Fairfax, VA, USA. We are born with mental wiring that selectively generalizes knowledge from some of our experiences while remaining skeptical of others. Ten million years of hominid evolution has molded our neurobiology and still influences our methods of inductive learning. [N1]

We infer intellectual conclusions quickly and easily, based on an absolute minimum of actual information. Our personal beliefs and choices often hang by a slender thread of frayed rationality.


We are, now and always, human, a relatively rapid evolutionary experiment in brain growth and reproductive advantage that has not yet proven fully successful. If there is a God, then She should hire some quality assurance specialists before attempting to create another universe or re-engineer this one.



Transsexual Narrative Outline

Purpose. Your struggle and a record of your heroic journey.

Chapter One. Birth. Include a couple of pages on your birth name and how it never really fit you.

Chapter Two. When you knew you were born into the wrong body, the earlier the better.

Chapter Three. The parents.

Chapter Four. Pre-School. How you always played/wanted to play with children not of your perceived sex.

Chapter Five. Grammar School. Your parents catch you trying on your older sister’s clothes/playing football with the boys.

Chapter Six. Middle School. You are devastated that you aren’t growing a beard/breasts/taller/curves.

Chapter Seven. High School. How you used to be harassed, cry yourself to sleep, slam your fist into the wall. Don’t forget drugs and dismal sex.

Chapter Eight. College. Drugs, Sex, Depression, etc.

Chapter Nine. Your failed marriage.

Chapter Ten. You take a leap. Come out to yourself. Start seeing a therapist. A great burden is lifted.

Chapter Eleven. Hormones. You finally feel like yourself.

Chapters Twelve through Twenty. Therapy, Coming Out, Surgery, Family, Transition, the old/new job, boyfriends, religion, girlfriends, etc. etc.

Chapter 21. The new life and the future.

Afterward. Advice to people born transsexual.The human mind is quick to make links that do not actually exist and exhibits a strong tendency to jump to facile conclusions that do not match the reality of the universe in which we live. Given the choice, we often prefer pleasant fantasies to the rigors of harsh fact.

Our brain, when asked, automatically makes up stories to explain its conclusions and actions. We link facts together that were not linked before we decided to link them. Even if we consciously inspect and evaluate our own actions, our resulting explanations should be held suspect as they are often self-serving.

We are storytellers who create explanations other than those that actually exist. A good self-lie told well can be more comforting than the truth told baldly. A rational human does not intentionally inflict physical or emotional pain upon itself. So we lie to ourselves and weave our personal realities rather than face a sometimes ugly world. Seldom do we make hard choices when easier alternatives and explanations are available. Post hoc rationalization is common. [N2]

We like to be told stories, narrative and causality. Journalists and Academics in the narrative disciplines are in the business of constructing intricate storylines that explain the facts as they see them.

The chief difference between the two is that journalists normally write short, relatively clear English sentences and academics prefer to obscure their writing in formal language and in-group slang (perhaps confusing obfuscation with a world class intellect). Whether or not the chosen facts are the actual cause for or even related to the observe effect matters little. The story is everything.

At this point some of you may infer that I intend to discuss transgender narratives and those of crossdressers. I have no such intent as they hold little that is interesting or new. But you can read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions. There are more than enough transgender narratives on the internet and the various abundant blogs to fill your weekly reading club discussions for several years at least.

Nor do I intend write about men and women with a transsexual history. Their stories too are all quite similar and I have only been a lifelong eyewitness to my own story. The bottom line is that we don’t need any more transsexual bios or book tours. Oprah is over and no one with a life watches cable access anyway.

If you feel you really must write a bio to share the unique uniqueness that is you with the waiting world, go right ahead. But first check out my sidebar with the handy outline for a transsexual narrative. I wouldn’t want you to go where no man or woman born transsexual has not gone several dozen times before.

The basic problem with all this is that to make sense of the internet, you have to know where not to look. Knowing where not to look is complicated by academic left ethos that making a judgment. That article there is well written, based on empirical evidence, and uses rigorous scientific methods; this article, however, is a piece of nonsense formed whole fabric from political beliefs unsupported by scientific fact; that judgment, is, in and of itself, intrinsically hurtful and not allowed.

Especially if you disagree with whatever the current political left dogma might be. The political right, of course, is just as dogmatic as the left, the only difference being that one side drapes itself in faux-morality and the other in smug pseudo-intellectualism.

The intellectual difference between liberal activists and academics and god fearing socially conservative religious preachers is more one of vocabulary than democratic convictions. Given the chance, both sides would silence opposition and use Federal Law to enforce their political catechisms.

So if you are constrained to being either politically correct or religiously correct, your ability to know where not to look becomes quite limited. You are pre-required to believe whatever rants and blogs correspond to your particular theology, political or god derived.

Even the nonsense covers itself in narrative. All the better to deceive you. Even if we know going in that 90% of everything on the web is excrement. [N3] A lot of that is openly malicious. Self-serving narratives abound. They are lying to us and they are lying to themselves to justify whatever it is they are doing back in the non-blog world where the rest of us live our lives.

As a species we need to learn to think better and not string together cause and effect like cheap beads on a plastic necklace. And we need to quit constructing our little stories to explain what we believe when the facts don’t support us at all.

In the meantime, a sign should be posted at the entrance to the internet: Caveat Emptor. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. [N4]

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment