Transgender Flourishing Rules: The Second Six

In part one of this blogpost, I considered what will it take for transgender people to flourish. Flourish in the sense that I mean it is, to feel more secure, grow in authenticity and thrive economically. We have been striving for legal protections of laws and precedents to end legalized rejection. But no amount of laws or legal precedents will, in themselves, allow us to flourish. We must take it on ourselves to do it.

Jordan Peterson has his 12 Rules for Life. I am asserting 12 Rules for Transgender Flourishing. I enumerated the first six as:

• ONE. Increase Visibility, Be Personable.
• TWO. Be Rational.
• THREE. Be Individualistic.
• FOUR. Resist Pathologization.
• FIVE. Be Industrious.
• SIX. Exercise Your Freedoms in Our Democracy.

And here are the final six.

SEVEN. Use the Right Word, Not the Trendy One.

There are several ideologies abroad that seek to use transgender people as examples, alternatively, of good or bad behavior. These ideologies use words as weapons and they change them to suit their goals.

On one hand we have the deliberate sex/gender conflationists who seek to make sex and gender the same thing in people’s minds. They may even use the term “sex-type behavior” to refer to gender behaviors. This conflation is used as a weapon to make transgender people disappear. These people derive their knowledge from mysticism and assert that we are delusional and therefore pathological, when in fact their mysticism is the delusion. These ideologies are also liberal, authoritarian and collectivist. The mass media immediately have fallen for this line of thinking and made it trendy, since they thought that there was something dirty about referring to sex.

On the other hand, there are ideologies that rapidly change their words and terms to confuse people into thinking that their ideology is the most “up-to-date” and therefore the correct ideology one should follow. These ideologies are illiberal, authoritarian and collectivist. If they became preeminent they would force us all (back) into the closet or worse. There is a cloud of terms which include the new left, political correctness, intersectionalism, being woke and social justice warrior which all refer to pretty much the same thing. I know some of the differences but the detail is unimportant herein.

Kate Bornstein

So, what is a tr**ny to do? (Like Kate Bornstein, when I was learning about being transgender, tr**ny was a term of endearment and I intend to use it that way despite political correctness.) The answer to me is to use words in their original meaning, whether scientific or in other apolitical usage. In future, I will attempt to restore transsexual and tr**ny to their original meanings. Transgender, on the other hand is beyond hope. It originally meant changing one’s body because of one’s congruent gender but now it means that one’s behavior does not fit the gender category assigned at birth.

EIGHT. Trust Transgender Science But Not Too Much.

Since I work to understand transgender science, distrust of transgender science might seem to be self-deprecating, but it is not. Since the early 1990s, the number of articles pertaining to transgender people has exploded. There is a lot of—shall I say it—garbage out there. Much of it is bad science and a lot of it just follows the Zeitgeist or the “spirit of the age”, meaning the ideas that people currently conform to. Many papers seem to be aimed at getting travel money to go to conferences. Yes, Virginia, scientists are human and are subject to human frailty. Another problem is argument from authority, essentially who wins the debate depends on which side has experts that are more prestigious that the other. Which side has more professors or MDs from Ivy League or prestigious colleges. Conformity and prestige have been studied scientifically in humans by Solomon Ash and is a common occurrence in transgender science. For example, I see the prenatal testosterone theory of being transgender invoked constantly when, in fact, the evidence disproves it.

When it comes to science, we should all be skeptical because being skeptical is part of the scientific method. Critical thinking or the analysis of evidence to form a judgement is important is understanding of logical fallacies and verbal traps that are easy to fall into. Alas, critical thinking skills are seldom taught in schools anymore but Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit provides the basics. What it boils down to is to look at research studies as to what the investigator did and the data and MAKE UP YOUR OWN DAMN MIND. The introduction, results and conclusions sections should frequently be disregarded because they are typically designed as bait for future funding.

NINE. Carefully Consider Helping Others.

Helping others can bring us joy. Caring for other people is an inherited trait that has helped groups of humans to survive. Saving the world is the next step up. I have tried that too, several times.

Do not give yourself away. Carefully consider what you volunteer for. It is easy to get involved in two many things. At one time in the recent past I was involved, count ‘em, in nine different volunteer efforts which included American Psychological Association (APA) LGBT Science Committee, APA LGBT Public Policy Committee, Board of Directors for the United States Association for Transgender Health, WPATH Crossdressing Survey, Ryan White ATL HIV Task Force, ATL HOPWA (Housing) HIV Advisory Group, facilitator for a transgender support Group, Chairman of the ATL Libertarian Party and Seventh Grade Science Teacher for Pride School. (I am not bragging, I am complaining about getting involved in too many things.

It got to be too much and several have gone away naturally and some I have recently terminated. (Teaching seventh grade science went away when the school systems in the area figured out how to deal with transgender kids.) I have retained the HIV volunteer work. It brings me joy to be with local dedicated people who have nothing to gain and aren’t playing games.

There is a danger of mental abuse in charitable work. And it is now documented as the communal narcissist. You know the type, the busybodies that take over volunteer organizations to get power. They exude virtue signals. They can be damaging to your mental health through narcissist abuse. If you are susceptible, by virtue of being empathetic and compassionate, no matter how worthy the cause, avoid them. In the long run, you will do more good and have more joy.

The following poem is relevant to this rule:

The Glade

I have saved the world once or maybe a half dozen times

It always seemed clear what to do.

But a while ago, I got all confused. Lost in the woods.

So many ways to save the world.

And not clear which one or ones to pursue

The Muse told me to make a clearing in my life to see what to do next.

So, I discarded all the things that made me anxious and tense

All the things I was not good at.

And I found that some of them were simply not for me

And maybe of no value in saving the world, anyway

I found the glade

Now, I am doing things that I always wanted to do and waiting for the next call

The things I never had time for

The things that others said I had no talent for

The things that I could not do when I was living a double life

The things that I kept inside me

Some of them are out now

Some of them feel right, now

Some of them don’t fit, but that’s okay

The clearing is here now

Let me play here for a few moments in the glade

Play is one way of learning

And one way of choosing what to do next

Listening for the next call, if it comes

But more important, it is giving myself a chance

To be me.

–Dana Bevan, 2021

TEN. Don’t Be Foolhardy. Have A Plan.

We lose too many transgender people to violence and adversity because they do not plan. I frequently read about transgender people who are killed, many in the dark of night, because they do not have a safety plan. Yes, you can make the world a wonderful place but it really does not care about you. As you are painfully aware, some people simply do not like, are afraid of, or hate transgender people. The world will not stop them from violence. You must be responsible for your own safety. No one likes to plan, but it is a necessity. If you are going out somewhere, plan your movements and limit your risk.

Plan for things like adverse weather, such as Texas is enduring now. It was predictable and it will happen again. Growing up, I lived in rural New Jersey and we had many such several-day power cut offs due to snow. But we had a plan. First thing to do, which may seem strange, was to fill up the bathtub with water before the well tank lost pressure. The people of Texas who are having water problems know why we did this. The second thing we did was to drain the water system before anything froze, involving the smallest family member (usually me) climbing down into a pit to turn the valve. The third thing we did was to turn on our portable kerosene heater while maintaining ventilation; we always kept a barrel of kerosene on our farm from the era in which it solely fueled our stove. You get the idea. Even today, I have an emergency kit to deal with power outages which occur here in the summer. And batteries, plenty of batteries.

Of course, weather is not the only hazard to plan for. When the economy went south during the depression, my family sold their house in the city (then worth next to nothing because the depression was essentially a banking crisis and no one had money to buy anything). They moved to their small summer cottage and lived off the land through gardening, hunting and fishing. And that was the house I grew up in.

Then there is the pandemic and a whole host of other hazards. Many people do not save enough to get them through such natural disasters and depend on government or others to bail them out. See Rule TWELVE.

The important thing about planning is that you have considered the alternative hazards and mitigations. A military saying is that “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy” is probably true. But the benefit of a plan is what one learns from preparing it and the information will shape later actions. The military considerations are what is the land like, what is the enemy disposition? The civilian considerations are what weather hazards do they experience in this neck of the woods? Knowledge of the 2011 electrical outage in Texas due to snow might have been the motivation for future weather hardening.

ELEVEN. Pursue Your Interests

Pursue your interests. In the modern economy you will have more than one career in your lifetime. Your next career will likely be based on that hobby, interest or side-hustle that you have pursued. Seek excellence in you interests; mastery will make it easier to change careers.

Right now, I am changing “careers” to become a fiction writer, even though I have published 4 non-fiction books. Throughout my career as a biopsychologist, on the side I have taken courses in screenwriting, poetry and story writing. And now I have cleared out time in the glade (see poem in Rule NINE) to do more work. My old aim was to engage people’s consciousness about being transgender; one of my new aims is to engage them on an emotional level. I may not ever get published or make it a career but I have found that I like it. I am still doing systems engineering to pay for my time in the glade.

TWELVE Believe In Yourself And Do Not Trust Authority to Support You

You will not succeed in flourishing unless you believe in yourself and try to be self-sufficient. You cannot trust any person in authority or institution to support you. This includes medical and mental health authorities, governments and advocacy groups. This should come naturally to transgender people who lost respect for authority at an early age due to social and institutional rejection.

You can think about most medical/mental health authorities as auto mechanics. I do respect all of them. (I was never good in auto mechanics but a pretty passable electrician.) God or the Universe love ‘em. But God or the Universe bless the child that has his own. They tinker with our transgender bodies and minds but it is up to us to make the decisions. Scientists, they are not. So far, for example they have not provided the science needed to completely explain transgenderism or the basis for dosages of hormones in HT. Indeed, they seem uninterested in these things. The mental health people are wonderful for dealing with social problems that transgender people face because of rejection but they cannot “cure” anyone of being transgender, despite what some say. So as with auto mechanics, tell them what you want. It is up to you to decide. But you better learn some science and mechanics in advance.

As alluded to in the first paragraph of this blog, government cannot be relied on to solve your problems. At best, it can prevent the use of force or threat of force against you. And it is not always able to do that very well. Governments are simply atrocious at things like regulating the energy grid in Texas, or dealing with job or other discrimination.

Although everyone sees capitalism as having flaws, it is the “best worst” economic system out there; government is the “worst worst.” The government likes to say that capitalism contains the danger of monopoly but historically monopolies only existed through government action and support. Examples of natural monopolies are hard to come by. You saw the people lining up with their tanks for natural gas when the electricity went out. There are always alternatives. Home electrical gas generators do exist!

Educational organizations have their own agendas, these days usually motivated by ideology. But they will try to use you as a victim which will not help you flourish. You cannot rely on many of them to educate for future careers and their reputations are already suffering.

Advocacy groups cannot be counted on for help. Some of them have thrown transgender people under the bus to get what their major donors want. Others concentrate on very narrow issues and not broader laws and precedents which are of limited benefit. Again, all these laws and precedents are no guarantee of support. Right now, on the national level there is at least a six-way competition of organizations for transgender advocacy. Although those opposed to transgender flourishing would have you believe otherwise, in the end there is no transgender movement, only transgender people.

I hope you will consider these 12 Rules for Transgender Flourishing. I am not telling you what you should do. You need to MAKE UP YOUR OWN DAMN MIND.

Tags: featured, Identity, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul