liminal_luke

Like you, I hoped that would be the case. Alas, no.

People rarely benefit from unsolicited criticism, especially from strangers on the internet. Consider your own experience. My previous post was mildly critical of you. Foolishly perhaps, I hoped that you would seriously consider my words and that your introspection would lead you to relate to our online community differently. Will that happen? I suppose it´s still possible but I doubt it.

"Showing off" is generally seen in a negative light, something that insecure people do to try to get approval and prop up their fragile egos. So my question to you is: why ya wanna do that? Why cast aspertions on the character of someone who you presumably don´t know well? The tendency to do this undermines your claim of coming in peace and goodwill; perhaps this is why many of us initially pegged you as a troll. A person could just as easily frame Maddie´s selfies in a positive light. You could say she´s courageous to show us who see is. You could say that her many selfies are evidence of self-love and a joyful, celebratory spirit. These hypothesis are at least as likely as your idea that she is "showing off."

People give up promising dance careers and become accountants in order to win the approval of their parents. Nobody transitions to win the approval of their parents.

Selfies are good and if you´re enjoying posting them -- why not? Nobody minds. They wouldn´t work in every thread perhaps, but in the Here I Am thread or your own threads I think you´re good. It occurs to me that you´ve invested a lot of time and effort to look how you look, so it makes sense that you want to be seen. Then again, perhaps you´ve always been a big selfie gal?

Yes, communication is a tricky thing -- particularly on a forum like this where everything is writing and there are no visual or verbal cues. It´s not surprising that we all get it wrong sometimes. Personally, I don´t feel like my existence as a gay man is challenged. Or maybe I do and am just not describing the experience the way you do? Occasionally I´ll avoid coming out to someone (say a new acquintance at a coffeeshop) because I think they might be judgmental and am just not invested enough in the potential relationship to want to bother. Mostly though I think that that´s something I´m doing to myself. I could be completely out and probably things would be just fine. And if someone doesn´t want to talk to me after they learn that I´m gay is that really such a loss? Probably not. I do think that it´s harder socially to be trans than gay. My mom has a gay son, me, and my mom´s partner Skip has a trans daughter. Skip once confided in my mom that he wished Emily was just gay like me, implying that that would of been easier to deal with. In another twenty years I think it will be much easier to be trans than it is today. At least relatively speaking, you are a pioneer.

@Salvijus deserves credit too. Like some others, I really thought Salvijus was a troll but I was wrong. Sorry Salvijus!

Here is a video of Nathan Brine talking about longevity, destiny, and immortality. I found it interesting. Can we live forever? | Longevity vs. Destiny (youtube.com)

Fair enough. I once got an energy reading from african shaman Malidoma Some. He threw some cowry shells on my behalf and analyzed how they landed. The upshot was that I had a spirit hanging around me and needed to do a ritual that involved climbing a mountain (well, large hill really), making a circle of ash and then talking to the spirit. Something like that. It was a long time ago and my memory is hazy. Anyway, like a doofus I decided to talk to the spirit before going to bed that night without bothering about the mountain or the ash. In the middle of the night, my stereo turned on full blast all by itself. Very spooky.

...eh...decided to edit....It seemed funny to me but, then again, maybe not.

How much importance should be given to our ego male/female identity? I don´t think any of us should stand in judgment over the degree of importance somebody else places on their gender identity. We´re all in different places -- spiritually, psychologically, karmically -- and it makes more sense to focus on our own development rather than critiquing others. It´s like this. Suppose you accidentally plunged your hand into a pot of boiling water. Would you keep your hand in the water because you´re pure awareness and you know that your hand doesn´t really exist? It´s possible that there are people on the planet who don´t care if their hands are immersed in boiling water because they are totally beyond grasping and aversion. For them, suffering isn´t a possibility. But I´d wager that neither you or me or Maddie are at that level. We´d probably get our hands out of the boiling water as quick as we can. I sure would.

If you feel an affinity with the idea that the "self" doesn´t exist then you might explore a nondual tradition, such as Buddhism or Bon. Reading is good but will only take you so far. Better to actually find a teacher and do the actual practices. There are many Bums who have traveled this road a long ways (not me!) and they can lead you in the right direction. When you have actual experience, as opposed to just book learning, you might have a better idea of how or if these ideas relate to the transgender experience.

Seems to me Salvijus is trying to go about spirituality backwards. I´m sure there are texts where it´s written that our true identity is beyond gender or that the self is an illusion. Fair enough. But these are conclusions that some people have come to near the end of their journey towards enlightenment. Nobody reads that the self doesn´t exist and then tries to live as if that´s true. Well, maybe some try but it doesn´t work. Ya gotta get enlightened before ya can act enlightened. This is not a project that can be reverse engineered by reading books. None of us can be sure, before the fact, what enlightened action would look like anyways.

Thought I´d share this great sentence from Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin, the author of the beloved Tales of the City series. Our gay protagonist, Michael Tolliver, is about to go home with a transman he picked up in a bar and is feeling a little iffy about getting it on with a guy without a penis. I took courage from the memory of a hot night in Chicago when I smoked a doobie on Navy Pier, then came back to the Drake and whacked off to straight porn on Spectravision and got off on it fine, especially with poppers, because sex, I was learning, is a place where all of us go, regardless of gender or sexuality. - Armistead Maupin The statement isn´t literally true, of course, because some people aren´t interested in sex at all, but I read it this morning and felt inspired to share.

Maybe I´ve watched too many crime shows on Netflix, but the analogy that comes to my mind here is jury selection. My understanding is that, at least in the US, both the defence and the prosecution in a criminal trial are allowed to get rid of a certain number of potential jurors without cause. The way I see it, Maddie used one of her free strikes to eliminate Salvijus. It doesn´t matter whether Salvijus is a troll or not -- he is stricken. Actually, I think Maddie´s been remarkably judicious with her strikes. We´re 15 pages in and only one down. Given the controversial nature of the topic, and given the fact that Maddie is not a paid trans consultant, that´s pretty darn amazing.