Let me start this with some quotes from my friend Sigmund Freud:
01. “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.”
02. “People do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.”
03. “We understand very well how to interpret in other people the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.”
04. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
05. “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
Thank you for your lucidity, Freud.
Now, each one of these sentences is in itself a truism and could be expanded to a whole essay on the strange intricacies of the human condition.
I just wish you could [if it’s even possible for you] to ponder on what he’s saying thoroughly. Freud was a researcher of the human psyche, the father of a whole new technique to understand how the human mind behaves, can get sick or cured, and he was also an explorer, a trailblazer. He dared to look into what was previously hidden. He dared to look further, to look underneath the surface of things. He dared to analyze before passing judgment, he dared to question standards irrationally held as sacred for centuries by the unthinking crowds. We could say, today, that his psychoanalytic technique has been overcome, it’s outdated. So be it. Still, most of his insights didn’t lose any weight. Just think of what he’s saying above. I mean: literally think.
If you’re the average extremist know-it-all, I know that to even suggest you could accept something diverging from your fixed notions is preposterous. And, thus, you are utterly incapable of realizing that, maybe, the really preposterous lies in your close-mindedness. Deep down, you can understand that you, like every other human being on earth, are unique and have unique, not “normal” sexual desires. But the “normal” is your intellectual limit. Your mind can’t go beyond the “normal”, even when you clearly understands it’s fiction, a fairy tale. And, yet, you laugh at childish Disneyan visions of things, you think romanticism is ridiculous, and you know that the average image of a man, a woman, three children and a dog [=the “normal”] is as rare to find today as it’s utterly unveiled, for all to see, as the universally accepted [by many] conformist convention that it is.
The reason the extremist is wrathfully decided to defend the “normal” in his head is based on his moral beliefs, that’s obvious. But here comes Freud again:
“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”
The guy really knew how to touch the most sensitive spot. Morality is a fiction, yes, but it’s the fiction the average mind and/or the extremist need to cling to to adequately hide, to others and to himself, how… immoral he is!! He knows he’s lying when he becomes the moral preacher, because he doesn’t like to listen to moral sermons himself! So his mind works more or like this way: “Have I acted convincingly enough? Have I managed to keep the illusion alive?”
Why am I saying all this?
Because sexuality, which is all about what is “normal” or not, is the hot topic these days. I wish it wasn’t. I wish Freud had taught us something. But here we are.
Let me start with homosexuality.
The Bible, as we all know, expressely states the Creator made man and woman, Adam and Eve, and He, as always, was clearly verbal about what He deemed as acceptable:
*"*You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."
Which is the favorite verse cited by your average Christian friend when he wants to condemn gay relationships.
Some claim it’s not as clear-cut as Lev. 18:22 suggests. Some even say Jesus never said a thing about homosexuality. Because there are no clear NT verses condemning it. But I’ll not dwell on this. I’m an atheist who has some serious doubts about Jesus’ actual existence. His words are not commandments to me.
But the Biblical, or should I rather say, the Abrahamic attitude, clearly condemning homosexual behavior, is what matters here. Because it’s at the core of the modern rejection of gay people, as the overwhelming majority of extremists are Christians, Jews or Muslims.
These more, say, “verbal” moralist religious extremists are very noticeable and virtually ubiquitous nowadays, but they are not alone in their Bigotland neighborhoods. There are those who do not condemn the gay out of some commitment or fixation to dear old Abraham, but out of more [according to them] rational and justifiable reasons. They insist homosexuality is against nature. A deviation from norm. They can use state of the art, updated scientific jargon to condemn homosexuals for eternity. Only, they make it out of moral concern, too. The “science”, or nature, for them, is just an excuse for them to impose on others their extremist notions of right and wrong.
The problem is, that science has long, long, discredited the notion of homosexuality as a disease/illness, so, you have to be extremely nit-picky to find the “science” to suit your moral rejection of it. Most scientists will be unanimous in stating homosexuality is, also, a part of nature, and, therefore, as natural as heterosexuality. In order to go on insisting it’s a sign of degeneration, the extremist moralist needs to transfigure real science, making science repeats, in his head alone, the lies it propagated hundreds of years ago, and which today only make real scientists cringe.
So, the first thing to know about homosexuality is: it happens, it is natural.
The homosexual person is not any sicker than the average straight. The homosexual person can be intelligent, productive, or ignorant, lazy. We’ll never know how many of the biggest geniuses in history were gay. Being gay doesn’t entail anything else about a person except that (s)he is attracted to the same sex. If someone says they’re gay, you know as much about them as whether they say they’re Canadian. They simply come in all colors and shapes.
More important yet: their sexuality is an intimate, personal, subjective affair.
But what the moralist wants to do is, exactly, interfere in the personal lives of others. That’s the core of extremism. I won’t do it. You won’t do it either. I condemn homosexuality, therefore, you will not be gay!!
Let me consider briefly an argument I’ve seen espoused here, on ILP.
“Homosexuals are a genetic dead end.”
Meaning, obviously: [male] gays do not keep the species going. Humanity dies in them.
The short-sightedness here is clear. Two main opposing arguments can be easily presented:
a) gay men are also male, can also have children, often do so and for millions of years have done so
b) in an overcrowded world, with 8+ billion people, what’s the disadvantage of a minority of the [male] population not having children??
As I see, arguments against homosexuality are rooted [and rotted] in the most primitive corners of the human mind. They are not logical, they are not reasonable. They either originate in religious extremism or in some weird “back to nature” approach which ends up endorsing blind prejudice and eugenist thinking. “Let’s rid humankind of this plague”.
A weird belief that, not surprisingly, is much loved in Bigotland.
Bisexuality presents an even more interesting problem.
Here we have the case of those who, somehow, someway, love both sexes, ie, a guy who “does” both his girlfriend and his best buddies.
How a bisexual mind works is something beyond me. Having always being attracted to females, I don’t see how I could ever sleep with another guy. And YET some do, and their sexuality is, yet again, not my concern, I can’t explain it, but I can’t explain mine either, ie, to be attracted to females is the minimum, how this attraction unvelops in my mind is another thing. To say I’m heterosexual is to say almost nothing about me.
What the bisexual person does is make us question the foundations of our understanding of human sexuality. Once again, the Freudian perspective is healthy: the “normal” is only a convention. We are used, most are used, to the notion that a [manly] man is attracted by the opposite sex only. That’s typical macho behavior: to go and get all the females you can. Yet, while the “macho” brags about the last female he’s “done” to his friends, he doesn’t notice, or could ever know, that one of these friends fantasize not only about such girls, but about him, his “macho” buddy, too.
It’s an even bigger threat to the fossilized notion of the “normal”. Because in this case, even the “procreation” argument fails: the bisexual is perfectly capable of being married, having ten children and still “doing” his male friends publicly or incognito. The extremist could then be at a loss of words for a while. But, unfortunately, he soon recovers. Bisexuality is definitely abnormal too. Deviation, depravation, degeneration.
The recourse to such demeaning -tions may be just a tactics to avoid thinking deeper though.
If he dared to explore the world outside of Bigotland, he could, who knows, ponder this:
If a guy can be attracted to both men and women and still be a father, still be manly, ie, still be indistinguishable from his fellow straight men, what’s the big deal with sexuality? With others’ sexuality?
But this is asking too much. He will soon revert to “The Bible [nature] says it’s inappropriate.” That’s enough for him.
Now if bisexuality, hiding itself in the guise of the “normal” so easily, is still aberrant to him, what will he think about those who take it even further?
How will an extremist react to transsexuality?
We’re seeing it right now.
Here, the Bible has nothing to say. Unless one interprets transgenders as another type of homosexuals. That’s the official discourse in Bigotland: there’s only men and women, God never intended anyone to change their sex. It should rather be: God never demanded anyone to change sex. Yahweh never intends. He demands. That’s why the extremists are here to make demands, to determine how people should live. They’re the servants of God.
As homophobia is, nowadays, not as strong as it was some decades ago, transphobia has taken its place. Just as antisemitism was substituted by Islamophobia. The scapegoat changes its color, but remains fucked! If people cannot present convincing, [real] scientific arguments to condemn homosexuals, the case with transgenders is more open to criticism, virulent criticism, as it’s clear as water the norm in nature is man and woman, right?
There’s a famous underground movie released in the 1950s, called Glen or Glenda, directed by Ed Wood, the [allegedly] worst movie director of all times. In this movie, Wood, who liked to crossdress, as portrayed in the famous cinebio directed by Tim Burton, seemed to have an understanding of transgenderism that is way ahead of his times:
"She [the transgender woman] is a woman in mind only. But the mind rules!"
A line in the movie I never forgot.
It is fascinating when someone, through whatever means, helps you to get a truer, clearer understanding of things. It’s called INSIGHT, deeper insight. I thought: "hey, that’s that!! The mind rules!! How have I not understood that earlier?
Yeah, the mind rules. Everyone, everywhere. Most especially regarding the most intimate aspects of ourselves. Like sexuality.
The mind rules.
So, a person starts to develop in his mind, in the deepest recesses of his mind, the notion that his body is… inadequate. That he doesn’t want to have a penis, or being hairy, or have breasts. That his sister or female friends’ bodies are much closer to what he’d rather have for himself if he could choose. Only if he could choose. Beginning from this, if he is living in a conservative environment [and for the transgender, most environments on earth are “conservative”], he will be taught that such notions are obnoxious, and can even be a sign of deep psychological issues. Girls are girls, boys are boys. Yet, according to some, even the strictest religious education can’t change their deepest desire to having being born in another body. For them, the religious mindset is the unattainable ideal. The body dysmorphia is the real thing.
It takes time, painful conversations and lots of consideration on the “alternative” for the true transgender to realize and accept that, regardless of what the family or “society” says, the deepest inclinations aren’t going anywhere. They would have to be literally forced out of his mind to fully dissipate. Ie, through either severe brainwashing or through death. As long as he stays alive, the desire to become a she is there.
What does [sane] observation tell us? That, despite his inner sexual inclinations, the transgender “works” fully in his societal life. He’s not an autist, he’s not mentally unbalanced, he’s not a threat to other people. He’s undistinguishable from other people as far as everyone can see. His issues are totally internal, intimate. His mind is his own private kingdom.
The Bible and nature apostles might feel inclined, and often do, to point out their accusing fingers and call it an illness of the mind. Just like atheists, Jews, blacks, gays, were one day seen, and treated, as walking aberration, now it’s the transgender turn. “There are only two sexes”. A mantra in the politically correct extremist mindset. Yet, that’s not distant from what the transgender himself believes. For him, too, there are only men and women. He just feels like he’s a woman, not a man.
And as long as the extremist cannot, scientifically, prove that the trans is sick, as that’s what he believes, as long as the trans men and women are able to fully “function” in society not harming anyone else, there’s no really deep point the extremist can make, except dive even deeper into his own hysteria. He has no access to the other person’s mind, he will never have. He will never be able to actually penetrate a trans [or gay, bi, assexual, whatever] person’s mind and actually understand or describe what goes on in that head. As long as he is unable to do this, he should remain silent.
But of course, he doesn’t.
So, do I understand the trans mind thoroughly? Nope, I don’t understand even my own mind thoroughly. But this I surely understand:
The mind rules.
Whatever goes through a person’s head that makes them wish to radically alter their body so as not to feel humiliated by what they see in the mirror, is beyong my understanding, but I can’t simply come and label this as some mental condition. That would entail that anyone else also has the right to peek into my mind, my personal life, and judge whatever idiosyncratic ideas and inclinations I might have as signs of mental illness.
That’s what has been traditionally done by the servants of the “normal”.
The transgender woman or man wants to identify themselves with what their minds perceive as being their true gender. This much I can tell because that’s what they themselves are willing to tell me.
I’m actually dealing with this situation right now in my job. There’s a trans woman in my team, and though she’s not particularly feminine, she wants to be treated as a woman by her colleagues. Nobody sees any problem in addressing her as ‘she’ even though most now she was born a guy. She hasn’t, as far as I know, fully transitioned yet. She is getting there. Taking hormones, doing costly surgery. Changing her voice so it gets more and more “womanly”. Now, I ask, is she doing that with my or anyone else’s money? Is she doing that to my body? All she ever asks of me is to be polite to her and address her in the feminine. I see no logical reason not to humor her. Besides, I see nothing in her that indicates some deep psychological issue. She does what everybody else does. She does her job and is paid for it. If anything, her presence so close to me is, once again, helping me to see how utterly diverse human beings are [not simply pretend to be].
The moralist bigot will not be satisfied with this. What, this guy is taking the place of a true female? That’s unacceptable! Nope, she is taking the place of somebody else who couldn’t do her job half as effectively as she does.
But he will go even further: his sex transition only happens in his mind. He’s still a guy to me. Yes, to you. And yes, in his mind.
But the mind rules.
If someone feels like a woman or a man in his mind, no amount of sanctimonious moralism will alter that. That’s how that particular individual perceives the world, deals with the world. We could say all men and women have in themselves both masculine and feminine traits. We just learn to socially repress the traits of the opposite sex, but they are still there, hidden somewhere inside our mental chaos. In the case of the transgender, he fully embraces his feminine traits, and represses the masculine ones.
By embracing the woman in him he’s, or rather, she, is actually challenging a socially accepted notion of human behavior, and such a challenge couldn’t go on without any opposition. The Bible has said Yahweh created man and woman, man to be manly, woman to be womanly. Amen to that for all millenia to come.
Except, no.
The Bible has little to say about the intricacies of the human mind. It only establishes a tyrannical notion of right and wrong, of normal and abnormal. And the fanatic sticks to it, or to his Ersatz for the Bible [nature, morality] when he wants to pass judgment on everybody else but himself. As the great British philosopher Ringo Starr once said, “it all comes down to who you crucify.”
Now, try to imagine the following.
A righteous preacher fully excited [sic] with his long rehearsed speech on virtue and immorality, on the normal and right things to do. He has an audience, and whoever has an applauding audience is right, huh? But this knight of righteousness doesn’t or can’t realize that, there in the audience, in the front row of the audience, sits one guy who’s fully [literally] excited about him [the preacher], another one who’s just texted his “unofficial” gay boyfriend, and a third one who can’t wait till he gets home and can try on the new fancy dress his wife bought. He doesn’t recognize his fellows’ hypocrisy as he can’t admit his. He doesn’t understand that one thing is a man’s discourse, and another one his mind.
And that the mind rules.
Doesn’t matter what social convention might demand of any of us.
So, in conclusion, the variation in human sexuality displayed by the existence of homo, bi and trans people should serve as a sign of how utterly complex the human mind is, and how many different people are out there, so many actually, that the whole notion of “normal” becomes meaningless. Homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, are minorities, indeed, but the most fundamental minority is the individual himself.
Each of us is a minority.
Each of us is an exception.
Freud got it brilliantly right.
The extremist will go on throwing his stones, hoping some of them never reachs his glass roof. But his main opponent is reality itself, not his hypocrisy. Reality itself tells each human is unique and, therefore, the “normal” is a fiction.
So, what’s the real problem with homo-, bi- or transsexuality? None. Nothing that I can even hope to rationalize. The real problem lies in ignorance and extremism, the inability of some to empathize, to respect others’ space and to understand that they are just willing to impose on all others a strict moral vision that they themselves only pretend to endorse.
If anything, the homossexual or transgender feeling oppressed or depressed about [some] people’s inability to let others be, can at least know this consolation: [s]he’s not alone in being alone.
