The basic premise is deeply flawed: that because a male "feels like" a female he IS therefore a female -- and unless we accept him as such we are bigots and "transphobes".
I am a woman: but I have no idea what it "feels like" to be a woman -- because I simply am one.
I can feel very angry when patronised by some man that, "because" I am a woman, my opinion on something is superficial, worthless or stupid: such anger is my reaction to misogyny -- to the imposed 1950s sex role stereotypes that gender ideologues pursue with such conviction as authentic "inner essence".
"Feeling like a woman" remains at the most a male fantasy of how it might feel to be a woman: without the necessary preconditions to have any idea of how it feels to be -- not to be "like" -- the opposite sex.
These preconditions are primarily to inhabit a sexed female body, and to have received since birth the matched social conditioning to know and perform -- or to question and reject -- your expected sex role stereotype.
The arrogance and aggressiveness -- with death and rape threats -- with which transactivists seek to impose, on women especially, acceptance of trans-identified makes as being "real women" is in itself stereotypically masculine: totally at odds with the normal conditioning of females to put the needs and wants of others before our own.
As to "gender identity", a cross-sex "gender identity" is necessarily a stolen one. Because if any male demands his "gender identity" as a female to be accepted as valid, I reject the notion of "gender identity" as being false in itself. I can have no "gender identity" as a woman -- because it has been stolen from me.
I agree with you! The interesting thing about trans women is that so many of them are misogynistic. They have no problem invading women's spaces because they have no respect for women. Disrespecting the class of human that they want to be reveals that it is all a pretense.
You are right. Genevieve Gluck has written very interesting stuff (on Reduxx, reposted on Substack) about the BDSM and pornography-soaked aspects of transgenderism in most men. In particular, "forced feminisation" in the use of "sisdy porn" empasises that for a men to identify as a woman is deeply degrading.
So the misogyny is built in: not just a product of narcissism (as Ray Blanchard would have it) but deeply patriarchal. It follows naturally that to be rejected, not to be accepted by the very group (women) that a man has degraded himself to belong to, provokes his furious anger against that group.
I agree. However, you are the second person I have seen make reference to trans people and pornography. It does happen that a lot of trans people become porn workers, but I know nothing about BDSM or "forced feminisation". I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just not aware of it.
Wonderful and exactly right. The need to normalize is a big factor in all of this. But, as someone on a podcast I was listening to said, why is it so bad to be outside the norm? Things could be better if people who decided to transition just embraced being in a unique position, having made unusual decisions, and living different lives than most - rather than feeling the need to encourage children and teens to "join them" and increase their numbers and their credibility.
We can't normalize everything or the meaning of the "norm" goes away. The idea should just be to remove stigma - which is quite different than making something "normalized." Similarly, if a woman is anyone who thinks they are a woman, the concept of "woman" ceases to exist. There is no such thing as a "Gender Identity," if it simply means one's sense of being male or female, both or neither apart from biology or stereotypes, because it is then nothing but an efemeral sense of something that has no substance. (If it means one's knowledge of one's actual sex, that's fine, and if it means one's unique set of masculine and feminine characteristics, that's also fine, but the most commonly used definition today is the one I first mentioned, and that definition renders the term meaningless.)
I agree with everything you said. That's why I said the proper posture of trans people is this: “Through no fault of our own, we feel like the opposite sex, and so we ask society to accept us as the sex we feel to be and allow us to live our lives the way we want to.”
I'm still reeling from the insanity of this poetry editor, but I'm fairly certain now that the pitifulness of trans people (and yes, there is a pitiful quality to them) excites the emotions of people who identify with the downtrodden. But there are other things going on with "woke" liberals -- specifically, they have not always acted up to their enlightened standards. For example, there is a lot of racism among liberals. The emergence of trans people gives liberals an opportunity to try again to implement the principles they say they believe in. And since this group has nothing to do with race (although some are black, of course) that makes them feel more comfortable. Race is still the electrified hot rail in our society.
The pitifulness of trans people may also be why so many people are joining the trans fad. Trans people are a new group that represents something unusual and exciting to people who don't like to feel restricted. Among other things, they are telling us all, "You don't have to be restricted by reality. You can be anything you want to be." Of course, we CAN'T be anything we want to be, but who wants to hear THAT message?
I agree they are, in some ways, "pitiful," and the people who want to be their "allies" want to help the downtrodden. However, it is not compassionate or kind to encourage people who are bothered by reality to totally eschew it. As you said, we can't just be anything - and, frankly, I don't think that's such a bad thing. In fact, to my thinking, one of the most important things about "LIFE" is that we are confined in a body with certain physical limitations and laws of physics, and the experience of life is to figure out how to have joy and meaning and accomplishments within those bounds. It's like baseball (or any other sport). The beauty of baseball is not just throwing, catching, hitting and running, although those are very important parts of it. The beauty is the rules of the game. When you don't follow the rules of the game, you are "cheating" and your wins don't count. Similarly, life requires us to live within the bounds of the physical world. When we pretend there are no such bounds, we are, in a sense, "cheating." Or, at least, we are not benefitting from the experience of life. Anyway, that was just a long digression from my point, which is that we are not doing these people any favors by making it easy to mutilate their bodies, and then pretending along with them that they are not the sex they are. Further, the mutilated body is definitely less healthy and I can't see it as doing someone a favor - especially a vulnerable teen, but even a vulnerable adult - by pushing them to harm their health.
Further, as to your point about racist tendencies, I agree that certain policies implemented under the false "be kind" banner are, at best, condescending, and, at worst, quite harmful to those at whom they are aimed. The current state of gender ideology is the best example of that. I think many "allies" see these vulnerable individuals as something to be pitied and, in a sense, given up on. They think these people don't need their fertility or their sexual function, and so what if they have various health issues - because they are these pitiful beings that don't need the same opportunities. They wouldn't dream of limiting their own, or their loved ones own bodies in these ways, but it's fine for the poor transgender kids!
A game without rules makes for an uninteresting game -- as Frost said, what point is there to playing tennis without a net? I discovered that for myself. I play a lot of solitaire on the computer, and the program I use is so configurable that I can set rules that will allow me to win 100% of the time, but that quickly becomes boring.
But I don't think the kids who are doing this take it lightly. They can't resolve the problems they are having, and so they are open to the message that they should just have a "do-over". Scrap the female body and get a new, hard male body. (The fact that males have less fat than women may be a big attraction -- and who wants to menstruate every month?) I think some of these girls have too much faith in medicine to actually transform them in a real way; they haven't figured out that it is all cosmetic. It's like replacing the spark plugs in your engine with pictures of spark plugs -- they won't do anything but look the part.
In my religion (a multidimensional God, reincarnation, karma), we do indeed have enormous freedom to determine what we are, but we have to go through lives with limitations in order to become wise enough to handle the freedom. It's my view that some trans people simply chose the wrong gender before they were reborn. (If this sounds flaky, keep in mind that billions of people believe in reincarnation, including many Christians.)
Let me clarify a couple things. What makes trans people pitiful is that they can't accept themselves as they are, and they go to extraordinary lengths to change their perfectly normal bodies. Not being able to accept your personal reality is a measure of being very confused. Also, when I mentioned racism in society, I was thinking in terms of personal relationships. I know a black family in the next town who are surrounded by white neighbors, none of whom have ever tried to be friends. -- that kind of thing. (The wife makes a point of saying "hello" to everyone who passes, but no one wants to really know them.) Of course, institutional racism also exists.
You made a good point that trans people, like blacks, may be seen as somehow expendable people. They are already screwed up, so nothing is lost if a solution is devised that screws them up more. That is similar to what blacks went through, in which blacks have been experimented on medically without their knowledge. But this doesn't explain why trans people themselves want to mess with their bodies so much -- perhaps they too believe in the miracle of medicine (or, at least, they believe in the miracle of appearances).
You are reminding me of the Twilight Zone episode where Jack Klugman dies and goes to "heaven" where he is at a glamorous casino and keeps winning. Eventually, after winning at every single game he plays, he realizes it is not good - which is when it is revealed that he is really in hell. (The moral being no challenge = hell.)
You are pretty correct about why some of these girls are doing this, and the fact that they truly believe that, once they look male, they are male - at least that's what my daughter explicitly stated to me numerous times.
I know you are a reincarnation believer, and I don't find that flaky. However, I don't really see the idea of choosing incorrectly as making much sense. Our choices - if we have them - give us a particular experience to deal with, and there is no reason to think any of those choices are mistaken, even if they may be more difficult or scary than we anticipated. They still represent the challenges we chose to face - not a mistake.
I agree that what is pitiful is the inability to accept what is. And it deserves compassion, not hatred, and not body-destroying chemicals and unnecessary destructive surgeries.
I didn't realize you were speaking of real, personal racism rather than a sort of indirect racism as I was thinking of when the "good" white folk creates programs to "help" but doesn't have any idea what is really helpful (like trying to "defund" the police when poor black neighborhoods have a huge need for police, although police-constituent relationships can use a lot of work).
Now, don't get angry at me for correcting you, but you are conflating two episodes of the Twilight Zone. The one in which the criminal went to [what appeared to be] heaven, but it was really hell, was not played by Klugman. Klugman was in a similar episode in which he was a pool player who demanded and got a chance to play the greatest all-time pool player, who was dead; when he beat that pool player, Klugman's character took his place, and was consigned to an eternity of playing pool against every upstart who thought he was the best.
The Seth Material describes a situation in which a particular soul may avoid being one or the other sex for too many lives. For example, some souls don't want the pain of childbirth, or don't like the second-class status of women, so they avoid being female for too many lives. You see, according to Seth, every soul must experience being a child, being a father, and being a mother (which can be done in two lives, though most of us have more than that). Seth made these comments about effeminate men, not trans people, as trans people were mostly unknown in the last century (the psychic died in 1984), but I have applied the principle to trans people -- i.e., souls who want to avoid one gender or the other.
The girls who think they are male because they look male will soon give up that idea. There are too many reminders that they aren't male (taking drugs constantly, having a fake penis that doesn't work normally, etc.) to believe that for too long. Ultimately, every trans person develops an identity, not of the sex they want to be, but as a FACSIMILE of the sex they want to be. But in the case of your daughter, she doesn't seem to be trans at all.
Personally, I do believe that mistakes can be made within the context of reincarnation. Every choice we make is an opportunity to make a good choice or a poor choice, and I think it's fair to call the poor choices "mistakes". The wonderful thing about reincarnation is that it gives us endless opportunities to fix our mistakes. That is why there is no heaven or hell -- neither is necessary.
I'm curious about one thing: Now that your daughter is legally an adult, if she goes through the entire process and decides that she is happy, will you accept it? Among anti-trans activists, I am encountering a lot of parents who, it seems, will never accept their child's decision. I'm not sure what that means, but it is notable.
Wow. You’ve got me thinking. I guess I conflated those two episodes. I’ll have to see who played the main character in the episode with heaven/hell.
Anyway, as to your question, I already “accept” the decisions. I am not throwing her out, or preventing her. I love her and will continue to do so no matter how far she takes this.
However, I cannot say they are good decisions. Even if she ultimately lucks out and has a fine life living as if she is male, I will not then believe these were good decisions. I will believe she was one of the lucky ones for whom it worked out. Given everything we know and all that we don’t know about medical transition, it is an objectively bad decision to do what she is doing, both from a medical standpoint and a practical standpoint and a psychological standpoint. I won’t further elaborate as everything I have written in the subject explains why I consider this a poor choice, particularly for this effeminate girl who does not understand that she will never actually be male and particularly because of her Expectations about how this will proceed and particularly because she is extremely adverse to medical things like getting shots and having blood drawn.
I hope that answers the question.
I do understand your philosophy regarding choices made that might turn out more difficult than one anticipated. However, if we keep living in order to improve our souls, we should be embracing these challenges. Also, this is not a reversible choice - the choice to be born male or female (assuming we have such a choice). Medically altering your body and asking others to believe you are the opposite sex doesn’t change being male or female so I don’t see it as correcting a “mistaken” choice, just reacting to the choice in a maladaptive manner. But what do I know?
Oh no, I didn't mean that "transitioning" is the same thing as changing sexes for purposes of fulfilling your obligation to experience both sexes.
Let's say that a soul avoids being a female for five lives, then chooses to be male once again in the sixth life. In that life, he may have a strong urge to be a female -- that's because his soul NEEDS the experience of being female for its development (having already been male fives times). Thus a transgender person is born who longs to be the opposite sex. So if that individual lives in an age when medicalization is possible, he may choose to "transition". But ultimately the experience will be unsatisfactory because being a pretend woman is not the same as being a real woman. He will STILL have to reincarnate as a REAL FEMALE in a future life.
Regarding the Twilight Zone, to find that episode on IMDB, it would be helpful to know the title of the episode. Give me a moment, I'll look . . .
Ah I just found it. The name of the episode is "A Nice Place to Visit". The criminal is "Rocky Valentine" played by Larry Blyden. Sebastian Cabot plays "Mr. Pip".
Now, "A Game of Pool" is the title for the episode in which Jack Klugman gets to play a famous deceased player. Klugman's character wins that game, and then takes that man's place in death, consigned to play upstart players who challenge him.
Now, let's say your daughter is making a mistake by wanting to transition to being a male. She may need the experience of allowing herself to be influenced into making a poor decision, in order to learn some spiritual lesson from that.
Yes - I agree entirely. He would still need to go through a life as an actual female to have that experience, which is why the medicalization is, in my mind, both pointless and, in many ways, detrimental.
Thank you for the Twilight Zone info. I had this nagging feeling that maybe I had conflated two episodes, so now I know! :)
And, as to the last sentence, of course she might learn some valuable lesson by doing what she's doing, but that could be said of any decision. In the end, we have to act in what seems to be our best interest for this life (even assuming arguendo there are other lives) in order to fully benefit from it. We can't just say to ourselves "Whatever stupid thing I do is fine because I will learn from it," or we will just waste life away. But I get your point.
The basic premise is deeply flawed: that because a male "feels like" a female he IS therefore a female -- and unless we accept him as such we are bigots and "transphobes".
I am a woman: but I have no idea what it "feels like" to be a woman -- because I simply am one.
I can feel very angry when patronised by some man that, "because" I am a woman, my opinion on something is superficial, worthless or stupid: such anger is my reaction to misogyny -- to the imposed 1950s sex role stereotypes that gender ideologues pursue with such conviction as authentic "inner essence".
"Feeling like a woman" remains at the most a male fantasy of how it might feel to be a woman: without the necessary preconditions to have any idea of how it feels to be -- not to be "like" -- the opposite sex.
These preconditions are primarily to inhabit a sexed female body, and to have received since birth the matched social conditioning to know and perform -- or to question and reject -- your expected sex role stereotype.
The arrogance and aggressiveness -- with death and rape threats -- with which transactivists seek to impose, on women especially, acceptance of trans-identified makes as being "real women" is in itself stereotypically masculine: totally at odds with the normal conditioning of females to put the needs and wants of others before our own.
As to "gender identity", a cross-sex "gender identity" is necessarily a stolen one. Because if any male demands his "gender identity" as a female to be accepted as valid, I reject the notion of "gender identity" as being false in itself. I can have no "gender identity" as a woman -- because it has been stolen from me.
I agree with you! The interesting thing about trans women is that so many of them are misogynistic. They have no problem invading women's spaces because they have no respect for women. Disrespecting the class of human that they want to be reveals that it is all a pretense.
You are right. Genevieve Gluck has written very interesting stuff (on Reduxx, reposted on Substack) about the BDSM and pornography-soaked aspects of transgenderism in most men. In particular, "forced feminisation" in the use of "sisdy porn" empasises that for a men to identify as a woman is deeply degrading.
So the misogyny is built in: not just a product of narcissism (as Ray Blanchard would have it) but deeply patriarchal. It follows naturally that to be rejected, not to be accepted by the very group (women) that a man has degraded himself to belong to, provokes his furious anger against that group.
I agree. However, you are the second person I have seen make reference to trans people and pornography. It does happen that a lot of trans people become porn workers, but I know nothing about BDSM or "forced feminisation". I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just not aware of it.
Wonderful and exactly right. The need to normalize is a big factor in all of this. But, as someone on a podcast I was listening to said, why is it so bad to be outside the norm? Things could be better if people who decided to transition just embraced being in a unique position, having made unusual decisions, and living different lives than most - rather than feeling the need to encourage children and teens to "join them" and increase their numbers and their credibility.
We can't normalize everything or the meaning of the "norm" goes away. The idea should just be to remove stigma - which is quite different than making something "normalized." Similarly, if a woman is anyone who thinks they are a woman, the concept of "woman" ceases to exist. There is no such thing as a "Gender Identity," if it simply means one's sense of being male or female, both or neither apart from biology or stereotypes, because it is then nothing but an efemeral sense of something that has no substance. (If it means one's knowledge of one's actual sex, that's fine, and if it means one's unique set of masculine and feminine characteristics, that's also fine, but the most commonly used definition today is the one I first mentioned, and that definition renders the term meaningless.)
I agree with everything you said. That's why I said the proper posture of trans people is this: “Through no fault of our own, we feel like the opposite sex, and so we ask society to accept us as the sex we feel to be and allow us to live our lives the way we want to.”
I'm still reeling from the insanity of this poetry editor, but I'm fairly certain now that the pitifulness of trans people (and yes, there is a pitiful quality to them) excites the emotions of people who identify with the downtrodden. But there are other things going on with "woke" liberals -- specifically, they have not always acted up to their enlightened standards. For example, there is a lot of racism among liberals. The emergence of trans people gives liberals an opportunity to try again to implement the principles they say they believe in. And since this group has nothing to do with race (although some are black, of course) that makes them feel more comfortable. Race is still the electrified hot rail in our society.
The pitifulness of trans people may also be why so many people are joining the trans fad. Trans people are a new group that represents something unusual and exciting to people who don't like to feel restricted. Among other things, they are telling us all, "You don't have to be restricted by reality. You can be anything you want to be." Of course, we CAN'T be anything we want to be, but who wants to hear THAT message?
Right on all accounts.
I agree they are, in some ways, "pitiful," and the people who want to be their "allies" want to help the downtrodden. However, it is not compassionate or kind to encourage people who are bothered by reality to totally eschew it. As you said, we can't just be anything - and, frankly, I don't think that's such a bad thing. In fact, to my thinking, one of the most important things about "LIFE" is that we are confined in a body with certain physical limitations and laws of physics, and the experience of life is to figure out how to have joy and meaning and accomplishments within those bounds. It's like baseball (or any other sport). The beauty of baseball is not just throwing, catching, hitting and running, although those are very important parts of it. The beauty is the rules of the game. When you don't follow the rules of the game, you are "cheating" and your wins don't count. Similarly, life requires us to live within the bounds of the physical world. When we pretend there are no such bounds, we are, in a sense, "cheating." Or, at least, we are not benefitting from the experience of life. Anyway, that was just a long digression from my point, which is that we are not doing these people any favors by making it easy to mutilate their bodies, and then pretending along with them that they are not the sex they are. Further, the mutilated body is definitely less healthy and I can't see it as doing someone a favor - especially a vulnerable teen, but even a vulnerable adult - by pushing them to harm their health.
Further, as to your point about racist tendencies, I agree that certain policies implemented under the false "be kind" banner are, at best, condescending, and, at worst, quite harmful to those at whom they are aimed. The current state of gender ideology is the best example of that. I think many "allies" see these vulnerable individuals as something to be pitied and, in a sense, given up on. They think these people don't need their fertility or their sexual function, and so what if they have various health issues - because they are these pitiful beings that don't need the same opportunities. They wouldn't dream of limiting their own, or their loved ones own bodies in these ways, but it's fine for the poor transgender kids!
A game without rules makes for an uninteresting game -- as Frost said, what point is there to playing tennis without a net? I discovered that for myself. I play a lot of solitaire on the computer, and the program I use is so configurable that I can set rules that will allow me to win 100% of the time, but that quickly becomes boring.
But I don't think the kids who are doing this take it lightly. They can't resolve the problems they are having, and so they are open to the message that they should just have a "do-over". Scrap the female body and get a new, hard male body. (The fact that males have less fat than women may be a big attraction -- and who wants to menstruate every month?) I think some of these girls have too much faith in medicine to actually transform them in a real way; they haven't figured out that it is all cosmetic. It's like replacing the spark plugs in your engine with pictures of spark plugs -- they won't do anything but look the part.
In my religion (a multidimensional God, reincarnation, karma), we do indeed have enormous freedom to determine what we are, but we have to go through lives with limitations in order to become wise enough to handle the freedom. It's my view that some trans people simply chose the wrong gender before they were reborn. (If this sounds flaky, keep in mind that billions of people believe in reincarnation, including many Christians.)
Let me clarify a couple things. What makes trans people pitiful is that they can't accept themselves as they are, and they go to extraordinary lengths to change their perfectly normal bodies. Not being able to accept your personal reality is a measure of being very confused. Also, when I mentioned racism in society, I was thinking in terms of personal relationships. I know a black family in the next town who are surrounded by white neighbors, none of whom have ever tried to be friends. -- that kind of thing. (The wife makes a point of saying "hello" to everyone who passes, but no one wants to really know them.) Of course, institutional racism also exists.
You made a good point that trans people, like blacks, may be seen as somehow expendable people. They are already screwed up, so nothing is lost if a solution is devised that screws them up more. That is similar to what blacks went through, in which blacks have been experimented on medically without their knowledge. But this doesn't explain why trans people themselves want to mess with their bodies so much -- perhaps they too believe in the miracle of medicine (or, at least, they believe in the miracle of appearances).
You are reminding me of the Twilight Zone episode where Jack Klugman dies and goes to "heaven" where he is at a glamorous casino and keeps winning. Eventually, after winning at every single game he plays, he realizes it is not good - which is when it is revealed that he is really in hell. (The moral being no challenge = hell.)
You are pretty correct about why some of these girls are doing this, and the fact that they truly believe that, once they look male, they are male - at least that's what my daughter explicitly stated to me numerous times.
I know you are a reincarnation believer, and I don't find that flaky. However, I don't really see the idea of choosing incorrectly as making much sense. Our choices - if we have them - give us a particular experience to deal with, and there is no reason to think any of those choices are mistaken, even if they may be more difficult or scary than we anticipated. They still represent the challenges we chose to face - not a mistake.
I agree that what is pitiful is the inability to accept what is. And it deserves compassion, not hatred, and not body-destroying chemicals and unnecessary destructive surgeries.
I didn't realize you were speaking of real, personal racism rather than a sort of indirect racism as I was thinking of when the "good" white folk creates programs to "help" but doesn't have any idea what is really helpful (like trying to "defund" the police when poor black neighborhoods have a huge need for police, although police-constituent relationships can use a lot of work).
Now, don't get angry at me for correcting you, but you are conflating two episodes of the Twilight Zone. The one in which the criminal went to [what appeared to be] heaven, but it was really hell, was not played by Klugman. Klugman was in a similar episode in which he was a pool player who demanded and got a chance to play the greatest all-time pool player, who was dead; when he beat that pool player, Klugman's character took his place, and was consigned to an eternity of playing pool against every upstart who thought he was the best.
The Seth Material describes a situation in which a particular soul may avoid being one or the other sex for too many lives. For example, some souls don't want the pain of childbirth, or don't like the second-class status of women, so they avoid being female for too many lives. You see, according to Seth, every soul must experience being a child, being a father, and being a mother (which can be done in two lives, though most of us have more than that). Seth made these comments about effeminate men, not trans people, as trans people were mostly unknown in the last century (the psychic died in 1984), but I have applied the principle to trans people -- i.e., souls who want to avoid one gender or the other.
The girls who think they are male because they look male will soon give up that idea. There are too many reminders that they aren't male (taking drugs constantly, having a fake penis that doesn't work normally, etc.) to believe that for too long. Ultimately, every trans person develops an identity, not of the sex they want to be, but as a FACSIMILE of the sex they want to be. But in the case of your daughter, she doesn't seem to be trans at all.
Personally, I do believe that mistakes can be made within the context of reincarnation. Every choice we make is an opportunity to make a good choice or a poor choice, and I think it's fair to call the poor choices "mistakes". The wonderful thing about reincarnation is that it gives us endless opportunities to fix our mistakes. That is why there is no heaven or hell -- neither is necessary.
I'm curious about one thing: Now that your daughter is legally an adult, if she goes through the entire process and decides that she is happy, will you accept it? Among anti-trans activists, I am encountering a lot of parents who, it seems, will never accept their child's decision. I'm not sure what that means, but it is notable.
Wow. You’ve got me thinking. I guess I conflated those two episodes. I’ll have to see who played the main character in the episode with heaven/hell.
Anyway, as to your question, I already “accept” the decisions. I am not throwing her out, or preventing her. I love her and will continue to do so no matter how far she takes this.
However, I cannot say they are good decisions. Even if she ultimately lucks out and has a fine life living as if she is male, I will not then believe these were good decisions. I will believe she was one of the lucky ones for whom it worked out. Given everything we know and all that we don’t know about medical transition, it is an objectively bad decision to do what she is doing, both from a medical standpoint and a practical standpoint and a psychological standpoint. I won’t further elaborate as everything I have written in the subject explains why I consider this a poor choice, particularly for this effeminate girl who does not understand that she will never actually be male and particularly because of her Expectations about how this will proceed and particularly because she is extremely adverse to medical things like getting shots and having blood drawn.
I hope that answers the question.
I do understand your philosophy regarding choices made that might turn out more difficult than one anticipated. However, if we keep living in order to improve our souls, we should be embracing these challenges. Also, this is not a reversible choice - the choice to be born male or female (assuming we have such a choice). Medically altering your body and asking others to believe you are the opposite sex doesn’t change being male or female so I don’t see it as correcting a “mistaken” choice, just reacting to the choice in a maladaptive manner. But what do I know?
Oh no, I didn't mean that "transitioning" is the same thing as changing sexes for purposes of fulfilling your obligation to experience both sexes.
Let's say that a soul avoids being a female for five lives, then chooses to be male once again in the sixth life. In that life, he may have a strong urge to be a female -- that's because his soul NEEDS the experience of being female for its development (having already been male fives times). Thus a transgender person is born who longs to be the opposite sex. So if that individual lives in an age when medicalization is possible, he may choose to "transition". But ultimately the experience will be unsatisfactory because being a pretend woman is not the same as being a real woman. He will STILL have to reincarnate as a REAL FEMALE in a future life.
Regarding the Twilight Zone, to find that episode on IMDB, it would be helpful to know the title of the episode. Give me a moment, I'll look . . .
Ah I just found it. The name of the episode is "A Nice Place to Visit". The criminal is "Rocky Valentine" played by Larry Blyden. Sebastian Cabot plays "Mr. Pip".
Now, "A Game of Pool" is the title for the episode in which Jack Klugman gets to play a famous deceased player. Klugman's character wins that game, and then takes that man's place in death, consigned to play upstart players who challenge him.
Now, let's say your daughter is making a mistake by wanting to transition to being a male. She may need the experience of allowing herself to be influenced into making a poor decision, in order to learn some spiritual lesson from that.
Yes - I agree entirely. He would still need to go through a life as an actual female to have that experience, which is why the medicalization is, in my mind, both pointless and, in many ways, detrimental.
Thank you for the Twilight Zone info. I had this nagging feeling that maybe I had conflated two episodes, so now I know! :)
And, as to the last sentence, of course she might learn some valuable lesson by doing what she's doing, but that could be said of any decision. In the end, we have to act in what seems to be our best interest for this life (even assuming arguendo there are other lives) in order to fully benefit from it. We can't just say to ourselves "Whatever stupid thing I do is fine because I will learn from it," or we will just waste life away. But I get your point.