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senmut 's, but I don't think she meant to inspire this mess. My problems, these.Okay. Gonna write this out long, for the sake of clarity, because there are a whole bundles of issues I have generally related to my body philosophy that people keep pinging off in various debates, on subjects like sexuality, gender, gender politics, body issues, religion, and physical culture. A whole bundle of issues, and people keep zinging questions and answers and arguments and pain off each other around me, and I can't respond properly because it's all too muddled and I need something I can point people at to explain where *I* am coming from, so at least they'll know that I honestly do not mean to attack in any damn direction. At all. Seriously. I am not out to cause people pain. I just ... don't get most of these problems.
Right. Me and my body. I have one. It's a good one. It's healthy, more or less. Brain is a bit faulty, maybe, and I'm pretty sure chemically it looks like an alchemy experiment carried out by baker from notes translated through fifteen different languages, but generally speaking it's a good body. It looks pretty good, I think, but I think every body looks pretty good, taken for what they are, so maybe that's neither here nor there. The body is also female. It does female things. I'm pretty much fine with this.
I also have a soul. This is where I get fuzzy as regards what other people seem to think, but filtering it out, I think I believe a bit more deeply in the existence of an autonomous soul attached to the body. *fumbles a bit* I mean, I believe in the autonomy of the soul. It is connected, very, very deeply, to the body, and while it exists inside a particular body it is shaped to some degree by it. Has to be, to sync into it, to work with it. But there is always a ... a deeper essence that is unchanged no matter what form it inhabits. Okay? All clear?
Now. As regards sex/gender. The body has a sex. The soul has a gender. Right? Here's where I feel the translation starts to break down wholesale. Mostly, I think, because people have a hard time connecting non-physical concepts to physical ones, and somehow something always gets lost in the translation.
Everyone has a body. Every body has a sex. That sex can be mutable, given current technology. Fair enough. Generally speaking it divides out into male or female, or something with aspects of both, or something with aspects of neither. It's a physical thing, limited by the degree to which a human body can arrange itself and still be recognisable.
Everyone has a soul. Every soul has a gender. BUT! But. Souls are not limited by physical needs. Souls are, to a degree, autonomous from the body. Therefore, gender, as a concept, is non-physical, and not limited to the physical arrangements. Souls can be male, if they want to be, or female, or something in between. But they can also be something completely different, something that has no physical translation. And souls can change. They can be fluid. They can change gender far, far faster, and far more completely, than a body can change sex. Or they can be stubborn. A soul is, after all, designed to outlast the body, and it can stick to an idea of itself long, long after the body has changed.
The problem, then, lies in the intersection of body and soul, sex and gender. Sometimes, they match. Perfectly. Sometimes the body is male, and the soul is male, and the two exist quite happily together. Sometimes, they end up in opposition. Sometimes the body is male, and the soul female, or some other binary opposition. In that case, you can try to change one to fit the other, if you want. Bodies are generally easier to change than souls, I think, but either can work. Or the soul and the body can be different, have different ideas of themselves, and just politely agree to disagree, and get on with the business of living.
Personally? I'd be in the latter category. My body is female. It's very happy being female. I'm very happy for it to be female. My soul ... I don't think it has a translatable gender. There's bits of the way I view the world that I've been told are very male, and bits that are very female, and other bits that people just think are plain weird and alien. Fair enough, too. The soul is not a physical thing, so it doesn't have to translate in physical terms if it damn well doesn't want to. I am perfectly happy to exist as an 'other' soul in a female body. Though I'd love for there to be words available for translation of this concept. Yea gods, it's awkward trying to explain this to people.
And for others ... Sex is the first thing anyone sees when they look at someone else. It's a physical reality and it's there, immediately. And that's ... that can be a problem, when people immediately carry that physical reality forward into their interpretation of the soul behind it. On the other hand, that sex is a reality, and it does shape the way the world works around a person, the way that person fits into the world. Cultures are an uneasy mix of physical and non-physical concepts at the best of times, and people have to live inside them as best they can. In all that mess of contradiction, you can't blame people for taking sex as a shorthand for gender, and just treating people as they first present. For casual acquaintance ... people only have so much energy, and they have to deal with the world somehow.
My body is something I love and live in and enjoy. It needs what it needs, and so long as I can comfortably give it what it needs, I have zero problems with it. The fact that it's female has more or less the same impact on me as the fact that it's short - they're both mildly problematic conditions on occasion, but that's hardly the body's fault, so why should I try to change it? It works. It works rather well, all things considered, and it lets me do most of the things I want to do in this life, so I don't mess with it. *spreads hands* I don't see a reason to change it just because if might not match up completely with my soul all the time, but that's my business, between me and my body, and I understand that not every feels the same way.
Beyond that ... as far as I am concerned, the body is the body and the soul is the soul. Your identity is your own business. It has to be. Identity is the concept a being holds of itself, after all. So generally, all I do is accept whatever you tell me you are. *smiles ruefully* This, naturally enough, leads to my getting lied to and fooled a hell of a lot. *shrugs* Acceptance and judgement are another binary spectrum, and venturing too far towards either end leads to problems. Venturing too far to either end of any spectrum leads to problems. *rubs face* The world is bloody complicated, people! And also quite nasty, a lot of the time.
What this results in, when I listen to all these arguments, when everyone cries out in pain because the way they are doesn't fit right with the world ... I know. I know. I understand. Me and my body, we do the things we do, and are comfortable like that, but some people don't, and can't, and aren't. My problem is ... everyone hurts. Everyone in this world hurts. And, more to the point, every last person hurts in ways that are just that little bit different to everyone else. Because everyone is just that little bit different to everyone else. We are all a unique mix of physical and non-physical attributes, and we slide around on the various spectra of life like a crazy see-sawing obstacle course, and no matter who you are there is always going to be some part of you that doesn't quite fit, and that is always, always going to hurt. The world does its best for us. It really does. It tries its best to hold as much of us as completely as it can, but the fact is it can't. Not quite. We're just too complicated, in too many different ways, and to make matters worse we keep changing on top of it.
My body is my own, and I do what I like with it. Your body is your own, and you do what you like with it. The same for souls. But ... part of being human, of living in this world, is the acceptance that most people only have a certain range of alternatives they can live inside, only a certain number of ways of seeing the world that they can accept. Most of humanity falls inside a certain range of attributes, and some of those attributes cluster together in time and space to form cultures that can only operate at all by ignoring other ways of life.
There are things in the way I live my life that cause people to hurt me. And they do. Hurt me. They really do. There are things in everyone's life that cause them to be hurt, just for being the way they are. And yes, everyone has a right to do what they do anyway. Everyone has a right to protect themselves. Everyone, too, has a right to be angry at the pain and those who cause it. I just ...
Some pain is caused deliberately. But most of it ... there are very few people in this world who genuinely want nothing more than to cause pain for others. Very few. Most of the time, I think, people hurt other people simply because the way they are designed, the set of attributes that they are best able to live inside, is not always the same design, the same set, as the people they meet. And some of those sets are mutually exclusive. And ... I can't hate someone because of that. I can't hate someone, or even be angry with them for very long, when they are hurting me only because they actually cannot do otherwise. I can't hate someone for their nature. And I can't ask them to change, to destroy some part of themselves, just to make my life easier.
No-one can empathise with everyone. No-one has enough energy. When we get up in the morning, we have to move though a world of people, have to live our lives, have to get from day to day, and inevitably someone is going to get hurt because of that. Just by waking up in the morning, we hurt someone. Just by existing, by being who and what we are, we hurt someone. To quote Thenadier, nothing gets you nothing, and everything has got a little price. Everything. And we can't always care. We can't always feel guilty. That's not callousness. It is, in its own strange way, self-preservation. Not just of the body, but of the soul. I can't be angry for that. I can't be angry at the world for not being able to hold all of us, for not being perfect, for not having the capacity to hold all the indescribable uniqueness of humanity. I can't be angry at people for trying to live as best they can. Or not for long, anyway. I do reserve the right to have little blow-outs from time to time at the stupidity of it all.
Again. What am I saying? Well, possibly I'm saying I'm a weak, gullible little fool who finds it easier to live around her pain than getting up the courage to try and stop it. That is always possible, and in many ways it is true. But. In the part of me that stubbornly thinks I am right, ever and always, the same way everyone else does in some little part of their heart ... I think I'm saying that the world is the way it is, and there's no point clinging to hate and anger in the face of that. Pain is pain. It happens, it hurts, but ... it goes away again, if you don't try and cling to it. If I hurt you, I'm sorry. I don't ever mean to, but the way I am is sometimes enough to hurt the people who brush up against me. I am sorry for that. But ... I like who I am. I like me.
*knocks head a bit* I'm falling into a rant, aren't I? And an off-topic rant, at that. *sighs* I'm in a funny mood today, and it's screwing with me. But. This is true, as far as I see things. And I hope ... well, I hope at the very least that it lets people know that whatever I say, whatever I might seem to turn away from ... it's not out of disgust. It's not out of a desire to hurt. If some bits of you don't match some bits of me, if some bits of you don't even match other bits of you ... that's fine. That's the way things are. You deal with it your way, I'll deal with it mine, and hopefully we can meet in the middle, if only for little snatches of time, and learn to understand how those different ways work. Just ... don't ask me to understand hate. Don't ask me to get angry for things that are not mine. I don't ... I've a very bad track record with those emotions, and I can't hold onto them for very long, or figure out how to use them properly. And, usually, when they are strongly present around me, I retreat from them. I retreat from you. It's the way I am, and it seems to work so far as keeping me alive and relatively sane, so ...
This here, this is a piece of who I am. I hope it helps you to understand why I don't always fit very well with who you are.
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