Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
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- Switzerland
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- The boring one
Outside observers would be the absolute least people to know. Yet it's the only question that matters.
People often say incredibly stupid things about themselves, but actually, people stay incredibly stupid things about each others much much more frequently. Mankind's history is a history of prejudice and misconceptions from groups of people on other groups of people, and their hoorendous consequences. That's precisely what social and cultural sciences break, by actually investigating "otherness", quantitatively and more importantly qualitatively, assessing it without prejudices, reporting on it on a descriptive and not normative angle, and basically accounting for what it is, actually, to be the person that is being talked about. And that's why our mountains of fictions about "chinamen", "savages", "redskins" just like "inverted trannies" or "homos" are being more and more treated for what they are : horrendous ignorant bullshit, self-serving myths, self-reproducing stereotypes. We do lose a lot of romanticism in the process, but we gain all the more dignity and accuracy. Because damn does reality, in contrast with our imagination of alterity, makes us look like twats.
Now, undergoing sex change is enough of a difficult decision, with enough difficult consequences, to assume that it is not taken lightly, and that there is something profound enough, in its desire, to justify it. The irony is that if we had a magical ray or pill that allowed us to switch back and forth between sexes (should we be so lucky some day), the stakes would be lower, the motives could be more superfitial, and you'd probably have all the more issues with it. As it is, the trouble is that it precisely is a very serious thing.
But also, it's odd to see its seriousness as an argument to forbid it, as if people should be forbidden any life-changing choice based on the possibility of mistakes. Such choices are made all the time : deciding to marry a given person or not, to make a child with them or not, to leave a country for another, to pursue a carrer or lose an opportunity, we keep doing stuff that we may regret, definitely closing a door to go through another, losing forever potential identities on the way, on all aspects of life. Being suddenly overprotective about sexual identity is just hypocritical. It's advocating for outside control by the least affected people who know least about a situation. In reality, simply because gender and sexual identity is a conservative taboo.
And it's a taboo that also applies to mere gender change. Because a lot of people do also switch gender (definitely or back and forth) without switching sex. They feel it like this and don't feel it like that. Gender combinations are infinitely complex (you have cross-gendered people who are or aren't homosexual, who consider or don't consider themselves the other sex, etc). Everything exists, all configuratoins are observed. Sexual change is one specific intent, on a whole array of existing intents. All of them are of course treated as abominations by conservatives who believe that their mythology-based prescriptive worldview is descriptive ("does not compute : you don't exist and you should not exit and if you exist then you do not count"). Those are, once again, the last people whose opinion matter. If you wish to know something about an exotic subset of humans, to ask them or you ask their cultural interfaces (peer-reviewed ethnographers having spent 20 years immersed in their world while distancing temselves as much as possible from their own internalized biases) and not the tourist, the missionary, the colon, or the remote-person-whio.vaguely-heard-about-it-but-has-opinions. There are sciences of grasping human variations beyond projections, these are cultural anthropology in general, gender studies when it comes to the specific field of how humans deal with manhood, womanhood and everything inbetween. It's the opposite from reading three verses in a bible and believing that the universe is revealed.
But it's also the opposite of playing it the know-it-all, unquestioned patriarch crushing the voice of his subjects under his god-anointed omniscient authority - which is the conservative structure of politics and family (of power upon lives). So of course, any form of anthropological (decolonial) knowledge is seen as subversive and blasphematory, and will be fought everywhere. The political stakes of lives control are too important to aknowledge the subjects' realities.
Plus, control and top-down narratives require to keep it simple. And thus deny the (too threateningly unmanageable) complexity and multiplicity of human experience.
