If you need surgery to accommodate a sense of self, you are not authentic. You are LYING to yourself.
It's better to accept the burden of being human in the body you are given.
To struggle is human. We all experience this.
Discussion
Ok no more surgeries to help people walk, hear, get prosthetics, nothing...be your authentic self
Slippery slope.
Healthy surgeries for everyone?
Sure.
Accommodate a mental illness that then in turn later, enforce rules in how we speak?
These individuals collectively move the goalposts and impede:
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of expression.
If an individual wants to remove their naughty bits, thinking that it magically transforms them into the opposite sex, they are mistaken.
The skeleton is still that of a female or male.
But let them.
Go ahead. Doctors get rich from these individuals. They are of course going to support whatever lines their pocketbook.
Just want to clarify.
This is MY bias.
IDGAF š¤£
Guess that makes me not authentic since Iāve had cosmetic surgery.
Rex, man. Of all the nostriches here, youāre one who has made me dig deep and think a LOT about people, politics, nuance, etc.
Sometimes the stuff you share is loving, wise, and compassionate, and I appreciate you for it.
Other times (like this one) Iām afraid it comes across as cruel and ignorant. And itās hard, but also kind of amazing to have a digital space where one can organically appreciate that kind of complexity without algorithms and all that.
Iāve never had the experience of feeling like Iām in the wrong physical body. I canāt imagine how difficult, distracting, and complicated it must feel. But the fact that so many in our society refuse to even try to offer compassion or acceptance toward people living such a unique and often hard experience is discouraging to me. Because I love people, and seeing suffering makes me sad. Itās why I Bitcoin.
Itās of course true that tiny, extreme factions can and do act horribly, on any end of the cultural/political spectrum. And Iām not here to make excuses for anyoneās bad behavior. (Itās obvious when it occurs, ānuff said).
But if we get hooked by that divisive culture war rhetoric, then weāre failing - in that moment - to bring about a better world.
When a minority of people in our culture have overwhelmingly been the recipients of scorn, abuse, and violence, it feels wrong to me to take any approach other than listening. Because I just donāt know what itās like, but keeping an open heart has never failed me before.
I didnāt read this thread in detail, but my sense is that it got pretty hostile. For my own well-being, Iām not going down that rabbit hole (and I still have to go get ready for a trip).
But since itās nostr, where I have gotten to know the two humans having this conversation, Iām not just scrolling on. I respect you enough to say, I believe youāre a good person but I think youāre wrong about this, because if we havenāt lived it, we canāt know. I hope youāll consider that.
Again, culture war BS is just not something Iām interested in. Red blue white black rainbow whatever, Iām in this for all the other humans and want to listen to and honor anyone willing to share their experience of this life.
Okay thatās all I got for now. Hope this note ultimately acts to bring a little more love to every side of the scale āļø
This is the best note Iāve ever read by anyone trans or not.
My cousin taught me about horseshoe theory. As you go further from center Botha side get further apart, to a point. But after that, both sides actually start coming together again. So the people at the far end of both sides are actually closer to each other than they think.
Most trans people just want to live normal lives and do normal things. Itās these particular trans people who think theyāre helping but theyāre actually doing more harm than good.
Early I n transition,thereās a phase we call āthe pink cloudā where we reach peak euphoria and when that wears off, the juxtaposition of the two hormones, testosterone and estrogen have a battle inside the trans person. Since transitioning is a necessar inherently selfish process, or manifests itself in a lot of way.
Airing your dirty laundry on socials is never the right thing to do. On that we can all agree. Society is adapting to this revolutionary new tool called a computer. As we adjust, we have a choice on how we evolve as a species. For the first time in history, we get to choose the trajectory of our own evolution.
As we attain higher and higher levels of technology, we much more serious ethical questions to discuss as a society as a whole. Downloading human consciousness will give us effective immortality. But how do we deal with an immortal Hitler or Stalin. Do we place them ins artificial hell? Or do we just erase them? What about AI porn? Or AI child porn? We live in very difficult times and itās going to get worse before it gets better.
How we show other humans compassion will decide how we answer these hard questions and more.
š«š«
Iām glad you took that the right way. My ideas tend to be pretty far forward looking and, as a trans person, I have been forced to tiptoe very lightly around the subject of children, lately. And, as a trans person in bitcoin, Iām exposed to more phobias than I would normally allow in my life. But bitcoin is too important for me to back out.
Itās extremely refreshing to hear a true libertarian say live and let live. You obviously see people as people and let their actions tell you who they are. And you have the integrity to do so in such a polarized world!
The world needs more people like you! š«š«š«
I especially appreciated, āHow we show other humans compassion will decide how we answer these hard questions and more.ā šÆšÆšÆ
I also admire and respect you for sticking around in a community which is in some ways so tolerant of peopleās differences that it includes some who are incredibly intolerant of people or ideas that make them uncomfortable.
Ava offered the live-and-let-live reminder (and I agree). And it got me thinkingā¦
Sometimes, libertarian philosophy ā which in its pure form I find to be very compelling philosophy ā is abused by selfish people (or rather, is co-opted by lobby groups and used for propaganda) in ways that ultimately reinforce an incumbent power/structure, to the detriment of the individuals the ideals are supposed to support.
But that happens with nearly any political approach.
For example, imagine that you steel-man the communist/socialist perspective, and give Marx the benefit of the doubt that āhe saw the problem and wanted to bring human society to a better place, but got the solution wrongā.
We again find that well-intended philosophical ideals get abused and corrupted by those people with the wrong incentives, and you end up with every failed communist state in history.
Back to āwhy I Bitcoinā, I guess. It gives power to individuals, whether they call themselves āsovereign contributorā or āproletariat producerā. Bitcoin fosters individual autonomy and responsibility within the context of a massively communal activity: a global monetary network and asset that everyone can contribute to, participate in, and benefit from.
To me, itās that first āhandshake across the aisleā that opens doors to remember each othersā humanity. Itās acknowledgment that we agree on a major (if not the biggest) problem in our society ā broken money ā and on a workable solution.
Iāve had that experience on Nostr frequently. And I think itās a first step in moving beyond the divisive rhetoric of the most hardcore activists and manipulative politicians, into a social environment where people learn to respect each other again.
Iāll close with this oldie: 
I ain't a hero.
Imma faulty human being, standing as sovereign as possible.
Full of bile and bias.
Never forget that.
Understood & accepted as such š«”
I have biases of my own, and I am gradually de-conditioning from them, as I unlearn some of the things that we grow up being told are truths.
Iām doing this with ingrained ideas from across the range of the socio-cultural-political spectrum.
Not asking you to change or agree - I am simply offering my perspective in order to foster the ideals of compassion and love that give me faith in people.
Nostr allows for this and itās beautiful.
Woke policies are not loving.
They promote hate and envy.
Iām not advocating for work policies, donāt get me wrong. (Iām nearly as āallergicā to the hardcore left rhetoric as I am to much of Trumpās vibes). Communism is predicated on theft, but so is fiat-based capitalism.
Issues like transgender rights are deeply nuanced, and ultimately every individualās circumstance is going to be unique, so Iām not writing this to argue for a specific policy approach.
Iām looking at it from a much more āgrassrootsā and āpeer to peerā level. I havenāt experienced the things a trans person has, so Iām aware that my perspective is necessarily limited.
But when someone tells me they are suffering deeply, or feel like something is very wrong, my inclination is to listen, and to try to understand. I try to imagine if they were my brother, a friend, or (someday) my child. How would I approach their vulnerability, their trust in me, in a way that I would look back on and know I acted from love.
Policies aside, to me itās easy to believe someone who says they were born in a female body but felt like a boy/man their entire life. Iāve never lived that - how could I presume to know otherwise? My best move is to be compassionate towards that person, and start from there.
Thereās hateful, divisive rhetoric throughout our society. But I find it exists far more on digital platforms than in the real world. Because most people are genuinely good.
The left-side cancel culture and the right-side culture war (to overgeneralize a lot) has put these conversations into a hypersensitive, existential overdrive: āif you donāt agree with X then youāre a terrible person and donāt deserve to exist, because you must believe Yā is promoted everywhere. Because it gets reactions and clicks, and because clicks generate ad revenue. Follow the money right?
To me, the reality is more nuanced, but also simpler:
- Love your neighbor.
- When someone tells you who they are, believe them (which is perfectly compatible with ādonāt trust, verifyā by the way).
If something makes me react strongly, with discomfort, or the type of outrage that comes from āthat voice I heard somewhere but it didnāt originate within meā, itās usually because Iāve internalized a viewpoint from the cultural influences around me, and itās time to get curious about why I trust that perspective and whether I genuinely believe in it, or I just heard it enough to assume itās true.
Again, this goes far beyond right/left disagreements. This is a facet of my lifelong work, spiritually and psychologically. The reason I responded at first was precisely because your posts have motivated me to do a fair amount of that work.
*woke, not āworkā, of course