Category: Philosophy

Let’s get the terms straight.

THEY::: those who want to exploit the masses expressly and exclusively for their own self-interests.

YOU::: the one they have believing this is about somebody else: the foreclosures. the job loss. the fascism.  

On Monday I read Learning to Count Past Two…with a few updates as asides…to a Women’s Studies class called Changing Women’s Lives.  My partner Debbie is coordinator of the Women’s Studies Resource and Empowerment Center (WSREC)  and teaches that class.  It would be great if it were a faculty line, and hence a full time position, but that is not the case.  She’s rather considered more of a hybrid staff/adjunct faculty person (i.e. she gets no benefits, except as my spouse).

Let’s not even talk about adjunct compensation.  It’s one of the things our society should be ashamed of.

I’ve presented that piece live a time or two before.  It was, in fact, written to be presented to a Psychology of Women class at the University of Central Arkansas.  The professor who invited me to lecture her classes several times didn’t get tenure.  That’s an observation, not a conclusion.

But it is true that many, many people think that teaching about people like me to college or high school students is beyond the pale.  And I leave open the definition of “people like me.”

Sixteen years ago, when I was 44, I started transitioning.  Oddly, fourty-four years ago, I was 16.  It was also a transitional year, in many ways.  I have spent the week trying to remember it, perhaps with hindsight that is quite more myopic than 20-20.

It was a time…

It’s hard growing up knowing that there is something so terribly wrong that it must be hidden from everyone.  It would have been best at the time if I could have hid it from myself as well but, as I’ve said before, ideas cannot be unthought.  I was, in my mind, a pervert.  Nothing was going to change that.  The best I could do was to try to hide it.

On Wednesday I posted my poem about my obsessive-compulsive disorder.  I spent an equally absurd amount of time trying to disguise that.

In a Country with Strange Taboos

by dharmasyd

For rusty1776 in gratitude for his

“Writing in the Raw: Valentine Confessions”

I remember when you brought me hyacinths

We walked the path under pepper trees

Laughed our way to the beach

To play in the surf like yearling seals

And when you kissed me, your salt wet curls

Dripped ocean on my face

I was a virgin then, and you a married man

In a country with strange taboos

^{Camille Claudel}

I swore that when I had kids, I would NEVER give as an explanation because. My mother was famous for it. Me: Why??? Mom: Because. If she really wanted to make the point (and a power play), she’d say because I said so. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Well, I never had kids. But I did end up with a few step kids. At first, any interventions on my part were always accompanied by explanation. I was a quick study though. I realized they didn’t care WHY. They’d ask and ask and whine and complain and ask WHY again a thousand times. But they never really wanted to know why. They were only interested in what they wanted and finding a way to actualize it. They used my explanations as an opportunity to stage never-ending debates, refuting all of my very sensible and very adult-correct thinking.

Mothers. They do know what they’re doing. It just takes years to figure it out. There’s not much after the old because I say so.  

I got over being angry many years ago…around the time that I stopped being depressed, I would suppose, but if there is anything I have learned in this life it is that depression is really not totally evident until after it ends.  I’ve relied on the analyses of my therapists.

Ralph and Kurt, two gay men I will love forever, did not agree with the depression diagnosis, except as how it might be true that the act of transition creates an induced state of depression.  And my MMPI evaluation pronounced me entirely sane.  I have papers.

My own belief is that the difficulty lies in the fact that in order to acknowledge who I was required a different world view, one which was totally at odds with the world I encountered in my off-line life.

That off-line existence became quite ugly when I came out in Conway, AR on September 30, 1992.  If a 15-year old boy can be murdered by a 14-year old boy in California in 2008 because he dressed effeminately, imagine what it was like to be a 44-year old being a known transsexual woman in Arkansas in 1992.  I decided at the time that I had a duty to do my best to ensure that nobody else should be treated like I was…ever.

That’s why I write.  What else can I do?  One uses the skills and talents which one has.

[Excerpts are from translations of the Tao te Ching by Lin Yutang, Stephen Mitchell, and Ursula Le Guin.]

The words flow like water.

But sometimes it is a drip.  A splash here and there.  Sometimes a stagnating pool.  Sometime a great river.

A life can flow or not, like the water.

Chapter 8

The best of us is like water;

Water benefits all things

And does not compete with them.

It dwells in the lowly places that all disdain –

Wherein it comes near to the Tao.

Muddy water becomes clear by lying still.  Disturbed water cannot be smoothed by a hand.  Lessons learned at great price.

buhdy wants to know…  what should we do to fight evil?

harsh and simple: stop partnering with it.

The fever burns.  Whether the fever of the head or the heart, it burns.  

Temperature rising,

it isn’t surprising

she certainly can can-can

–Irving Berlin

Twenty-four hours being bathed in fire, spiked with the occasional five minutes of shaking from being chilled to the bone and frequent bouts of coughing which rendered breathing problematic have passed.  Memories linger and are recorded.  Ideas joust with each other for primacy.  Words erupt.

Memories of the bad times…of decades of burning pieces of my heart to keep the world out…and me in, all in the pursuit of safety, or so I thought.  When in doubt run away, either emotionally, psychologically or physically.  What else could be considered sane when one lives in an insane world?  And the inhabitants of this world became more fearful with each passing day.