I also believe as I learned in acting school that I am many expressions of self. When I put on a business suit and go to court I am playing a particular role. I am not that ‘person’ anymore than I am the ‘person’ who is the sailor or the hunter or the physician. I have had several very powerful identifications. I have had these amazing roles in my life.
I played a girl on stage as a teen and later as an improvisational actor I played many female parts, but more in humour like Benny Hill and Monty Python. I miss that time. Older I remember the sheer fun of association and creation and the celebration of creativity and spontaneity.
I’ve been a physician more than 40 years. I certainly felt the role of surgeon differently than the role of psychotherapist. I enjoyed most the psychotherapist role which was very ‘feminine’ in the traditional self. Activity and passivity have been generalized as masculine and feminine. Whole fields are defined in this way. Ivan Illich wrote the amazing book Gender which predated all the Marxists oppression garbage. The reductionism of Marx is so painfully passé yet people persist in promoting his angry binary bias. Illich made it clear that people mostly liked their ‘roles’ or ‘accepted them’.
The 20th century has been an explosion of possibility. Buckminister Fuller noted that a mere hundred years ago the vast majority of people had not travelled more than a hundred miles from their birthplace. Television is only 70 years old and the birth control pill was only first developed in 1952. Today so many people travel and those that don’t can watch tv and even National Geographic. The differences and possibilities are now readily apparent to all except a protected tribe in the Amazon Rainforest. Diamond’s ‘Traditional Societies’ is a classic text showing that the ‘noble savage’ was anything but. Life has evolved from taboo and paranoia and safety in the masses and sameness to embracing change in a way only possible for the elite of a previous era.
The 60’s cultural revolution was a revolution of luxury. The Australian ‘walk about’ is a middle class phenomena. 8 billion people and more and the ability to own a bicycle is a matter of security and possibility of wealth the world over. In my travels I’ve encountered people who own only one pair of clothes. Living is fairly good by historical standards but is still mostly about survival.
Cornbury Society an old cross dressers organization on the west coast has been almost all heterosexual men who like to dress as women on the weekend. The joke about golf is that it’s main attraction as a sport was that it allowed men who war the ‘suit’ a replica of old British Empire uniform, to get out of such clothing and dress ridiculously. Every sport has it’s own ‘dress’. Golfers are the most ludicrous. But here are a group of men who have for decades skipped the hitting of little balls and just dressed as women. They could, for one, afford women’s apparel, the au femme, as well as the ‘au drab’. Just as golfing is a sport for the wealthy like motorcycling, cross dressers as a group tend to be often ‘filthy rich’.
All over any city there are countless thespian societies, amateur theatre groups who follow Stanislaw and Checkov and try not just to ‘play’ a different character but rather to ‘be’ a different character. There are even Passion Plays with conservative Christians playing Mary and Jesus. The Cosplay and Medieval societies are booming. The frontier day folk with their historical re enactment and the hobby gardeners aren’t much different from the ballroom dancers and the bowlers.
There’s the ‘family’ role, ‘school role’, ‘work role’ and ‘social role’. The cross dresser has an au drab and an au femme role. The women who dress as men are now main stream. Few recall that women who wore pants were so outrageous in this last hundred years. Chanel’s pant suit was ‘shocking’. Hillary playing to the ‘old ladies’ of her days politicized herself as a ‘pant suit’ Vice President. She epitomized the cross dressing female takin for granted today.
The “Mollies’ were the Irish revolutionary’s who dressed as women when they struck back against the British Empire oppression. Transgender Warrior, though painfully Marxist nonetheless gives some history of the gender wars,.
Cross dressing men are as likely to be heterosexual as women who wear pants suits. The 10% political figure refers to the minority of individuals who define their sexuality as other than traditional or conventional. The whole ‘Hair’ phenomena of my ear as ‘are you a boy or are you a girl, with your hair so long, you look like a girl.’ The music industry androgyny was celebrated by Bowie foremost but so many were ‘doing it’. Long haired men and short haired women. Cross dressing.
Today with the Transgender Movement cross dressing is just the mildest of ‘deviations’. At the extreme men and women are surgically and hormonally doing all they can to be the ‘role’ of the ‘other’.
I do not believe God is male or female, whatever anthropomorphism we may use or how the Bible may describe the family. Yahweh. Allah, Krishna and all the god’s of man are like the story of the ‘elephant’ and the blindfolded wise man’. The elephant is all and none of the descritptions. That’s why we say God is ineffable. Qualities of God included omniscient , omnipotent, omnipotential, ineffable, immanent and transcendent. The mystical classic of the west, is the God of Unknowing.’
Buber described awareness as I and It and that the greatest movement was from I and It to I and Thou. Namaste , the “god in me salutes the god in you’. The Self is neither male or female. God is and isn’t. God of the Trinity has gender and family but Yahweh, “I am that is who I am” is beyond gender for sure. The Self is self. That is the indivisible and infinite within.
I like the term role. Others call it personality. Some have described it as ‘dissociative’. There’s even ‘multiples’. We offen talk of the good and bad self, the child who is mischievous. That’s not the entity or being. When I meditate I know I am and that process isn’t gender biased
Yet when I dress and act as a woman I become a part of mysel. We’re actually all have the X chromosome. We begin as children in a feminine state if anything , men become more differentiated as male at adolescent. Remove the testosterone producing gonads and men revert to female in so many aspects.
My friend laughs about aging saying that as women and men move into their sixties their hormones move more to the centre balance so little old men and little old women often look little different. Gender defines the young but the old are more defined by age and capability. My friend in a wheelchair never became an ‘invalid’ or’ wheelchair’. He was so much more and indeed argued stridently that the wheel chair freed him to become more his self.
I like breasts. I expect if I was Buddha as a young man surrounded by buxom brown skinned princesses naked from the waist up I’d never want my own breasts. But in our nuclear family society and the individualism of this modern culture I like the look of breasts. As a former dancer and gymnast I’m fascinated by how they affect my carriage. I have to stand more upright . Posture is so affected by many factors. There’s no doubt despite the 19th century legal system that 4 inch heels are ‘fuck me’ shoes . As my very stylish friend now in her 70’s has always said, if you have to walk in 4 inch heels you are definitely doing something wrong as a woman. I loved the classic “Naked Ape’ which pointed to the ‘red lips’ and butt pushed out to accentuate the sexual provocativeness of the female. The woman in ‘sensible shoes’ is not the girl of the ‘slut walk’.
Communication in the grossly outdated courts is not just ‘written and spoken language’ which the courts actually handle well. Psychologists and sociologists and psychiatrists however are much more evolved as are anthropologists in the study of ‘communication’ between men and women and groups. 4 inch heels and public stripping are definitely sexual communication of a sort but ‘broadcasting’ doesn’t mean that I want a ‘specific response.” I might hold an open house to sell my property but I don’t mean that the Hell’s Angels are invited to use the place for an orgy. Communication is multi factorial and beyond the limits of the present binary legal political scene which has failed in terms of family and marital courts abusing generations of children and now continues to mess up with the whole ‘gender expression’ issue.
I am self. I have expressed my self as a male self most of my life. I have expressed my self as a ‘physician self’ for 40 years. I’ve expressed my self as a hunter and fisherman for over 50 years. I’ve expressed myself as a blue water sailor for some 30 years.
I wore women ‘s clothes and presented in public ‘au femme’ for some 40 years off and on. I attended the famous ‘drag queen balls’ a few times a year. I invariably saw Halloween as a chance to dress in female apparel. When I lived in Mexico I wore a sarong. I’ve worn kilts for 50 years. I’ve danced the woman’s part and the man’s part and played various roles. As a writer I’ve written the woman’s part and the man’s part. As a psychotherapist i have always considered the person from their perspective. Psychological mindednesss is the ability to tolerate the tension of opposites. Thanks to Transactional Analysis I’ve utilized the child within as a well as the parent and adult within to work wonders with patients. I’ve been pained by the rigid roles of those who have become their ‘position’.
I’m facing retirement and seeing so many of my friends either dying or retiring. So many are leaving the ‘rigid roles’ that they tolerated so many years but with wisdom and age realize were killing them. Administration and government which divides itself into ‘parties’ is always ‘partying’. They’re worse than my drug addicts. The ‘government party’ which all it’s hypocrisy and virtue signalling and lies is anathema to the soul of most. These ‘roles’ are ‘unhealthy’ and people who must interact with those who cling to a role o any kind experience ‘toxity’. There’s little transparency or honesty in those arrangements.
I am self and I like to wear breasts,. My favourite book was the Lazy Cross dresser, He used breastforns because it made the clothes hang better I think it’s a declaration, Beyond long hair the breast declare one as ‘outsider’ and accepting of it. The female equivalent would be the “cod piece’. We are a matriarchal society. Imitation is the sincerest form o flattery. The women are wearing pants and the men have long hair. Next the men are wearing breast forms and we’re waiting for the women to catch up and start wearing cod pieces, The lesbians and an unknown number of heterosexuals have made ‘strap on’s’ a highly lucrative market. The ‘porn industry’ so abused by the ‘respectable women’ has now a ‘competing ‘erotica’ market which is loosely ‘female porn’ by no better name. Euphemism is all the rage today.
I understand though why so many women are thankful to take off their bras at the end of the day. The equivalent for men is the ‘suit’. The ‘ work role’ is represented in the clothing. Communication is in dress. I liked my white lab coat which I wore for many years, I so enjoyed Carl Jung’s book on Symbols. The Mao Jacket by artist Sui Jianguo is the latest of military symbolism . I loved the ‘make peace not war’ era yet Freud was right when he noted that ‘sex and agression’ were the issues of adults. I like that Jung noted that Integration was more an issue for the older.
I enjoy a retired artist friend whose daily change of clothing is outlandish. Fashion is wild. Andy Warhol was right when he made of the statement of ‘20 minutes of fame’. We actually have an idiot PM who is as much as putting his feet on the table at international conferences to have his socks discussed. These are bizarre times. War and Rumors of War.
Klinger was the MASH character who wished to be sent home from the war as insane so dressed in women’s clothes. Today when women do anything traditionally male they are celebrated but when men ‘imitate women’ they continue to be ridiculed. It’s as if the ‘feminism’ of today is merely “imitation of men’ , flattery of men, not at all ‘egalitarian’. In traditional society the ‘mother;’ was most elevated as was the ‘father’ whereas in the Marxist anti family world, their roles are reduced to being ‘breeders.’
I think of myself as transgender. I’m what Malcolm Gladwell has called the ‘outsider’. My IQ once was what ‘alienated’ me. I felt one of when I became part of a high IQ group and now I’m alienated by my ‘gender expressioon’ though their are indeed millions of transexuals and perhaps a third of all adults who don’t fit that more rigid definition of male and female. All power to them. I certainly enjoyed my successful years as an elite cisgender male. I’m an old person now. I find suits and other military masculinity heavy. I miss sailing where I had no use for a bra and was satisfied in either torn sailing shorts or a sarong and sandals. Even wearing a sarong causes judgement in Canada and that wearied me because of the virtue signalling. I mights as well present as a Rocky Horror Picture Show transvestite since the ‘acceptance’ and those who go to ‘heaven’ is so narrow. As a dog owner I’d long ago decided I didn’t want to go to a heaven that didnt welcome dogs. Thought there’s a stairway to heaven and a highway to hell I’m not wanting the heaven’s of some people who though I admire them and their ‘tribes’ don’t really want me.
As an English Canadian who stopped speaking French when Quebec instituted French only communication when English Canada had established French and English communication, I’ve accepted that I could never be the ‘head’ of my own country where. I was born and raised and lived too many decades . Similiarly I ‘ve found myself asking where can I be the leader, not that I want to be the leader, but what organization would allow me to be a leader as a man who wears a frock. I understand my female colleague who feels that way about her feeling excluded as a woman from leadership in some organizations. I believe in meritocracy and don’t hold with identity politics at all. But I do believe in inclusivity socially. I don’t want to support an organization that wants my death as just one minor concern.
That’s my issue today. Where am I welcome. That’s what I want. It’s not like I voted for our present PM. Yet I’m treated as ‘less than’ by those who voted for this evil elite ignorant fraud and traitor. Just a thought. An opinion in a time and world that is regressing and devolving to the censorship of totalitarianism. It may be that all men are wearing bras and all women cod pieces next year, No progress there. I love this middle place which makes me such a target of the left and right.
Time to walk the dog.
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