Hiding as a mandatory behaviour pattern

 "Say what you say,

Do what you do,

Feel what you feel

As long as it's real!"

"Take What You Take" - Lily Allen 

I have a "problem," and it consists on the fact that I always get people to know me once I get confident. It's never really affected me negatively: people around me know who I am, they know I'm uncomfortable with my right-now look and situation, they know the kind of men I'm attracted to, they know how important these things are for me and it's never got me any consequence.

I know, though, as soon as others' opinions get to have more weight, in situations where they could get me hired or fired, I'll eventually have to hide and Heather as she is will have to be reduced to the continent of a tiny box well hidden between my dress and my then-new body. I actually find that terrible, but the it's-weird-so-it's-bad rule has a wide variety of targets, in the center of which there are people with "weird" aspirations and priorities, e.g., me.

The interesting detail comes when I get to take a look at those giving their opinions about me and realise they share the idiosyncrasies they comment. Let's face it: you can be cis, but you can't fall to the 100% of your gender's pressures and musts... well, you actually can, but, well, have fun with the psychiatrist. You can't completely be the norm. Your experiences define you, and unless you've always lived in a variety-free bubble without hearing anything about dreams, aspirations, pleasure or anything that can differenciate one person from another in general, you're probably a pervert who dreams of things that don't exist yet just like me. That's what makes us human.

Of couse it's still a funny idea... I'm writing it down...

So, no, it's not "me," it's not "my" problem. It's everyone's problem. A biased judgement could get any of you homeless in a mid-term future and there are lots of variables that play a role: there are people who will judge you for using make-up, for wearing a fedora, for being a white straight cis male, for being a black lesbian trans woman, for being red-haired, for being too fat as a 50kg person, for being too thin as a 49'999kg person, for being you, for being me, for being any of our teachers or even for being a cat. Anything can be judged and it could be really significant in certain contexts. Of course if I shout "I used to have a penis and I like hairy fat men!" in the middle of my workplace I'm most probably getting more chances to be fired than any of you for, let's say, scratching your head in a corner? It's obvious, but it doesn't imply that your boss couldn't see you, take your scratching as a major offense and fire you. It's unlikely but still possible.

But let's not talk about scratching your head, that could be done by anyone; let's talk about you. I don't know who's reading right now, but I'm pretty sure there's a part of you that people would consider "weird" or "unacceptable" or "bad." It might or might not be related to your life aspirations, sexual likes, hobbies, identity or situation. I'm also pretty sure you're aware of it. First, relax, it most likely hurts absolutely nobody, and that means it's OK. The issue comes with expressing yourself... all of yourself, that too. You can't.

I guess the best we can do now is show the world while we can that we exist with our "weirdness" and "perversion" and we're perfectly viable as progressing and contentable human beings. That's why I express myself with the rest of my social estate (i.e. the rest of students). I like to put my furry drawings right next to my 10 in Biology (yes, the thing has its irony), show someone else I know well and say "this is what I get for being me."

At the end of the day, being Heather is simply wonderful. I like who I am.

Caitlyn Jenner's interview in TIME Magazine brings negative reactions among transgenders

"I know exactly what I want and who I want to be,

I know exactly why I walk and talk like a machine,"

"Oh No!" - Marina And The Diamonds

(SOURCE: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a50590/caitlyn-jenner-time-magazine-transphobia/)

Caitlyn Jenner, famous because of her MtF transition, has become a figurehead within the Trans Community. Several weeks ago, though, she offered an interview to TIME Magazine, which had set her among the Person Of The Year ranking, which sprang mixed opinions within the public.

The firstly-published interview on the magazine was a short version where some questions were skipped in order to make only the most important point part of it. It had a good reception by the Trans Community, as most of her points about being a transgender until then, and brought no problem. Recently, though, TIME has released in its online version the full post, and it hasn't been received as

much acceptation.

From the several points of her that stand as the most controversial from the so mentioned interview, there are two major highlights to take a look at, the first one being

"I think it's much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role. So what I call my presentation. I try to take that seriously. I think it puts people at ease. If you're out there and, to be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable. So the first thing I can do is try to present myself well. I want to dress well. I want to look good. When I go out, as Kim says, you've got to rock it because the paparazzi will be there."

The reason of the controversy surrounding this fragment is how it fails to recognise the dimensionality of the Trans Community: the fact that someone born male wants to dress up as a girl doesn't mean they want to have boobs and a vagina; actually, it doesn't even mean they identify themselves as women at all.

The second of her points that brought strongest reactions was to

"be intelligent on the subject."

The detail in it that caused most people to cringe was the fact that she had missed the diversity within her own community, making her seem inherently not intelligent on the subject.

As the article goes on, the objective facts start fading away and the author's opinion becomes the central point, so I'm going to stop my summary here and give my opinion instead. We already saw in Ellen's show that C. Jenner is rather a conservative traditionalist, we shouldn't pretend we're surprised as we're doing now. On the other hand, while it's true that Jenner is not an ideal role model for progressive transgenders, I find her simply amazing because of how she says what she thinks without being influenced by society's stereotypes about transgenders: it's true that everyone should look normally to every kind of human behaviour, but it's also important to remember that being under an LGBT tag does NOT mean sharing those views, and that is great because it shows us that we're all different.

It's okay to educate people on equality and diversity, but it's also great that not all of those people to be educated are the same kind of person.

"Everyone's At It" as a rebel song

"Why can't we all, all just be honest?

Admit to ourselves that everyone's on it

From grown politicians to young adolescents

Prescribing themselves antidepressants."

"Everyone's At It" - Lily Allen

Lily Allen is known for being cynical in her songs. It's then common to see her work qualified as "rebel" for complaining, sometimes openly and sometimes in a subtle way, about some person, group of people or just a characteristic of our world or society.

"Everyone's At It", first track from her second album It's Not Me, It's You (2009), is a clear example of that. It deals about drug abuse, mostly on teenagers but also in adult estates such as "grown politicians." Surprisingly, though, it doesn't only talk about illegal drug use, but also about prescriptions and the abuse of prescribed drugs such as the Prozac or sleeping pills.

Let's talk about ideal authority

"I get involved

But I'm not advocating

You got an opinion

Yeah, you're well up for slating."

"Everyone's At It" - Lily Allen

(Some statements on this post respond to a mindset I don't share anymore.)

Ideals, opinions and priorities vary from one person to another; that's how it is and how it should be. That's what makes us interesting as existing entities: we all behave differently as individuals, perhaps following some common patterns (I'm not going to discuss the essentiality of those again) but, in some way, uniquely. This means we, within our years of existence, have reached our very own result of an evolution nobody else has gone through, and that is what makes us a significant unit among human society, because nobody else will ever be us.

Once stated that we, with our Marxism or our technocratism, are significant and important with our ideals, I must throw a question: should there be a dominant ideal?

To put a now-popular example, it's easily reasonable that we should all look for equality for every human being, but even among those whose objective is reaching equal treatment for all of humanity there are different focuses and points of view. This, per se, joins my first point to make the most positive equation ever though... The issue here is, and now I'm going to start a fire, "feminism."

There's a reason why I put that on quotations: feminism per se is not a problem, but most people putting themselves under the tag "feminist" are often discriminative against one human collective or another (e.g. TERFs, RadFems, etc.), so it becomes a spiky tag that brings the word "discrimination" to several minds. That for, I speak as an egalitarian humanist, but in no way as a feminist, and I'd agree with everyone whose priority was equality for all humans, even if they had chosen to tag themselves that way.

Now, considering those are ideals, why are they an issue within diversity of opinions? Well, the problems come when discriminative people under the tag "feminist" discriminate those who look for equality but don't identify with the so mentioned adjective, counting, because of the name, with the inconditional support of actual feminism and everything that carries the same name. This ends up to make it acceptable for everything that smells of "feminism" to discriminate anything and anyone who disagrees at some point, leading to a state of ideal authority and, eventually, to an intellectual dictatory where everything published must agree with the dominant point of view in order to avoid punishment and shaming, and that is the issue.

This was just an example, but as some ideals and movements get popular the same kind of opressing extremism might appear in other topics of debate such as veganism or religion. And dominant ideals, even the ones we agree with, are something to question and, sometimes, fight against.

I'm a humanist, and I want to tell you about it

"Oh, the Queen of Peace

Always does her best to please

Is it any use?

Somebody's got to lose."

"Queen of Peace" - Florence + The Machine

(This is not a book review. Though I wanted to use my opinion on a book to open this text, I also preferred to focus on something else in this concrete post.)

The Spanish reader was terrible to me. As one of the critiques mentioned in the exam pointed out, it's a matter of entering into the story as an ethicless a**hole or never entering at all, and, as I've shown once or twice in this blog, my ethics and ideals are always accompanying me, making any kind of anti-human cynicism something to look down to.

That led me to leave the subjective part of the reading exam for the end so it was the only thing I missed: everyone around seemed to have found the book hilarious, and an exceptional opinion in a reading exam will always have a chance of pounding the summary alarm, which translates into "she probably hasn't even read the book and just got the plot without the humour." Sorry, but I, personally, can't find the brutal murdering of a man who was retaking his life with newfound hopes funny (have I mentioned he was on a wheelchair?) in spite of how many times the sadistic author tries to nail down unfortunate jokes a person with a sense of poise and rationality would hardly ever get (okay, I admit having laughed out loud with the "estás pa'llá" thing, but that's all). If that gets me a fail in Spanish, I'm pretty okay with it, even though I spent a good amount of time reading it and a good amount of nights without sleep due to the terrible feeling I ended up with, because that's precisely the worst: the realism of the novel implies such events could be taking place right now at some place, and it's hard to sleep with that going down your throat.

The reason why these aspects of the book had such a hold on me has been suggested several times both in here and in Littlest Things, but I think this needed a concrete post to express it. That for, I'm profitting the chance to tell you about the ethics I live by, as branded with iron in the deepest of my thoughts:

1. Every human, for being so, is the greatest of existing things and must be treated as of it.

This means nobody deserves to be hurt by default in any way, and by "hurt" I mean anything the concrete human being considers negative and undesirable in that concrete context. When it comes to responding to negative actions (see postulate 2), the punishment must be given taking into consideration the opinion of those affected by the negative action and in any case must have a similar moral weight than the so mentioned action (and that makes two noes to shooting the character mentioned before in the head, in case someone was thinking about taking it as a consequence of his in comparison harmless actions).

2. An action must only be considered negative if the affected third persons (in case there are any) consider so.

This means a human action is only negative if it affects others in a way they don't agree with. This also leaves doing drugs in private, taking junk food, working out and playing sports in the same level of acceptability, since the only person affected agrees and decides to get the action happening. If a person has chosen to be negatively affected by a human action (e.g. "I saw this gay couple kissing and it affected my morals because, you know, God and stuff, and I couldn't look away because, uh... That question is affecting me negatively!") the case probably requires a closer analysis.

3. A punishment to a negative action must never affect the way a human being is treated by others unless the consequences of the so mentioned action involve a similar effect to the affected persons.

To offer a real-life example, this would disable public shaming as a punishment of anything but public shaming, and even in the case of public shaming the significance of it must be similar to the significance of the initial action.

I accept that ethics are subjective, but I think assuming "some are naughty and some are nice" just like Father Christmas just does NOT work. Our starting point when it comes to passing judgement on people and their actions should be the acknowledgement of the fact that good and evil are subjective creations of our society and that, regardless of what we do in our lives, we're all still human beings and like to be treated with some love. Someone we'd consider evil might be able to become someone we'd consider good if treated with love and affection by us. At the end of the day, most of our behaviours come from our life experiences and learning, and we're constantly getting them new.

Are sexuality and identity a matter of categories?

"You can paint me any colour

I can be a Russian doll

But you ain't got my number

No, you can't make me small."

"Can't Pin Me Down" - Marina And The Diamonds

I don't really like the word "transgender." It's me myself who says I'm one, but every time I say it, hear it or think about it, whether it's about me or about any other trans person, it pounds a strange alarm inside my head. What are we? we're boys or girls, depending on our """""choice,""""" but, why does it seem as if we were the only ones who had to """""choose?""""" Do cisgender people go through gender identity crisis or do they just assume what they want to do and who they want to be through stereotypes related to their genitalia?

At some point, thinking and talking openly about these things becomes spiky, because it comes up obvious that everyone feels radically different things, want radically different things and have radically different life aspirations... Bearing that in mind, do all those tags really make us have something in common? Do I feel the same way other trans women do? Might I just have any idea of
how a trans man could feel? What makes us a common community? Just a tag?

Don't get me wrong: I know being united is important. The sense of the existence of these community is rather a matter of visibilization, I'd say. It's about people asking each other "what's the T in LGBT?" and getting to know we exist. That's why it's worth it to make it LGBTIQDA and whatever gets discovered outside what is strictly cisgender-hetero rather than making it shorter. But that's not the topic I want to deal about now. The thing is, what makes us L, T, B, Ψ or whatever we are?

In order to classify human beings, society appears to take into consideration three factors:

• Biological sex. Basically, our genitalia, and nothing further than that. Inside the binary system, we use male and female as classificatory words.

• Gender. What we are, what we "identify as." This should be thousands of times more important than biological sex when it comes to treating a person in a certain way, but, sadly, it appears as it isn't. Inside the binary system, the words for gender are boy and girl, or man and woman.

• Sexual orientation. What we want to... "sleep" with, whether it's men, women, children, dogs, cars, food, whatever. As of 2015, it's far more visible as a possibility of difference than gender, which is normally assumed to coincide with biological sex. The problem with classifying sexual orientation is that, as humans, it's very unlikely that our sexual likes are fully related to the sex and gender of our viable sexual mates, meaning that while it's normal that we have some preferences, it's most likely that we'd like a little percentage of the "other thing."

And even if we ignore the last sentence, it's easy to realise there's a huge black hole within this as a rigid classification: actually, we cannot say all humans are "men" or "women" without especifying we're limitating to the binary system; if we look at intersexuals, "male" and "female" suffer from the same lack of ability as classificating words. This comes to mean that while biological sex is unavoidable, the connotations we give it aren't, meaning that there isn't really a necessity for a male person to behave in a certain way, and the same would apply to females and intersexuals.

Does this mean that every cisgender straight person in the world is in a mistake? Well, the thing is, no but yes. People should live any way they want to, even if that means being a macho or a femme fatale or whatever, but that shouldn't mean they stick their heads into stereotypes and stop living other kinds of life that could help them grow as human beings and make them know a little bit more about themselves. This would also imply the existence of female machos and male femme fatales, among other things.

Don't get me wrong, though: I'd love to make my nails, dye my hair, shave and wear nice clothes, and, actually, transition. Yeah, I feel it's something I need because I'd feel much prettier for sure. The thing is that society would probably never considerate me a "true woman," since I wouldn't be able to, for example, have children, and I wouldn't even have periods. Bearing that in mind, why would I ever need the word "woman" in my life? What does it really mean? Is it any better than "man?" Of course it isn't, it's just different. Then, what makes it needed in my case? I mean, it's a matter of identity, of course, and I'd probably be offended if I was taken as a man by everyone systematically, but, what makes me want the word so bad?

... Society?

Parted oranges rot before finding the other half

"Love is cruel

When you realise that you give your life

To someone who has given up on you."

"Blindfold Me" - Marina And The Diamonds

(Some statements respond to a mindset I don't share anymore. I, a year later, am truly disappointed at the version of me who wrote the second half of this post.)

I don't know about others, but I can't help to wonder if what I feel as love is the same another person would call "love". Do we all feel the same or do we just call them the same because we're taught to? Are we taught to demonstrate love in certain ways? I can't help to feel that the relationship model we're constantly being shown is all but assertive or healthy: are we meant to be emotionally dependent on our significant other? Is it normal or should we do something about it? Are we meant to expect them to feel the same kind of dependence on us? What does this lead to?

Many people within Queer Culture theorize about the artificialness of monogamy and romantic relationships, some reasoning about natural instincts on both biological sexes involving looking for different sexual mates when necessary without it affecting an emotional bond between two human
beings. While most people agree they've felt an emotional bond of the kind throughout their lives, some have reticences when it comes to its evolution and duration.

The most assertive theory seems to be that while love has not got a caducity date, it does change and evolve within time. It seems to appear as sexual, animal and irrational but evolve in time towards a more pragmatical state based in respect and mutual support and understanding. However, this transition seems to be a catastrophic disaster for some couples, making them insecure, unhealthy and unstructured due to a failure on making this change.

Okay, end of the mostly-objective part. I know my opinion is certainly unpopular, everyone has theirs and it's okay, but I have to say it. This is what I was thinking of during the reading of the reader of this year. The book, in case you don't know what I mean, features a character who cheats on their spouse and forsakes their family. This, for itself, is bad, but I couldn't help justifying them: even though they didn't appear through most of the story, they were simply the perfect example of victim-blaming for me; we, as readers, lack information about this character: there were probably conversations prior to the happenings between them and their spouse regarding relationship problems and lackings, but we don't question that, we just assume and blame this character for pretty much everything that happens later, because we see it all through the [ignorant and naïve] main character's scope. The most funny point of our beloved sorry-but-I-was-born-last-week (a.k.a. SBIWBLW from this point on) main character is that they refuse this character to "buy" them but SBIWBLW (and SBIWBLW's mother) openly accept total maintenance... but it's okay, because none of them is an adult man, who are clearly pure evil, so it's not hypocrisy.

Okay, I might have been a little mean to our common pet-SBIWBLW, but... seriously. At least he evolved somehow, and he had some good points. But this just made me really angry. If someone does something really bad to me but then shows real regret and will to retake a relationship with me I don't connect with the shortest responses possible like I was a f[...]ing autist. However, the very end of the book seems like a little bit of a forgival so we'll forgive SBIWBLW a little bit as well. But just a little bit.

To read more from me about this topic, check my last year entry "Why do men cheat on women?"