After two years of more of less isolation, perhaps we’ve all fallen into our own personal echo chambers.
It’s not intentional. It’s simply what happens in isolation. There will be those who say we’ve not been isolated because we have the internet and the news, etc. But we have been isolated from people and friends who challenge our beliefs.
It’s the personal interactions, it’s the people we care about, our friends, family, etc. who add balance to our thoughts and opinions. Without those people challenging us, we fall into patterns where it’s far too easy to self validate what we think and as humans do, we assume that we’re right.
COVID has provided a perfect storm in this regard.
No matter how egalitarian we try to be in our news absorption we inevitably develop biases and preferred news sources. It could happen because those sources have pretty people, or entertaining pieces, or that they simply validate what we’re already thinking. Eventually we choose those sources that we’re comfortable with. Then we narrow our focus to only the comfortable.
Without discussion and interaction. Without people we respect and care about pushing back and saying, “Well this report here says thus and such,” it’s easy to create an echo chamber and not notice it.
I’m guilty… Are you?
That’s not about laying blame. None of us should feel threatened by this realization. It’s just a sign post that says, “Hey there, we need to do better.” None of us are perfect, but we all should at least aspire to keep walking that path and get as close as possible.
The problem with echo chambers is they feed division. Everyone walks around with their own entrenched beliefs and they defend them.
How many people have said, or been heard to say, “You are wrong and I don’t want to be friends anymore,”? Isn’t that the same as a dating profile saying “Republicans don’t contact me,”
That’s not healing, that’s not being open minded. It’s in the discussion of even closely held beliefs that validation, or error is uncovered. Sometimes neither validation or error is uncovered but the discussion provides enlightenment.
The enlightenment I’m talking about is understanding what drives the core belief. For example. Just because someone was tried for a crime and there was nothing uncovered in a trial that was legally actionable. It doesn’t mean there was nothing there in the first place. It may mean that someone was skating along the boundaries of the law and they were clever enough or lucky enough to stay just out of reach.
Al Capone is a good example. For years the FBI and other law enforcement knew Capone was in charge of a massive criminal organization. They could never actually pin anything on him directly. They didn’t have sufficient evidence and no matter how many times they arrested Capone, the case always fell apart. Until the IRS got involved. Then it was a whole new ball game.
Maybe, a way forward for all of us, is to have those uncomfortable discussions. But both parties really need to listen.
That’s the hard part, listening and divorcing yourself from your beliefs for a time. That way, you can get into the head of the other person thereby understanding the factual or not so factual underpinning of why they believe a certain way about something.
It doesn’t matter if you agree or not with their belief. What matters is that we all acknowledge that no-one is an idiot for thinking in a way we don’t agree with. It’s just that we each put “facts” together in some kind of order that makes it possible to cope with the world around us.
I’ve written in these pages that I personally think something was amiss in the most recent election. For that matter I could make a case that something has been amiss in elections going back decades.
When I’ve said that I thought the most recent election should be investigated. It wasn’t to depose Biden and install Trump. I honestly don’t care about which of the two is president.
I’m not even sure if constitutionally Biden could be removed at this point. I don’t even want to consider the chaos that removing a Biden Administration and installing a Trump Administration would cause. I guess I’m more of a, “Well, we’re here now, we just have to muddle through,” we have to do better next time. I don’t like Biden. I personally think he’s incompetent, but Harris is no better.
I as a voter, don’t like being placed in a situation where I feel that I have to choose the devil or the deep blue sea.
That doesn’t mean that I’m pro Trump. I personally think that he did some things that were beneficial for the country in the near term but I don’t have enough knowledge of politics to be able to project how those near term benefits play out over time. I’m willing to acknowledge that perhaps the folks who were screaming about his policies know, or knew something I missed.
When I say I think we should look at the elections, I’m saying that from a perspective of fixing what’s broken.
How do we change the system to make sure that the next election, everyone feels confident enough in the system that they believe the results represent the will of the electorate? I’d like for everyone to be able to comfortably say, “I didn’t like the result but that’s okay, because the system was fair and it works.“
I’d be willing to bet that average folks on both sides of the political gulf could get behind that. The politicians might not like it all that much, but the people they’re supposed to represent might like it a lot.
It hit me, that folks might not understand the nuance I’m talking about. I’d like to see a disassembly of the voting process to find the bugs and plug them. That would be a big task, and it would take representation from all parties, not just the big two. That’s also why I’m in the near term pro voter ID.
I’m not about preventing someone from casting their vote. I am about preventing someone from casting 20 votes. Yes, it would be inconvenient to have to present ID to obtain a ballot. but the benefit outweighs the inconvenience. God knows, I remember how slow it was to write a check and present ID in the grocery store line.
I’d like to see the next election, be clean. I’d like for there to be no margin for a candidate to do what Trump did this last election. We should remember that before Trump, there was Al Gore claiming the election irregularities.
Folks call it “The Big Lie”. I call it a warning sign. How about we figure out a way to eliminate the possibility of “The Big Lie” altogether? That seems like a worth while enterprise doesn’t it?
I’m amazed how many people have Trump living in their heads rent free. I’d prefer to push him into history and deal with what is in front of us. Yes, I acknowledge that Trump is living in my head rent free too. I try very hard to only let him have a cheap studio apartment with a leaky toilet. It’s hard to do because there’s so much media attention still focused on him.
I’d tell you to read the bill. Unfortunately you seem to have a difficult time understanding English. I’ll chalk that up to your teachers spending too much time with silly fluff passing as education and not actually grading your work, thereby neglecting the more basic aspects of your fundamental education.
After all, it’s unfair to be mean to the village idiot or call them out for being an idiot.
I’ve read the bill. It’s here if you’d like to, or can, read it for yourselves.
I’d remind you Democrats, that you’re the same people who look at a man, a stranger, with suspicion ready to call a cop, if that man happens to see your child about to fall and catches the child out of instinct.
You’re the people who in years gone by attempted to destroy at least one California man because he happened to be naked… IN HIS OWN KITCHEN one sunny morning. He’d forgotten that a set of curtains was open. This allowed a nosey busybody to see his nudity from a sidewalk through a hedge.
You’re the people that call child protective services on parents if their child happens to mention they’ve seen Daddy or even Mommy in the shower.
You’re the people that have made changing clothes for PE and taking showers after PE something sexual and sick instead of what it is, simple functionality.
All of these things, you’ve created and nurtured with the mantra, “It’s for the Children.”
You’re the people that have so confused things, that multi-urinal men’s rooms are going the way of the Dodo. I can only attribute this to penis envy on the part of some very angry harridans who felt it unfair that men could go into a men’s room and relieve themselves in a couple of minutes. As opposed to the harridans waiting in line while their sisters occupied the ladies room for 15 or 20 minutes.
Now, you village idiots are screaming bloody murder because parents and real people who have nieces and nephews are pushing back against discussing sexuality, any sexuality, with Elementary School children aged 4 to 9 in a classroom environment.
There was a time when that would have gotten you on a perverts list.
So you’re saying it’s bad if a child sees Daddy or Mommy’s privates at home, but it’s perfectly okay for that same child to be taught and shown the ins & outs of all kinds of sexual behavior well before they’ve got any clue about what their parts are for.
Until I was 10 the only thing I knew my penis could do was pass urine. Fortunately, somewhere between 10 and 12, one or both of my parents realized that I’d discovered an alternate function. They provided a very helpful gender specific, age appropriate book, that explained the changes that were happening. The book just appeared on my bed one day.
Inside the book in my father’s bold handwriting was a note. The note said, “You’re normal, If you have any questions now ask myself or your mother. You and I can talk whenever you’re ready.”
As I recall, there were very helpful line drawings that showed me the internals and externals of my plumbing. They were relatable and informative, as was the text of the book.
This was 1970. I remember feeling safe and not threatened. They knew, I knew, they knew I knew they knew, and in all we were a knowledgable family. (To paraphrase Hepburn from The Lion in Winter.)
What my parents didn’t know, and I didn’t admit to myself until I was between 18 and 21 was that I had rather broad sexual tastes. I tried both genders, choosing whichever one was at the time, more interesting.
Looking back, knowing there was the freedom to be who I was, would have been helpful. That being said, in the 70’s and 80’s men who “did” with men were still subject to arrest and imprisonment. For that matter, in some states, any sexual activity other than putting tab A in slot B was illegal. Yep, oral sex was illegal even between married consenting adults.
Talk about government overreach!
I’m pro sex education for teenagers. I think that it is something that could be very good especially if it dispelled fear, and shame, and made it clear that sexual expression is natural and healthy.
I’d also say that letting appropriately aged children know that whoever they want to be with is okay. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain what responsibilities come with sex. Tell the students that their bodies are theirs, and they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to or are not ready for. There’s no shame in saying “No.”
When I was 10, I was developing a bit early. None of my friends in that age group were close to the “discovery” I made. By the time I was 12 things had changed. That book my parents gave me was read cover to cover by all my close friends. They also read my Father’s note to me. The note itself was the perfect size to be a great bookmark.
They were ready and knew I had resources.
I will not discuss the projector incident(s)… 8mm was a very popular format. That’s a funny story, because 25 years later I found out that the projector and associated films were not owned by my Father or Mother. They belonged to a close family friend who hung around after my parents were divorced. A bunch of 13 year old boys watching silent dirty movies projected on a nicely painted flat white closet door must have been a sight. Ahh, the good old days!
I am absolutely opposed to talking about sex with children in elementary school. I believe that the innocence of children is to be protected and cherished. Let children be children and let their bodies tell them when it’s time to start growing up.
I started that process young, and I had parents that understood. I realize that not all children are as fortunate but I can tell you without question, at 10 my body showed me a neat trick. I wouldn’t have been ready for all the permutations and combinations of human sexuality. It was all I could do to just understand what was going on with me.
I didn’t care then, that in the future my tab A was supposed to fit inside someone. At the time my personal tab A was making me very happy all on its own. The very concept of putting a part of me inside someone was, in the vernacular of my 10 year old self, “Icky”. I didn’t want or need to know about the wild world of sexual sports.
There’s stuff I’ve seen and done, that I wish I hadn’t. Once you see or experience something you don’t forget, even if you want to. I think that is probably more true of children because they don’t have filters. It’s the adults in the room that are supposed to provide the filtering.
So Democrats, quit mislabeling the FL bill as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Call it what it is, “The Protect the Innocence of Children Bill”
After all Protect the Children is your favorite chorus isn’t it?
In remarks to the 82nd Airborne Biden did his usual rambling type of speech. It’s Here if you’d like to read it for yourself. I personally find that reading his speeches, like listening to them, makes my dang head hurt.
You’ve been warned…
The part of the speech that made my blood run cold was this:
And — so, you know, with the Ukrainian people — Ukrainian people have a lot of backbone. They have a lot of guts. And I’m sure you’re observing it. And I don’t mean just their military, which is — we’ve been training since back when they — Russia moved into the — in the southeast — southeast Ukraine — but also the average citizen. Look at how they’re stepping up. Look at how they’re stepping up.
And you’re going to see when you’re there. And you — some — some of you have been there. You’re going to see — you’re going to see women, young people standing — standing the middle of — in front of a damn tank, just saying, “I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.” They’re incredible. But they take a lot of inspiration from us.
Remarks by President Biden During Visit with Service Members of the 82nd Airborne Division. March 25, 2022
Did President Biden just say to the world, including President Putin that the United States was going to deploy troops?
Wasn’t that one of the things that Putin said was going to trigger a vigorous, Possibly nuclear Russian response?
I’m used to idiotic saber rattling. But DAMN!
If you’ve poked the bear and managed to not get eaten, it’s probably not a good idea to poke the bear again.
Thus far the Russian / Ukraine war has been largely an affair between two affiliated countries. Ukraine was, after all part of the old USSR. The tipping point for Putin, (if there is a geopolitical one,) appears to have something to do with the possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO nation.
I doubt seriously that NATO would accept Ukraine, but that’s a different issue. Putin on the other hand has reason to prevent Ukraine becoming part of NATO.
NATO troops sitting that close to Moscow would give Putin endless headaches and he would likely perceive it as an ongoing threat. It’s a little too close to home. I go so far as to say Putin is telling the world, “Not in MY backyard!”
The long history between Russia and Ukraine is too intricate and soaked with too much blood for me to begin to understand the underlying issues between them. That’s the job of political historians and I’m so not qualified.
I have begun to think that Zelenskyy and Putin may well be cut from the same cloth.
I don’t know if there can be a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the two countries. That’s for diplomats from Ukraine and Russia to work out, Send some decent and savvy ambassadors to assist in brokering a deal, but keep Biden himself 10,000 miles away.
Who knows? It might be something as simple as Ukraine saying they won’t join NATO.
I feel compassion for the Ukrainian people that have been conscripted, killed, displaced, and had their lives and homes destroyed.
I however, don’t think that it’s smart in any way for The President of the United States to add fuel to the fire.
I’m not ready for World War III. I haven’t finished building my hyperdrive!
Joking aside, we need a strong cogent statesman. We do not need a President that isn’t respected, (or perhaps feared,) by the leaders of the world.
There are reports that the Saudis aren’t taking calls from Biden, and other reports that suggest General Miley is not having his calls returned by his counterparts in Moscow.
It bodes ill that two former superpowers heavily armed with nuclear weapons aren’t talking with each other.
We can only hope at this point that Biden did not mean what he said in his remarks to the 82nd, and that the world leaders assume it was a doddering senile old fool speaking.
Who knows, it might be the one time when Biden’s apparent state of mind does some good.
Years ago, I was speaking with a Professor friend of mine, extolling the virtues of digital books.
In my idealism I was bubbling over about the elimination of the high cost associated with college text books. I saw this as a new age where everyone would have better access to higher education and as new discoveries were made, the new data could effortlessly be inserted in the text books so people wouldn’t have to buy the revised editions of a hard copy.
My Professor friend nodded and conceded that if things worked that way, it would improve education and could make higer education somewhat less costly.
He said simply, “Sometimes the best ideas, built on the best of intentions, don’t work out like we think they will. I’ll stick with my dusty paper books for the time being.”
At the time I envisioned a world where everyone had access to the sum total of human knowledge and that we would then all be playing on a level field. Naively I thought that the best angels of humanity would rise to the top and we would enter a new age of cooperation and creativity. I thought equality and harmony were just around the corner, built on free exchange of information and thought.
I WAS A MORON!
Yep, at that time in my life I was leaning pretty left. I thought the vast majority of people would choose light and temper their natural selfishness because the promise of everyone being happy, healthy, and productive would be so alluring.
Looking back from 2021, I have a bitter laugh. There’s also a sadness, humanity could be so much more, but the opportunity may have passed. Now I think we’re heading for another “Dark Age”.
Five years, or so later, my friend and I were having a similar discussion. This time the discussion started because He was having to incorporate EBooks into his curriculum. He was dealing with variations in some of the books. It turned out that many of the Ebooks, even though they had the same ISBN number contained different text and there was no notation of when revisions had been made. To make things more confusing the Ebooks didn’t match the hardcopy text books that could be purchased from the campus book store.
That was when I realized that an Orwellian component had come into play. In my innocence I’d never considered that anyone would prefer censorship or alteration of the facts in a book, to fit a narrative. I actually believed that we as a species had grown beyond that.
Truth rings like a bell. You might not like it, but Truth stands on it’s own merit.
Knowledge, and understanding may start out flawed, but there is a logical step by step refinement that is driven by the truth of new undeniable facts. We should be able to see that process, to chart it, and books provide the evidence of our journey towards understanding.
If we can look at the old books and theories contained within, we have a view into how knowledge evolves and how new data can, and should trigger re-evaluation of a theory or belief.
I always believed that books, and the written word were somehow sacred. That is why the Nazi book burnings were so abhorrent to me.
During our conversation, discovering that books were no longer being treated with any kind of reverence, it dawned on me perhaps digital media was too ephemeral to be trusted with the knowledge of our species.
Maybe a better method would be to have books start out as digital, collect the data and facts then publish a hard copy (a snapshot if you will,) that would be placed in every library all over the world. Then you’d publish addenda in hard copy as warranted.
But even as I had that thought, I knew the genie was out of the bottle. People will always choose convenience over having to do the actual work of locating a book in a library stack and opening it. The books would simply rot to dust on library shelves.
That was the beginning of my journey toward a more conservative view of the world. That journey continued the more I became aware of subtle changes to books. Specifically Ebooks.
I bought into the convenience of having a book on my phone or computer to read at lunch. I purchased a lot of Ebooks but as I read them there were changes. At first it was small corrections, reasonable edits that corrected a typo or made a sentence read better.
These changes were within what I considered, the realm of reasonable. I could see an author making those changes in the Ebook because it was simple and didn’t require an entirely new press run. The changes would be folded into the printed copies of the book as needed.
But the edits became more plentiful, and far reaching. Soon some of my favorite books diverged in their Ebook form from the hard copy I’d had for years. Then I started seeing it in movies.
The weirdest example was in “Alien”. A friend had a laserdisc version of Alien. When we’d seen the movie in the theater we’d noted that the Nostromo’s shuttle had a name. When we’d purchased the movies on videotape there wasn’t a name on the shuttle.
At the time, we thought it was probably something to do with the resolution of the videotape. When my friend purchased the laserdisc version of Alien, the name once again appeared on the shuttle. But DVD and Bluray versions, the name was gone again.
This suggested that there were multiple versions of the movie and there was no way of telling which cut you actually were purchasing. Shortly after our “discovery” multiple cuts of movies were being repackaged as “New” xyz cuts, thereby maximizing profit to the studios. I think at one time, this friend and I had 6 different cuts of Alien and who knows how many other movies between us.
I lost my DVD / Bluray collection and all of my books in a house fire. At the time, I chose to invest heavily in streaming movies and Ebooks so that I’d never have to face the heartbreak of losing collections again.
Except that’s not how it works.
Movies and books available online can disappear suddenly and with no explanation.
Gone with the Wind,for example now has a whole Social Justice disclaimer before you get to watch the movie.
Looney Toons collections have Whoopie Goldberg reminding viewers that some of the depictions in the cartoon are representative of an era when racial relations were horrific. She even has to comment on Bugs Bunny having a go at German and Japanese soldiers.
All she needed to say was that those cartoons were propaganda from World War II and in context, they were supposed to give theater goers of the time, a laugh and bit of hope. But instead we’re subjected to the whole Social Justice Warrior education about a 6 minute cartoon.
If you’re sitting down to watch Looney Tunes, you’re not looking for any deep political lessons, you’re looking for some mindless goofy antics to put a smile on your face.
The point here is that if everything in malleable, if everthing can be edited and altered then we risk corrupting and losing our global knowledge.
If we eliminate dissenting opinions, we eliminate healthy discourse that could lead in new directions. If we censor comedy, or free speech, in my opinion we accelerate the decline of civilization.
If all that you believe is given to you in little spoonfuls of “Approved” narrative then you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that almost nothing you know is true.
We all know that a large percentage of the population will be surprised, then angry, then possibly violent. When that happens… Well, you have book burnings, and stuff akin to the fall of Rome.
This time, it will be worse than the dark ages. Because libraries have fewer and fewer books, some libraries are even destroying books rather than curating them.
A large percentage of late 20th and early 21st century information is digital only. After everything is burned, the power goes down, the internet doesn’t work, and the cell towers go offline what resources will be available to rebuild from?
We’ve written our knowledge and history in the sand on a beach. When the tide comes in, it will be lost.
Just as a lot of old knowledge had to be rediscovered when the Dark Ages waned, humanity will have to claw their way back from the abyss and start over.
For just a minute, imagine what this world would be like if the industrial revolution had started 300 years earlier. What might we know now? The people of Greece, Rome, China, MesoAmerica, and Egypt were all equal in intelligence to us. What they lacked was knowledge, science, and resources.
All of these civilizations were working on those problems when they fell. We’ll never know how much was lost or suppressed. But we do know they contemplated the stars, and studied mathematics. We know they could build massive structures and grasped art, literature, and rudimentary physics.
An argument could be made that had these civilizations conquered their greed, need to control each other, and war, choosing instead to work together we’d be a lot further along in our development than we are today.
Then again, I’m reminded of the line from The Fifth Element, “Everything you create you use to destroy.”
Perhaps that kind of cooperation would have just reduced the population.
I think it’s time for the trans community to separate from the LGB community.
LGB has become pretty accepted. There are still issues to address and probably will be for the next 20 years or so.
The problem I see rising is that the Trans community has become so conflated with the LGB community at large, that Trans issues are damaging the LGB community and their hard won gains.
Comments in various online publications which were once about 50/50, pro/against LGB issues. Have become increasingly hateful and vicious about just “normal” LGB folks with the addition of the Trans communities never ending strident yelling.
While I agree that everyone should be teated kindly and equally. I don’t think that Trans issues as presented belong in the LGB spectrum. I also think that the way the Trans community is behaving has drawn the LGB part of the community needlessly into an agenda that is not representative of the average LGB person.
Comments in recent articles about Lia Thomas, and Rachel Levine demonstrate in my opinion that America is growing very tired of the Trans community and by extension the LGB community.
Many of the comments paint Trans people as gay or lesbian. Moreover, comments paint the entirety of the LGBT community as deranged, mentally unfit, sick, disgusting, evil, or perpetrating some kind of con on various institutions (Lia Thomas, I’m looking at you).
The Trans people that I have personally known may start out being homosexuals, but that appears to be a transitional phase. The person is homosexual because they believe with all their heart and soul, they were born in the wrong body. They’re intimate with the gender they find attractive but they still feel that their body isn’t right. Several of the Trans folks I’ve known, have entered into loving straight relationships after they’ve transitioned.
A former man, completes the required surgeries, and then marries as a woman to another man. They aren’t homosexual at that point.
The full transitions I’ve known, left the LGB community and went off to live in suburbia with their husbands and most have adopted children.
The LGB folks don’t believe they were born wrong. Typically they believe they were born a bit different but they’re content being whatever gender they were born. They don’t feel alien in their own bodies, they’re comfortable in preferring intimacy with members of the same gender.
I know for some, this is a difficult distinction, but it’s an important one.
My personal experience is very different from the strident demands of today.
What passes for the Trans community these days doesn’t seem to have the same appreciation for the gravity of the decision Transgender people had in years past.
It’s not just about pumping hormones into your body. Yes, that is part of it, but it’s about where your head is at. A transgendered friend told me that before the surgery when she looked in the mirror she perceived her male body as a suit she was trapped in. She said that she’d felt this way for her entire male life. When she woke up from surgery, during the months of healing she anticipated seeing her true self.
She said that the first time she saw herself in a mirror after healing, she cried with joy because she felt like she’d awakened from a terrible dream. For the first time in her life, she saw herself as the person she had always been.
As a male, she’d been somewhat androgynous. As a female, she was beautiful. You had to really look closely to see minimal telltales left by her time as a male.
As a male, he’d had a slight physique very little body hair and an average sized penis and testicles. His personality was sparkling, witty, and intelligent. He was a lot of fun to be around, a great entertainer, classy, with a sense of understated style. He was a great date, and knew how to please a man.
Post Surgery, as a woman, she had beautiful breasts. they were not ostentatious or out sized. The hormones added a little padding to her hips accentuating a femininity that I’d never noticed. She was still all the other things. Sparkling, witty, intelligent, classy, stylish, a great date, and she still knew how to please a man. She was different from any other woman I’d been with, in that she was always 100% engaged in sex. Her vagina was beautiful, and visually indistinguishable from any woman I’d been with.
She joked about it a little one night as we were cuddling in her bed in the dark. She said she’d paid for the full top of the line package and one of the best surgeons. She felt she was worth it since she was reclaiming her real body. Then she asked if she’d gotten her moneys worth.
I kissed her and told her, “Yes,” as far as I could see.
She later told me I’d been her last sexual partner as a man, and her first sexual partner as a woman. She liked the symmetry. Later she made a comment that stuck with me through the years. She said, “The unhappy old me died on the operating table, the new me is going to live savoring each day.”
About a year later, after all the documentation was settled, she took a job on the East Coast.
Several years later, there was a Christmas card with a picture of her, her husband, and his child from a previous marriage. The note inside said simply, “Can you believe I’m the ‘evil’ stepmother! I love my husband and while my life may be shorter than it would have been otherwise, it’s been marvelous so far. This is the life I always wanted. P.S. You were right I think. When we got serious I told him everything and let him decide from there. He thought about it for a week or two, then decided he didn’t care. We were married six months later. Thank you my friend.”
We’ve lost touch over the years, the last I heard she was still married, living in upstate New York and very happy.
Perhaps the fact that I’ve known intimately and personally someone who was transgender is coloring my view. When she began her transition, she dressed as a woman, and was never concerned about using the ladies room. She’d sometimes comment ruefully that she’d miss urinals because they were just so much easier to deal with. She had a group of close supportive friends and we all just accepted.
Perhaps it was easier for her and us, because pre surgery she could easily pass as a woman. Perhaps, it was that at the time that the LGBT community was far less divided, more forgiving, and more accepting than today. Perhaps, it was that he/she was really a she trapped in the wrong body.
One thing I learned from her is that people see exactly what they want to see. Pre surgery, Miranda took me to The Magic Castle in LA for my birthday. She wasn’t fooled too often in the close up sleight of hand room. Later in the evening, we bumped into the magician she’d inadvertently made sweat. He asked how she knew his tricks and if she was a magician herself. She smiled sweetly and said, “Yes, in a way. You think I’m a woman don’t you?” She hugged the stunned magician and thanked him for an impressive show.
I wondered at the time if the knowledge that people see what they want to see, was why she was so good in business negotiations.
The difference I see now, versus then is that the Trans community today is very much in everybody’s face. They’re apparently angry and hostile and I don’t get why.
The Trans people I’ve known in years past weren’t angry, they were kind and gentle spirits. They were in intense counseling, not to make them be something they were not. But to make sure that they fully understood all the ramifications and risks. They were the people most in-touch with their feelings. They’d put in the time to understand themselves. They’d done all this work prior to beginning the hormones and transition because at the time, it was one of those things that you only got one shot at. They also had very realistic expectations about what they’d look like afterwards.
Some Trans people just aren’t that pretty or believable when they’re done. Back in the day, if the outcome wasn’t going to be a good one, a surgeon might simply refuse.
It makes no sense to take a decent looking man or woman and turn them into someone that will never be happy with the results of the transition surgery. Why modify someone that’s already lonely but has a shot at dating, perhaps love, into someone that is unattractive and has no shot at dating or happiness? Doctors used to take an oath to do no harm. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if the oath they take today is set to Pink Floyd’s Money.
I mean really, would you date Rachel Levine? It’s not necessarily about age, even Lia Thomas looks much better as a male than as a female. In Thomas’s case artful surgery might make him somewhat appealing as a woman but he’ll always have the proportions of a man.
In this time of gender fluidity or non-binary sexuality it seems that folks aren’t thinking that way. What future will an ugly, angry, old, Transgender have? What ever happened to honestly estimating/evaluating the outcome of a surgical procedure?
Why don’t surgeons say, “You’re too masculine / feminine for me to make you look like the opposite gender. Your hips are too narrow or wide, your shoulders are too broad or narrow, your face is too characteristically male or female. We can do this surgery if you insist, but my professional opinion is I don’t think you’ll be happy with the results.”
The same could be said of tattoo artists. If a tattoo is the first part of a large piece, say a tattoo sleeve, then isn’t it incumbent on the artist to tell the client a particular tattoo isn’t going to work in the sleeve?
I’d really appreciate a tattoo artist telling me something like, “This isn’t going to work, let me see if I can redesign it so that it fits better with the whole piece. Come back in a week and I’ll show you some options,” I’d appreciate the thoughtfulness and concern.
Instead, what we seem to have is, “let me prescribe some puberty blockers or hormones for a while and let’s see how you feel.”
Having lived for a long time as a Bi man, I found that while my sexuality is non-binary, my gender very much is.
I searched for love and found it. I don’t and didn’t care what gender package that love was wrapped up in. Arguably, I’m far more comfortable with another man but I’ve never excluded the possibility that I might find an equally loving relationship with a woman.
Looking back, I loved Mark/Miranda. (She claimed she didn’t want to change the monograms on the towels. I think it was that Miranda or ‘Miri’ was an uncommon name and it’s as pretty as she was.) I wasn’t in a place where I was ready for commitment or marriage, She was. That doesn’t discount the fact that it was the person, not necessarily the gender that I cared for.
I throughly enjoyed our time together and yes, loved him/her in both genders.
The point is, you don’t just wake up one day and declare you’re a woman or man arbitrarily. Just saying you’re Trans doesn’t give you the right to play dress up just because you want to mess with people. Drs handing out hormone therapy or puberty blockers as though it’s not a big deal, to people who’ve not done the really hard work involved in counseling and therapy is, in my opinion, a very bad idea.
I’m not Trans. I can’t speak from inside a Trans person’s skin. But I’ve walked alongside a person who was. I’ll never know all the introspection and questioning that Mark did.
I do know it was years in the making and that I came on the scene only in the last few years. When I met Mark, he was content with his choice & still dressing as a man. During the time I knew him he began dressing as Miranda moving toward full transition. He was the most stable, put together, person I’ve known.
When Miranda came home from the sabbatical, during which she had the surgeries and recuperation, she was still the most stable person I knew. She was also the most serene person I’ve ever known.
The same is generally true of the other Trans people that have passed through my life. None of them were hostile, angry, or pushy. They were respected, and conformed to the social norms of the society at large. They were dressed as a specific gender, and acted accordingly. They weren’t about doing bad drag (which has its place,) they were making a very serious life decision that was theirs and theirs alone.
I’d bet Miranda would be at the forefront of demanding parents have a choice in what their children are taught, and when, regarding sexuality. I’m also pretty sure that she’d put a verbal smackdown on anyone who remotely pushed a child toward transitioning or puberty blockers before a child could understand what that really meant.
I suspect Miranda would ironically be called Transphobic by today’s standards.
I can almost hear her laughing about that label, in some activists face.
I don’t know if she’d agree with me about LGB folks distancing themselves from the current Trans community. She might not, and she’d have excellent reasons that she could defend. In the few arguments we had, it was 60% likely that she was right. 40% likely that I was. Her position was always well thought out and backed up with facts.
Even in winning, she was gracious and beautiful. She didn’t rub it in, and she’d hug me when I was crestfallen.
“You can’t be right all the time, settle for half… Do you want something to eat, or would you like to just cuddle,” she’d ask. Id always reply, “I’d feel better about it with both.” She’d just laugh.
I think that Miranda would appreciate my opinion. She might not agree, but she’d see where I was coming from. It’s about being silenced, told what I may and may not say.
It’s about being forced to accept things that I find fundamentally wrong. (Hormones, Puberty blockers, and a rush to transition without doing the work.) Today I can’t even speak that conviction without being labeled or cancelled.
Nowadays, being a part of the LGBT community implies that you agree wholeheartedly with anything and everything Trans. Which makes being a part of that community a complete non-starter for me and many others.
I’d prefer to see an LGB community and a separate Trans community. I’d prefer to see the LGB community support the real Trans community as we used to. With love, acceptance, and the knowledge that our Transitioned brothers and sisters may leave us, not in anger, but to move on with the life they’ve always dreamed of, and deserved.
Miranda… Miri, if by some weird chance you should ever read this, all my love to you and your family. You deserve all the happiness in the world, I’m very glad you’re living the dream you wanted.
