Dyssonance

Sometimes we have to do things in a different way than we otherwise would like. This is such a time.

In the comments to a recent post of mine, one commenter has been railing at various elements of our differences, and at me, personally, as well. I’m an easy target. I know that quite well — and the odd thing is that I often see great humor in that, as I recognized my flawed self for what it is — flawed and fleshly

Anna,

Do you have an issue with abstract thought?

If so, why?

You are one of the anti-trans trans people, Anna.

You are also sexist (personally), racist (via institutional racism and a cultural ideal that you apply on different ethnic groups unknowlingly), ablist, and elitist. To name a few things.

Like all of us, you are a product of your times, the sum total of all your varied expereinces and the way the world was when you grew up.

That is reflected in your desperate desire to ignore the simple fact that you are not normal, and never will be. You strive for something even more nebulous than perfection, and you have placed much of your sense of self, your personal self esteem and social value on this conceopt of being normal.

And you do that because of the times in which you were raised — a time of great conformity, a time when anything that was different was frowned on, a time when propaganda was spoonfed to you from early childhood about the proper and the right, in the name of false patriotism and economic growth.

You can help that, but to do so would require you to do somethng you resist doing, constantly, predictably, with fervor and fire.

You probably think I am insulting you in writing all of this, for example, for you were raised and taught and likely think that all of this is insulting to you. That it is an insult to be called racist — when it’s still true, no matter how much you want to think otherwise because you don’t see that institutional degree of it within yourself.

In part because you avoid abstractions.

I don’t avoid any of it.

Fucking a penis is worship of one if you use it as the essentialist measure of what defines sex. Perhaps you should learn what worship means — as an abstract concept, of course. For that, read the Rule Of Screwing. IT’s a fairly quick and simple way of explaining a larger concept that surround the idea of what I am talking about when I speak to worship. But for an even easier and likely more familiar way of looking at it — you are a tool of the patriarchy, willingly and substantially, and you are working to reinforce it by using it as the basis of your arguments.

And a Penis is absolutely the center of your function. What, you think that the abstract concepts of the discourse exist in a vacuum? Your use of the Penis or lack thereof (which is a penis-centric structure) affects everything in your social interactions that stems from that.

Including your self. If the penis wasn’t at the center of how you function, you wouldn’t have suffered so greatly from incongruence or dysphoria or just flat out transsexualism to the point where you had to get the surgery. And if that strikes you as somehow saying that I suffer from the same thing here, then you are right.

You wouldn’t use it as a verbal weapon and a sneering retort “oh, you little pre-op with no experience” which places a person as an action, creating a value structure by which only surgical status has merit.

You use braniac as an insult, in a space where sexism is already present fundamentally, calling to mind the ideas of “smart girls” being less desirable.

You raise MENSA like it’s something of value and importance. I was a member of MENSA, it was full of fuckwits who valued a number over knowledge. And what sucks is that one of my personal little issues is that I can’t talk about when I was a member, without some bright toad doing something I don’t want done and bringing up the name I had for most of my life (which was not the same as the name I was born with, thankfully).

MENSA, to me, is a cool thing for those who want to be a part of it. I think it’s a waste of time and has little value beyond that because it’s sole purpose is really just to say that we’re smarter than the rest of you idiots out there. And when you have intellectual abilities a little or a lot ahead of the world around you, things get pretty annoying because you develop a sense that you don’t belong on that basis, and it colors your perceptions of others. So what if my number is high. It’s just a number meant to reflect potential, not capability, not use, and it is the use of that intellectual capability that is more important, imo.

I am not “smart” at Engineering. I do not enjoy math enough to sit and do calculations, I am not a chemist (though I understand some of it), nor a physicist (although I try to grasp some of it as best I can). I am not a hard science person — that is not the gift or curse I have, that is not the source of the spirit that the Greeks said roamed the house and home and gave inspiriation: genius.

And my manly man is quite real, Anna. He’s also my fiance and I am his fiancee, and I’m quite satisfied withthat arrangement.

You skipped the class you said, and yet a short while back you were talking about how you read through what is trans and openly admitted you didn’t understand that. Instead, you disagreed with me on what I said about the article, and then dropped it when I pointed out what I had written already. And that’s only one part of it, AnnaRose.

If you don’t understand that part, what makes you think you will understand the other parts, found in the same space, such as What is Sex, Gender: expression, identity, and role, The sections on situational membership and so forth as well? Instead of asking questions, you make assumptions, you leap to conclusions, you write things here or elsewhere to me that spend more time saying I said something other than what I said, or you attack some personal aspect of me as a person.

But I’ll tell you what. You find out what I refer to when I talk about existence before essence. You read you some Simone and Sarte, you give yourself a bit of growth with Irigay. THen you get familiar with the scientific method (which I would assume you already are, having multiple advanced degrees that would have, at one time, relied on such, unless it was something like, oh, law or business where science is only useful on occasion and something other people do.

You want it simple, and yet when it is given to you simply, you say that’s not possible, that’s wrong, and worse — you ignore the simple statements and make them into something that was never said (a strawman).

Because of your ageist expectation that it’s not possible for someone 15 years or so your junior possibly having a greater knowledge of how it really is. That perhaps I somehow lack “real life knowledge” to join the long and involved efforts of my literate education.

Forgetting that I have done more in my few years than others have done in lifetimes longer than yours. Forgetting that for me “know yourself” is not merely an axiom to hang on the wall but a commandment that I followed early on. Not knowing much more of my life as it has been lived than the thinnest slice of it from a few pages all carefully edited to proffer only the hint of what I’ve done and am capable of.

You react as if I’m not speaking English, when it’s one of only two I can speak with any fluency (and the second one is a religious one that’s dying out).

Well, I am.

And if my likely unusual mix of the academic and colloquial, the familiar and the new is hard for you, then perhaps the fault is not mine for your lack of understanding, but yours.

Pedantic? Quite likely. I’m not so much into the whole formalism aspect, but certainly into the precision part. And, admittedly, I write with a desire to teach others something — so yeah, given that’s its source and where it comes from, absolutely likely. Even without the whole formality thing.

But you don’/t mean it that way, of course. You mean it as a pejorative (an attack on me as a person), a way of saying I come across as condescending. Which would be rather silly if you ever met me — you’d find that it’s not even close to the way I am.

I’m far worse, lol.

As for bully, well, you aren’t the first one to call me such, nor will you be the last.

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