, McCoy’s interest in the paranormal, trauma & the psychic realms, the dissociative mechanism, the sleep paralysis experience, lucid dreams & other realities, the reality of ritual abuse, finding evidence for organized abuse, Sebastian Horsley, an internal memory war, childhood memories of dissociation, changing UFO memories, Abbotsholme & Fabianism, memory matrices, “I know you,” a strange attraction, a post-gender society, the raw egotism of children, the anima Yaldaboath, MK-ULTRA memories, Ann Diamond & Leonard Cohen, the secret school narrative, infinity & entropy, cocaine dreams, McCoy’s mysterious hole, a life made of signs.
Songs: “The Kommema and his Religion” and “Of the Lakes, by SunWalker; “Mars Trouble” by The Gandua Sound Project; “Early Clear” by The UpsideDown.
Cross-posting this comment from faceborg for clarification purposes:
Speaking for myself, I am not speaking to the question of whether people should have the right to do what they want with their bodies, which until now was fairly limited, but the question of whether the State and the medical industry should be exploiting people’s identity confusion and prescribing surgery and drug interventions, both to children and adults, based on an ideological principal which IMO is almost wholly divorced from a deep psychological understanding of human beings, and is based, paradoxically, on a wholly mechanistic viewpoint that conjures up an imaginary self independent of biology or soul that somehow needs to have the right to choose how to define itself. This has never worked for anyone so why would we think it would work for these sexually confused souls?
Add to this that the dominant social mandate is to impose that dubious (in terms of whether it really leads to wholeness) choice on everyone else. I never use the term mentally ill, and for me, almost all of our drives can be traced back to early trauma, so I am actually only trying to include transgender drives within that general understanding of human neurosis. I only consider it especially worthy of attention because the measures being sold now are so drastic and irrevocable (body parts removed under the banner of self-realization), because they are being prescribed for children, and because there seems to be an inexplicable movement towards such, what I would call, insanely premature and unfounded measures. I am not aware of a correspondingly far-reaching anti-transgender movement and if there is, I can only suppose it must be in response to (or reaction against) this weird new trend. BUT, I may have been misled by the media in this estimation.
One thing I am fairly sure about, however, is that a lot of people are being manipulated by a kind of ideological Trojan Horse shoe-horning its way into their psyches until they accept and defend something that is very far from harmless. When looked at closely, transgender as a movement (not as an individual experience, please note) appears to be the tip of a deeply sinister and life-destructive iceberg, a socially engineered push towards complete thought-control, on the one hand, and total body-denial on the other. (Speaking of transhumanism in general.)
All points irrevocably to an end of the human race as understood. Transhumanism, AI, robotics and the incremental rise of technology evidence of a non-human form of excellence and intelligence desperate for its own development and improvement through, it would seem, gaining access to human beings’ innate ability to attain higher consciousness and the trigger for considerable forms of creative intelligence etc. It is likely to have happened before. Time may not wait for man but it has a potentially different contract with emerging forms of intelligence. Is it all a traumatic conspiracy to kidnap the capacity of the human mind? Is it the eternal return doing its rounds, and, or, the rejection of the notion of ‘conjunction’ (Gersonoides) and its replacement with a model of immortality according to which it is the content of knowledge of the Acquired Intellect that matters; for when the content of the Acquired Intellect mirrors the rational ordering of the Agent Intellect, immortality is (supposedly) achieved. All mythologies induct us into a program of trance-like acceptance of not being able to ever quite know the why or how of the purpose of the moving target, mystery. Skepticism our final refuge. UFOs, the paranormal etc, traumatic frighteners capable mainly of bumping us back to, on reflection, ‘to get back to where we once belonged’.
Transgender is not a new phenomenon (not a new feature of the human experience)–although it has recently come to be featured more prominently in the media and in general social consciousness–and there may yet be other ways of relating to it that are more helpful and based in truer foundations than what we have suggested to us at the moment.
There is anthropological evidence suggesting that people akin to those identified today as transgender have existed down through time and across cultures, and even in the modern west there was a “community” of sorts of transgender persons, and some literature describing the phenomenon, before it recently hit it big and became a bone of contention/fixture of the neoliberal agenda.
Speaking as a trans person myself, I am not sure this recent development (with Caitlyn Jenner as poster child) has been terribly helpful to my well-being–although I suppose it was inevitable, and there would at some point need to be a reckoning in view of reconciling our emerging self-understandings as trans individuals with what the broader narrative affirms concerning sex/gender.
Yet the question (and answer?) is not so neat as some trans advocates would present it (nevertheless, I understand the impulse/necessity to simplify and consolidate a message to get it heard in the contemporary media sphere, particularly where there is a sense of needing to break through entrenched prejudices), and I think the approach to advocacy we have seen much of recently really does a disservice to trans people ourselves. We do not know what trans is. Let us not act as though we did, and thereby foreclose the possibility of deeper understanding emerging with time.
Certainly there are those of us who still have questions, who moreover expect to live in the question all the days of our lives–and as far as accommodations and concessions on the part of society go, we would prefer the conversation to be less noisy and polarizing, and in some sense less “public.” (Look, I am a lady. If you think I am going to go walking around a women’s locker room with penis dangling, you have deeply misunderstood me.) It seemed it could happen on this level before everybody started trumpeting “trans this” and “trans that” all over the media: it was a deeply personal issue to be dealt with quietly and discreetly.
Yet trans is real. Gender may be a (the?) fundamental polarity, and if so it is certainly not to be taken lightly, or re-visioned carelessly. But especially if it is so that gender is a fundamental polarity, would we not expect it to be a rich field where challenges and peculiar twists on the expected could occur around the periphery? I mean, is anything truly as simple as “this is this and that’s that,” with no overlap, no bleedthrough, no liminal space in between, no exceptions? We know that some humans are born hermaphroditic, and some animals change sex. (And additionally, as I mentioned above, trans has been with us a while. It is not purely an invention of the contemporary transhumanist agenda or any such thing, even if forces at work, however well-intentioned or nefarious they may be, may be using it to serve their own purposes.)
I do not have a definitive explanation for trans, although many thoughts have occurred to me over time, different ways this journey may acquire meaning and significance. Certainly I am interested in what perspectives depth-psychology might offer (including considerations of how trauma may affect its genesis or expression), and most especially “spiritual” perspectives, and how it may be reconciled with the religious outlook.
For religion, I have in mind specifically Christianity, and, more specifically still, Roman Catholic Christianity, since I am in the process of seriously considering a conversion to said religion, having been a “spiritual seeker” much of my life.
I would not be the first transsexual Catholic. I know of a few others, and one in particular who has a project going involving researching and meditating on the questions around how trans individuals may be received in the Church–giving due respect to the teachings and tradition of the Church (we are, after all, faithful believers, struggling to be devout, and not raging social justice warriors convinced we are in possession of the truth) while at the same time giving meaningful and empathetic consideration to the felt reality which has presented itself to us as people who have come to be identified (for better or for worse) under the “trans” moniker–this persistent calling/question asking to be engaged, lived, possibly understood after a fashion.
So certainly some of us are interested in taking an honest, searching and prayerful look at the questions, instead of simply plowing ahead with much shouting and insistence that others see it our way or risk immediate excommunication from polite society. (Seeing what has been happening in the public sphere, I blush and cover my face.)
On the other hand, I know people involved in more mainstream/liberal/LGBT-banner trans activism, including some involved in outreach to trans children and their families, and I believe they typically mean well too. As someone who transitioned in my late teens and early twenties, I can look back and imagine how much nicer it might have been to have had support–whether social, in terms of counseling and awareness of possibilities and role models, or possibly in the form of medical interventions–at an earlier age. I believe that many of those who are involved with trans kids have had a similar experience, and believe they are doing good by raising awareness and making possibilities available to people at a younger age. (Thus less time spent suffering the felt gender mismatch, and more time to integrate into the revised gender role during a time in life where development–physical and psychic–and socialization are still occurring in a concentrated way.) So it makes sense from a certain perspective, and seems a compassionate response.
Anyway, it seems this is turning into a long comment, and showing no signs of drawing to any particular conclusion. I just mean to chime in to say that I have an engagement with the question of transgender that is deeply-felt and means to be serious-minded, and while by and large I feel myself on the side of trans people, in the face of a hostile culture (or one that is facilely accepting, without real understanding), I am also sympathetic to those who want to go on asking questions about it. Indeed, I am one of those who wants to keep engaging the question.
Thanks for sharing all that. It’s a long & thoughtful comment and requires a considered response, which I hope to get to tomorrow. On question came to mind already: do you have any sense of what the social function of transgender individuals throughout history might have been and still be? By social function I don’t mean simply role within society, but I guess in a more evolutionary sense. Also, are you aware of female to male trans throughout history, or if we go far enough back does it become only male to female? (I am interested in the shamanic parallels, and also priestcraft, men attempting to become women. This lore is also in Castaneda.)
I recently heard the term, the Procrustean solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
Pro·crus·te·an
(especially of a framework or system) enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality.
“a fixed Procrustean rule”
It is an irony that the transgender movement which may well have begun as reaction against a Procrustean social view of gender has become itself Procustean.
Every individual has within them both sexes, both biologically speaking & psychologically, as mother-father imagos (both of which combined relate also to the energetic ancestral line). Bringing those polar-forces into balance within the psyche is essential to a full and healthy life and yet, due to social factors preventing a natural development of sexuality, extremely rare.
To see transgender as an expression of this lack of balance is not to reduce it to a symptom of a pathology, but potentially to understand it, like all symptoms, as a process by which balance or wholeness is eventually restored to the collective.
What troubles me is that it is perfectly natural, even inevitable, to experience confusion over our sexuality, and that reconciling male and female within ourselves is central to the alchemical work of individuation. Literalizing this as a biological problem that can be fixed by mechanistic means, whether by dressing up, drugs, or surgery would seem to be not a means to embrace liminality but to banish it.
What might be on the other side of that threshold of sexual identity confusion if the movement was directed inward rather than outward?
and:
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3091.htm
agree with you. and doesn’t big pharma & the medical establishment profit enormously from people with gender identity crises in a big way? i have a friend who is a trans-man & he pays a lot of money every month for his hormones — if he stops taking them, he goes back to being ‘female’ (albeit one without breasts & a uterus).
If a child doesn’t identify with its genitalia, wouldn’t it make more sense to give them the hormones that go with the genitalia it was born with, rather than mutating the body to sync up with the ‘feeling’?
as an aside, with regard to breast augmentation: i live on the french riviera, where they were the first to go topless on the beach. what i’ve noticed in the past few years is that very few young women go topless — it’s only the middle-aged and elderly women going topless. i’ve also noticed that even bathing suit tops have padding in them now (like bras). it’s like if we don’t have perfect breasts, then we have to make like we do. breast augmentation has become the norm, even among young women.
Jasun
Your podcast remains a beacon of unbridled human thought in a sea of chained beasts. I’d like to highlight a couple of things that have resonated with me recently that you have discussed
1. The possibility that there are humans who would seek to destroy human qua human in favor of a kind of milquetoast consciousness (ie the end of the body and gender). Is this not the bacterial urge, the dream of pure unity, of existence without distinction- a pre-cellular life? Baudrillard talks of this dream, the fatal urge of thought to destroy the mystery of human life and seduction/alien existence. The pure ordering of all things-as you describe it, the virus of language would memify everything into its incubating and isolating chambers.
2. The abomination of thought: I have often considered the outer perimeters of our own cognitive powers as demonstrating the unhealthy possibility of human thought-like were not quite smart enough to truly appreciate some of things we can contemplate. Taking a truly third person view as to human life seems toxic and undermines our experience. But your discussion most recently about the possibility that our contemplation of our brutality itself gives rise to our moral selves was quite fascinating and is a considerably novel theory of virtue.
3. The matrix theory. It seems that the nature of reality is the keystone to almost all thought. It is an area that vexes me. This hypothesis (that reality is fabricated in some way) would seem to underline another hypothesis, namely that our thoughts reflect reality in some critical fashion. However sanity depends on the object-reality. Without the reflection of some outside world, we seem to get lost in the psyche. It’s not enough for us to believe in the ruminations we experience alone. Precisely because these thoughts and experiences would seem to be alien abduction type phenomena if it weren’t for some qualifying component. External reality (or a belief therein) allows us to escape from the UFO of our mind. Which arrived without explanation, and continues to subject us to experimentation. And it is the great mystery that lurks within all discussions-where exactly are we, and how did we get here?
Love this comment, and not just coz it’s so flattering
Is this not the bacterial urge, the dream of pure unity, of existence without distinction- a pre-cellular life? Baudrillard talks of this dream, the fatal urge of thought to destroy the mystery of human life and seduction/alien existence.
Sounds a bit like how when a culture becomes increasingly complexified it also becomes more and more body-denying/distorting (e.g., foot-binding) and how this resemble an organism as it decays. Paradoxically the dream of pure unity leads to the reverse, a corpse being the most fertile ground for bacteria to thrive in?
Taking a truly third person view as to human life seems toxic and undermines our experience. But your discussion most recently about the possibility that our contemplation of our brutality itself gives rise to our moral selves was quite fascinating and is a considerably novel theory of virtue.
Is that what I said? If I did, seems like I approached it from the opposite angle, that an awareness of our brutality and corresponding shame/self-rejection leads to a form of conscious, willed brutality, making morality the root of all evil (as a former self once wrote, tho “moralism” would be a more correct word for it).
The matrix theory. It seems that the nature of reality is the keystone to almost all thought. It is an area that vexes me. This hypothesis (that reality is fabricated in some way) would seem to underline another hypothesis, namely that our thoughts reflect reality in some critical fashion. However sanity depends on the object-reality.
Sanity, or identity? A sense of a separate self depends on a fixed outer world separate from ourselves and therefore beyond the influence of our thoughts. An experience of unified conscious that is connected to all things would contain everything within it, hence only internal reality remains yet without denying the “objective” reality of what we are seeing with our organism’s eyes. To be abducted by the UFO-psyche and taken home to the stars….?
Agree here. The rational mind destroys, it dissolves into components, and then grows and lives again in its remainder. It is the civilizing of our impulses writ large, the disembodiment of experience itself, and the reconstitution of said experience into zombie versions of it. It is like a TV show that has gone on too long.
Right, well I think thats how it works as a practical matter. But the initial instinct – the initial awareness – leaves open the door for a future in which we treat each other as ends, and subdue the dominating impulse. But maybe that creates even worse barbarians? Who must we scapegoat in order to satisfy that suppressed urge?
Haha excellent. The minds eye currently cannot make the journey currently (or at least I have trouble myself). One day maybe, though I think the worry is we might go into hell or worse before humans can cross that threshold.
The story of one organism who, with the help of a “sympathetic psychologist”, deliberately blinded herself with drain cleaner because she did not identify as a sighted person.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3256029/Woman-dreamed-blind-DRAIN-CLEANER-poured-eyes-fulfil-lifelong-wish-says-happier-ever.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorder
Greetings Erin and Pamela, and Vivian, and Sr (good comment, Sr), Lcy, and of course Jasun.
To come at this from another angle, to open things up a bit more for consideration, the conversation begun by Erin and Pamela with Jasun brings to my mind Genesis P-Orridge, who was in groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. He has had extensive plastic surgery to make himself resemble the love of his life, Jacqueline Breyer. I’ve been a fan of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV going back to my youth. When I first learned of P-Orridge doing this, I thought, “Aw, that’s fucked up. There must be something wrong in his head.” To me s/he looks hideous, but beyond that, I personally love Genesis P-Orridge, have always found him marvelous in creative subversiveness, have always been taken by how fearlessly s/he articulates and explores ideas. You could say a totally committed liminalist.
Here’s a quote from an article about what s/he has called the Pandrogeny project:
“But that was all before 1993, when he met Jacqueline Breyer. Known to friends as Lady Jaye, she was a tall, Twiggy-esque blonde who had dabbled in dominatrix work, and she shared his interest in body modification. P-Orridge fell hard for her, as he tends to do (he can “swallow a lot of you,” a friend notes). He bought a brownstone that had belonged to Breyer’s grandmother, and they moved in. Breyer was equally enthralled, referring to P-Orridge—an occultist with thirteen penis piercings—as Bunny. “We fell in love the minute we saw each other, and as we became more and more obsessively in love, we had that whole feeling of ‘I wish I could eat you up. I wish I could just take you, and I become you and you become me,’ ” he says.
So as a tenth-anniversary present to each other, they began to do just that. They called the project “Pandrogeny.” On Valentine’s Day 2003, the two received matching sets of breast implants from Dr. Daniel Baker, a well-known Upper East Side cosmetic surgeon. Eye and nose jobs followed, and in subsequent years the two would receive, altogether, $200,000 worth of cheek and chin implants, lip plumping, liposuction, a tattooed beauty mark, and hormone therapy. They dressed in identical outfits. Each mimicked the other’s mannerisms.
And then in 2007, after returning from a tour with Psychic TV’s spinoff, PTV3, they lost half of their unified whole: Breyer died at 38, of stomach cancer. She’d been about to get a set of gold teeth, to match his.”
“We were getting there, weren’t we?” Sitting in their apartment nearly two years later, P-Orridge refers to himself in the plural: “we,” “us,” “our.” Not on occasion, or when he remembers, but resolutely: in conversation, in e-mail exchanges. (I’m sticking with “he” and “him” here, for clarity’s sake.) He believes that his wife still exists within him. The project, P-Orridge says, has little to do with sex or vanity, and more to do with behavioral science—testing the boundaries of identity, redirecting the way “other people encode their expectations and their needs on you.” It’s like his collage work in that “we’ve always been interested in falling out of the frame.”
——-
There’s a documentary about this relationship called “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.” After watching the documentary, I’ve sort of revised my opinion about what s/he’s doing, what they set out to do together. Beyond the appearance I can feel humanity and love in it, their total commitment and devotion to each other. This is territory I believe we cease to have the right to judge. It may be totally fucked up to me what makes this or that relationship work, and what individuals do to express their love, commitment and devotion to each other, but this is just me on the outside with my own personal preferences and biases, my own fears and insecurities, my own dark desires and needs.
When I see clips of P-Orridge talking with lipstick on and women’s apparel, I still sort of cringe but also find it amusing (not in a mean way). P-Orridge himself has fun with it. P-Orridge is so fascinating and original that there’s really no comparison. A true act of transgression may lead to liberation, a restoring of concrete individuality, or fail miserably, and that’s when others move in with their branding irons, their insults, the mob mentality taking over and calling for a lynching, to protect at all costs their little status quo. The true inner ugliness surfaces in the horde, foaming at the mouth. To succeed one must be totally committed and follow all the way through. There’s no going half-way and no turning back. Actually motivated by love and devotion, not for superficial reasons at all, also if you consider P-Orridge’s past and history, the cut-up and collage elements and methods he has experimented with in his own music and art, I think P-Orridge has not as a sick impulsive leap or wildly irrational act but quite logically and in full self-awareness pushed beyond the standard beauty tropes which ensnare the majority, the commercial Beauty Industry which rolls along and has so many individuals mutilating themselves, to serve the ruthless Goddess. Yet I think by what P-Orridge has done to him/herself, the irreversible lengths to which s/he has gone, one might say taunting the ruthless Goddess and even defying Her, going beyond Her more commercial methods of getting others to conform to Her and worship Her, the ruthless Goddess will surely follow him/her around as a shadow for the rest of his/ her life, threatening to swallow him/her, whispering in his/her ear continually that s/he’s a hideous monster.
Here we part ways, John, and drastically. I can think of no better or more grotesque example of destructive self-delusion than that of Gen-Po. As happens my brother ran with that pack for a brief while & even received a curse from G-Po, acc. to my brother’s account anyway. Not sure if that’s relevant except that P-Orrige’s affiliation with The Process Church & the latter’s with Satanism, organized ritual abuse, and intelligence psy-ops underscored my sense of my brother’s being pulled into a nexus of darkness from an early age. This is not liminalism, as i pointed out above, it’s the precise opposite. Going against the frothing mob or socially imposed standards of beauty by de-forming oneself and concretizing an internally generated phantasy is not liberation, it’s negative identity politics, and is akin to giving the keys of the body to the damaged fragment and forever banishing the total soul. Nothing more tragic than this, IMO, unless it be when others admire and praise such behavior.
Very good rather recent interview of Genesis P-Orridge on YouTube. “Interview: Life advice from Genesis P-Orridge” – To me P-Orridge is quite grounded and full of good sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpX8trRqbuA
Offering life advice, no less! As the owner of this site, I strongly advise readers to steer clear of the above video. But of course, you must decide for yourself what “grounded good sense” looks and sounds like!
Didn’t realize I touched a nerve with you, Jasun. I apologize for that. Anyway, I don’t have an agenda. If you’d like, you can delete my comments. We can regroup and steer this in another direction.
“touching a nerve” reduces it to a personal thing. You did, but that doesn’t mean you should not be free to express your opinion, nor does it mean that my own are simply reactions to having a nerve struck. as i said previously this site is not well-designed for discussion, however.
Agreed, Jasun. Ah, the written word. It sucks. The limitations, the difficulties. I realize there’s a ton more behind all this than mere reactions. I may be a naive fool. That’s a possibility too!
Faulty perception &/or interpretation is always a possibility. This is a real dilemma for me, whenever I reach a seeming impasse with someone & want to simply say, “If you can’t recognize insanity/delusion when you see it, what’s left to talk about???” Knowing this is useless to say, but at the same time, not wanting to continue to discuss a subject when the viewpoints are so diametrically opposed, neither wanting to just ignore it and move onto something else. The same happened with a cousin who was praising Hilary C. It forces a realization, that said person is not ready to go into certain areas and so should not be forced to. But at my end, there’s a cognitive dissonance and a necessary readjustment, which relates to seeing my own delusion about said person. & of course we are the only ones responsible for our own delusions, at least now we are adults. All I can do in this present case is suggest that you sincerely reconsider your opinions about P-Orrige based on what I’ve said, not so as to be able to agree with me or placate me, but because you may be wrong, and it is always good to see faulty perceptions for what they are, and because they are, IMO, invariably part of a larger delusional complex or blind spot (as I discovered looking into Whitley Strieber).
Some facts and conclusions from https://radio.therightstuff.biz/2016/08/07/darwin-digest-episode-23-transgender-and-intersex/
0.12.56 DAVID Reimer not Daniel, Given that Wikipedia has a bias against un-PC stuff, go read his Wiki page and imagine how much worse it must be.
CORRECTION: It’s come to my attention the John Money likely does not echo. Thanks Wat
0.27.55 Life outcomes for transgender patients.
0.35.55 Economic cost of gender reassignment surgery
0.38.11 What defines an intersex disorder
0.45.00 Examples of how intersex disorders occur
1.08.40 Histrionic personality disorder
1.16.36 The degeneration of culture and society in the West a possible cause for all this
1.27.38 A question from the viewers: how do sites like 23 and me know what your heritage is?
1.31.31 Sorry I misspoke here. SNP = single nucleotide polymorphism.
When one googles ” bertrand russell scientifically engineered society ” the first thing that comes up is Jasun Horsleys writings at disinfo ! Ha ha
Real Mccoy – Jasun was born around Christmas so you may have found your way back to Santa yet again ..
Loved listening to you guys jam , RealMccoy remnded me of Joaquin phoenix character in ” irrational guy”