human_nature

The truth about Human Nature

By Sophia Siedlberg.

Imagine waking up in the morning and feeling peaceful, but you then realize you are not allowed to feel peaceful. You get up and go blindly through the routine of waking up, and the world just seems nasty. You wish you had never woken up and then you realize that even wishing you had not woken up was also not allowed. A good analogy of this feeling (even though you are not allowed to admit to having that feeling) is something like a childhood memory of a mid summer evening and you were in bed with the flu or something. It was that strange time where you were just recovering and felt sort of fine, and you could hear your friends playing in a garden somewhere. And you were not able to go and join in because you were still considered to be ill. There is something on television but you know you cannot either laugh or cry over it, because to do so would be regarded as "not appropriate" by someone. Then you see someone else who was born with everything you wished you had been born with and that crushing feeling that you are not allowed to have becomes overwhelming. "This life you want to lead it is not for you. You are envying someone their life. Not allowed!" Of course it is not envy, but being reminded of one really horrible fact you really cannot exist (yet alone live) with. Because of an accident of birth, you were surgically made to be a member of the wrong sex by the mistakes of doctors.

You dare to mention this state of abject misery and there is always someone who will appear saying how evil you are for even thinking such a thing. You see a doctor about it and you get to hear, "Oh, I understand." (No they don't.) Or there are those lectures about how man is man and woman is woman. If you were the victim of a childhood surgical mistake (act of human vivisection, let's be honest here), it is particularly insulting because in all probability you were born neither male nor female in the true sense. And the "doctors" just acted out of bloody mined arrogance and made you the wrong sex when you had no say in it. If you are not the victim of such intervention, it can be just as nasty but in another way because people just keep talking about some being in the sky who inflicted this misery on you and want to punish you for doing it.

And then there are the times when you are no longer able to deal with that sense of constantly being reminded of being the wrong sex. You cannot express it because everyone else around you is just plain stupid. They want to talk about what you did as a child and what the other "boys" or "girls" did and how you had years of being told what you "are" and you have to accept it. Oh yes, they will trivialize it or mock it because they really just don't get it.

Then there are those lengthy academic papers you come across in the library, all of them totally missing the point, some talking about some sexual fetish (like yes, how is feeling suicidal while being allowed to feel at all a sexual fetish?) Others come out with incredibly complex theories often with a lashing of terminology and strange theories, but still they just do not get it.

But it is there, all the time, a piece of music you like or a smell or just the sound of a plane flying over or a radio across the street. If you get any sense of familiarity from it, it gets you, that crushing sense of not being allowed to live. Even if you were on your own on a desert island away from people constantly rubbing your face in the dirt, it is still there. The sea splashes the water feels nice. "Gotcha!"

There are the religious types who will tell you that it is a demon or an unholy mental illness, and they will (with, dare I say, some level of sadistic glee) tell you about how nasty you are for having these "feelings". (Notice how we are on about the erasure of yet more feelings) and that G-d will burn you in hell if you do not "give them to G-d" (Pretend the feelings are not there). But they are not just feelings if you are in this situation. The one thing you will get really angry about is some text, like this one suddenly saying "How about Jesus! Jesus can help you!" I suspect the truth of the matter is that "Jesus" (His name was Joshua actually) is probably hopping mad with anyone who uses his name to pile on such misery in order to control another.

And no, I am not going to harp on about "Jesus" because this is not the point I am making. But for those who would, I will say this. Read Matthew 7: 21-23. No, the point I am going to make is a much less complicated one. What is it in the collective psyche of society that allows for an individual to be so tormented and for the tormentors to be considered "right" or "moral"? I will be honest here. I do wonder about the sexual morality of those who set up "clinics" to "treat" people who for whatever reason are the wrong sex, by bludgeoning them into conforming to everything they do not want to be?

I say this for two reasons. Firstly, such tormentors seem to love the idea of a child born as I was being assigned a sex surgically and yet they scream blue murder and blasphemy when an adult said they are the wrong sex and gets surgery. What makes the actions of such tormentors even more reprehensible is when an adult who was a victim of childhood surgery says they want it undone and the tormentors are always on hand to say that rejecting being operated on as a child is somehow immoral.

Worse still is how the tormentors act if you were born intersexed and wish to live according to your birthright, they will then really go into fits of fury about how there are only men and women. There is a very profound principle at work here, and it actually has little to do with sex as such, but more to do with how society seems to demand too much of the individual. There is a classic form of double talk that shows how bad this gets. People who are female but were born "male" get accused of propping up "gender stereotypes" when they express the pain they are in. "Oh, how dare you! That is insulting women." Has it ever occurred to anyone (like please read how this article starts) that this actually sounds like: "Oh, look what I was born with and you were not, ha ha ha. I will torment you over it and get lots of social credibility because I can and you will suffer. What fun!" No, this is society playing a game of reverse stereotyping. Stereotyping the transsexual woman as someone who mocks "natal women" rather than the transsexual woman being mocked by other women.

I find the logic of that very ironic because according to "social stereotypes" such "natal women" (Female gender police) are supposed to be "empathic" when in truth these "natal women" are being as "empathic" as a brick. OK, they have made their point, but do they realize they are being as misogynistic as a knuckle scraping woman hater? But then that is what this is really all about, isn't it? It is not about who is stereotyping whom. It is about human nature and some facets of it that are very disturbing. Look at the opponents of consensual adult sex reassignment surgery, and how they advocate everything from aversion therapy to cutting bits of someone's brain out (lobotomy basically). What that tells me is that some people are quite prepared to hack and chop at someone's mind because "sex" is more important. And these self same people are happy to see a non consenting child put through sex reassignment surgery of some form or another to preserve "sex", but a consenting adult is somehow "wrong" and cutting their brains to shreds is "the best way”. “Make their minds fit their bodies".

I cannot think of anything more revolting quite frankly and I have reached the stage where I have truly seen and heard enough. If society is quite prepared to miss the point and hack away at those things that make us truly human (the mind) instead of simply allowing people to use medical technology in a way that actually does alleviate suffering, then there is a problem. You see the real question is whether any right minded human being would take someone who feels like they do not exist and via medical torture (lobotomy, aversion therapy, etc.) make them exist even less?

I know some will laugh at this article. Others will attack me for saying something that is not all that easy to deal with (that human nature can be really nasty sometimes, and then some people make a virtue of that nastiness). Others will rationalize it and come up with some theory about how I am myself mentally ill for pointing out a very unpleasant truth.

The fact still remains that society is driven by punitive ethics. There are some who still believe eugenics is a good idea. There are others who would rather carve someone's brain to the point of making their victim a walking vegetable rather than let them live their lives out as human beings.

The thing people really need to notice is that not once did I mention how some like to wear dresses and other wear trousers, nor did I mention toy guns and dolls. No, I did not even mention what it is to be male or female. All I have done is get to the basic facts of the matter. Those who think they are moral and respectable often turn out to be very destructive people. Those who are made to feel like they are the lowest of the low are often people trying to get some thread of dignity in their lives. As for the "religious", consider very carefully Matthew 7: 21-23 again.

Organisation Intersex International

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