Objectivism and Transsexual Identity (part1) we are not language constructs.

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Just a quick post after a brief chat with Katie at genderqueer.co.uk about gender / trans labels. I thought it would be useful to look at transsexualism as being something emerging out of issues of gender identity whilst transgender being a function of behavioural gender roles. note* I use the phrase trans to describe the entire spectrum and transsexual and transgender in alignment.

I thought after this chat it would be beneficial, if only for me, to look at the fine line that exists  between externally ‘real’ concepts and equally subjectively ‘real’ inner realities.  Both have their part to play in much of the difficulties surrounding trans identity, from the perspective of the observer and also the person being observed. In the first part I want to look at the objective external reality, in the second part the inner subjective self and in the third part bring the two together.

One of the first mistakes some trans people make, I state this as a truism, is to argue against the fact that there are objectively real binary genders.  They say that male and female are language constructs and are more about assigned roles than actual real difference. I would hope to elucidate briefly how the brain works and forms concepts without the need for any language and hence show that male and female are objective realities as opposed to mere labels constructed from language.  I think epistemological language games remove us from really useful discussion about gender, that would lead to better psychological outcomes and a more fulfilling idea of a real true self.

I use objectivism as a way of explaining how we are born with the innate hard coded ability to form concepts. These concepts are necessarily free from language they are part of our gene code and essential for our survival. I am not strictly seeing this from a Jungian archetype perspective but rather from Rand’s ideas on concept formation.

When Rand speaks of concepts she talks of the innate ability for us to distinguish one thing from another thing. To classify things based upon similarities and equally classify other things from that, based upon their differences. We are born with the understanding for example that object x is close to us whilst object y is  further away. We don’t need language for this or any units of measurements we simply understand that concept without thinking. It is the objective reality of the world we are born into. Equally from this we grasp the concept of size and shape so again we can distinguish the appearance of object x and object y. Rand looked at this as concepts being formed due to our inbuilt mathematical sense of the world we find ourselves in. If we saw one table we would have the inbuilt understanding to see it as being different from a chair, in terms of attributes such as shape. This is fundamental to how our brain works and learns.

Objectivism indicates we are born with the ability to form concepts without language and to be able to differentiate and create classes, sub classes and types of things. We can see similarities and we can see differences. Male and female are not only fundamentally biologically different there common external presentation is different. This differences may be subtle in some cases (not when unclothed)but the brain has a highly tuned ability to detect minute differences and classify patterns accordingly. We are far more capable of doing this than even the best computers. This external difference is what manifests itself to the observers brain as conceptual awareness of a female class as opposed to a male class. This is unavoidable as this is how our brains are wired to understand the world in which we find ourselves. Heidegger talks of being in the world and it is a core part of our being in the world that we form concepts.

We cannot create a path that takes us away from the reality of how we are as human beings or deny the way our brains actually work in order that we learn. To seek to deny what is true takes us back to Descatres saying how do I know a devil is not deceiving me and the world is actually real at all.  It seems in our secular age we have looked to science to find answers where once we looked to belief. It seems out of time to be debating ideas of true binary genders as a non physical reality when evidentially that is clearly not the case. We are not born with language but rather the ability to conceptualise without it. This is based further upon the brain’s innate ability to differentiate mathematically, without needing a measurement. The brain knows there is a size difference, a shape difference without needing language or the direct ability to understand mathematics.

Whilst many would say this is writing about the extreme end of gender politics as some trans people may view things. I personally feel it very important to begin with acknowledgement of fundamental real objective difference. This then will enable me to fully explore transsexualism as opposed to transgender as the foundations will be firmly in place. I would then seek to build the subjective and environmental walls upon and around this core in part 2.

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Art & The Individual, A Haven for Difference

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After a disastrous appointment at a gender clinic in London, I have been thinking to myself the weight of pressure we place upon ourselves to create futures and bring others along with us in the creation of our dreams. The human need for affirmation and cultural acceptance is incredibly strong and we as individuals are constantly trying to fulfil this tremendous sense of self purpose whilst at the same time seeking in others an understanding that in some way we are ‘right’ in the choices we make. If we make choices that exist outside of the cultural norm we feel an incredible sense of isolation and difficulty with expressing that. Of course psychologically no one wishes to spend their lives in having to justify what they perceive they are.  Yet at the same time most of us want wider acceptance without having to acquiesce or fit in. In other words we want that ideal sense of human individuality our individual uniqueness to shine yet we also want the light of understanding from others too.

We have the individual desperately striving to be themselves whilst we also have to acknowledge the collective spaces we occupy and the sense of difference and responsibility this brings in a parallel time frame. The world of Art probably best allows us to express that individuality. It gives us a social arena where the individual is afforded by the wider collective a right to express themselves within that context. We feel this individual expression afforded here, by proxy underlines all our senses of the world seen in microcosm. It speaks to us all in varying ways, even if we think the expression trite and self serving in some way it affirms us and says there is a place where we can be just one voice in a global cacophony of sound. Art enriches us all in this way, it goes beyond the normal notion of cultural conformity and has no walls.

Outside of Art and the culturally allowed frame of self expression we have the life we must lead as others do. We must work, engage, interact, travel, have social discourse be involved in our local communities and share concern for our neighbours and the environment we inhabit. We want our lives to be productive, contributory and useful. Our individuality should not seek to withdraw from social collective responsibility but it is in these spaces that our uniqueness is halted. The majority takes precedence and of course in communities that is a sensible model for cohesive social growth. The problem is the extent to which the individual is allowed access to contribute it they are outside of the ‘normal’ expectations of a wider social group. These expectations are of course socially malleable depending upon the surrounding environment one is lucky enough or not to live in. It would not seem to take a wide social anthropological study to say that perhaps those in communities with less access to education, finance and broader senses of a world beyond the narrowness that financial constraint imposes, would welcome less an individual expressing themselves for example as I would outside of the gender binary norm. In communities where there is a greater sense of a broader world based upon a wider exposure to a diversity and cultural difference perhaps one might find more of a chance to express themselves.

The question for the individual is how they approach the need for self authenticity with the need also to be in the world, when being in that world often means abuse, ridicule, potential harm, and lack of empathy or support. The psychological strain is enormous as it is rather like crossing a frozen lake where on the other side we feel awaiting us is a personal sense of fulfilment a place where we will meet our true self. This is only a feeling however, it is a dream and a belief, it is an internal map that speaks to us and continually forces our feet in its direction. This is inbuilt and not something I  understand, it is the chemistry of my mind and the amalgamation of my life and it leads me there. I have no comprehension as to how individual elements of me have brought me to what I consider my identity now. I just know I am here. The crossing of this lake is enormously difficult and fraught with individual self doubt and the wider collective reiteration of the dangers involved.   I can of course stay here and never cross and be subsumed into the collective and exist as someone who can go from day to day and contribute and be accepted. I don’t have to look for tribes that will take me in like some abandoned creature and that will further distance me from the reality of life. Yes it is important that common niche groups form collective and cohesive bonds to build awareness and address collective difference of opinion. That is positive and I want to be active there but I don’t want to be active there so the niche group defines me more than I define myself.

Art is indeed a refuge and that is why I spend so much time there. So much time creating, thinking and exploring individual expression that does not seek a wider acceptance but just expresses the inner self. I seek it because it allows one freedom to be oneself and also if honest hide oneself in explanations of eccentricity and the individual thought that Art expects and allows. It does not make a tube ride easier or sitting in a waiting room or shopping or conversing with others any less fraught or difficult. It does present a haven, a place where identity is fluid and a feeling one doesn’t need to explain. It is a space free of affirmation, it is a place where we see others who think differently and spend their lives in these small authentic interior spaces. It is an arena where one is free from justification, one is accepted via the door of creativity and one finds tranquillity despite the difficulty in the creation or getting out in our chosen medium the wonder and sadness of existence. The pain and joy of being alive and the capturing of  that as mere episodes in time passing.

I would like to write more about this dichotomy and the havens that we seek to find peace in living the unique authentic us under the pressure of collective thought and programmed thinking. It is very difficult though as what one wants is the right to be part of both and one’s life isn’t long enough to make that happen. The choice is to find personal happiness without excluding oneself from the world that others experience too. To not be only concerned with our authenticity but also to want to give all we can to make life better for all people who live it. I would hate my personal choice to leave me outside of that. I think I would find equal unhappiness if by my following my own dream I couldn’t help or contribute to the dreams of others.

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric part 3

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Part 3

There was now a distinct difference between body types as I got to my mid teens. I looked increasingly different physically from girls around my own age and I started to feel the pain of that. How I describe the sensation of looking at another body and recognising that body as the external shell to my own interior world is almost impossible. My brain was saying over and over when I looked at girls of my own age, I am the same as you yet I am physically different. How did I know I was the same? I just felt that was the case. I cannot explain it any more deeply than that.  I just felt this body I had was wrong in the sense that it didn’t match the brain I had. It actually makes you feel claustrophobic if you think too much about it and if you don’t quickly turn your mind to something else. There was a real sense of definite panic or a wishing to flee from the thoughts.

I remember too at this age as sex was starting to play a part in teenage years, one would be exposed to pornography at school that other boys brought in. Of course it was always heterosexual pornography and I looked at it as everyone did. The one thing I remember in my attitude to it was not the arousal but a feeling of jealousy or rather the good fortune of the women in those roles having male attention. I always viewed pornography with the notion that I wanted to be the girl. I never perceived it from a male perspective in that I saw the women as objects of desire. I always thought that their role in the images suited my own personal psyche.  This of course could be attributed to my sexual attraction to men but I never imagined myself as a man with another man, only as the female with another man. I understood the representation of her heterosexual female pleasure and related to that alone. I didn’t look like her but I thought I felt how she did. These of course are only projections but I was experiencing sensations that I was a heterosexual female and not a homosexual male. It always felt like that even from this very very early time. I couldn’t put that into words then, but I was feeling something which wasn’t desire but rather understanding. I was aroused more by the idea of presenting as female to please a male sexually as opposed to any idea of pleasing myself. The idea of being penetrated seemed to my brain the most erotic thing but the idea of penetrating seemed odd to me or rather I had this penis but had no desire to replicate with girls or guys anything in the pictures.

I clearly remember those sensations and thoughts with regard to sexual penetration. I had this penis yet I looked at images and it felt strange to think of using it in the way the pictures described. It isn’t that I automatically thought I wanted a vagina and that I hated my own sex organs and there was this eureka moment of understanding. I still didn’t have a clue as to what my thoughts meant or if indeed anyone else felt that too. I doubted that but having no one to speak to and just playing the role one was expected to play I quickly learnt to override any feelings of that nature and slot in with the way everyone else thought or expressed themselves. I wasn’t about to discuss I dressed at home as a female and imagined myself with a male lover and not having a penis and so forth. That would have been insane to talk to 15 year old boys who one went to school with in that way. It would be impossible to talk  to anyone about that for decades. I even couldn’t talk to myself about that without feeling unwell and upset.

I looked facially quite feminine and my hair was long and I used to dye it lots of differing colours. I was dyeing my hair from about 15 onwards which other boys at school were not doing. I never saw this as strange and it kind of fitted in with a punk ethic but it was more for me a way of feminising without overtly making a statement I think. I hid behind this alternative fashion period which luckily emerged in the 80’s and I used it to somehow be a little bit more female than other boys whilst having a wider cultural excuse.  I was the one boy dyeing his hair and wearing eye liner at that age. At the time not significant but looking back there were 98% of other boys not doing that. Was I being drawn to the androgyny of the new romantic / punk era as a place to play with gender presentation, was it just fashion, was it my chance to push myself to look more female. Whatever the actual reasons I was doing something that other boys in the main were not. I was spending time on my hair, I was in stores looking at make up, I was looking at female magazines and also desperately wanting a boyfriend. Again at the time I didn’t feel I was transsexual as I had no concept of that word. I had all of the thoughts and feelings I have written about but I kept constantly ignoring myself and my thoughts.

I look back and think I was ignoring so many signs about myself and ignoring the real person or rather what my thoughts were. I was simply not aware that you could make any choices and as such I carried on and fell into life as I was supposed to live it or rather how everyone I knew or read about or saw on television was living it. The other person was forever isolated and lived in shadow, always listening for fear of discovery. It was not healthy and obviously led to my being prescribed anti depressants from about the age of 18 which to this day I still take.

Continued Part 4

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric part 2

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Part 2.

I spoke in the first part about a story of gender confusion from an early age, although at that age I had no concept that this had anything to do my gender as such. I just felt a connection with femininity or rather its outward expression as I saw the world around me as opposed to masculinity and how that was portrayed in the outside world. I had no sense that one should be a boy or a girl or that in essence I wasn’t a girl. I had no understanding of genitals I never contemplated them or thought about them and i didn’t really understand the difference anyhow. I didn’t know they were genitals or what their function was.

Who would I speak to at 6 years of age, where would my knowledge come from and how could I express myself in a language I had no perception of. At this age it was purely about feelings of wanting to wear what I saw my mother and sister wearing. To replicate them and be like the people I loved most deeply. Was this a sense of exclusion, was I seeking to be nearer to the people who were kindest and most loving to me. My father was an abusive monster so perhaps I was rejecting that experience of masculinity, I had no other to go by in the home environment. Did I see the kindness and love and gentle nature of my mother as a refuge from this terror. Was I trying to become her to avoid being him.

None of this took place as thought process then. It only takes place now as  I look back and try and piece together the moments of evolving perception that would later form part of my view of myself and the world. Was I trans gender from a biological standpoint in that in the womb certain chemical events happened that meant my brain and body followed separate paths. Did my external environment as a child drive me away from a masculinity that I saw as destructive, unkind and frightening toward the femininity that I felt safe and secure in. This environment was certainly one where my personal psychology was being formed to have a negative view of what it meant at that age to be male.

In the absence of a scientific diagnosis of this condition I can only try and piece together what I actually know about the events of my life and how I felt as a child in the environment within which I found myself. It was an intense isolated experience, my parents has few external friends and we were poor and had little access to reading or external influence. It was a little like the plays one reads of Tennessee Williams in that suffocating family atmosphere that pervaded my childhood. The strong maternal figure and the house being the epicentre of a universe I felt as very small.

When going out into the world and achieving well academically from a young age. I never lost this sense of being unable to slot into a convenient space with everyone else. I was fortunate in that I was born with a degree of intelligence that made school a place where I could do the things required from me and receive respect in that I was a good candidate to go to a better school when I was 12. I was equally highly aggressive at school toward other boys, not at all afraid and probably projecting the violence I experienced at home. I had this huge male figure to deal with a home of whom I was very frightened however these boys of my age looked like small dots in comparison and I was relentless in my pursuit of assuring that no one in my school space would intimidate me as I was intimidated at home.

I had also learned that fear was a good way of ensuring you were left alone and that if I had exposed any weakness of myself or for one moment expressed my feminine feelings then I would have been drowned at school. I would have had no place where I was safe. School would be safe and I would fight every day to ensure that was so.  I had to be someone else at a very young age and I was conscious of the effort it took. I lived ahead of myself and never was in the moment always planning and calculating how to deal with others and to present myself in situations. This was at 9 and 10 years old, s0 I was  suffering real stress and anxiety about a number of issues and not understanding why.

All of this as in Part 1 is me trying to look backwards and possibly see patterns that were present when I was very young and unable to process what all of this meant. I certainly see now that as a child I was under huge stress without ever recognising it as such. I was frightened to come home because of my father. I was another person at school to protect myself from further harm. I had huge secrets about my affinity with females and being unable to express that in any way other than through furtive dressing. I had yet to experience sexual feelings but when that did come when I attended an all boys grammar school this again led to again having to hide my feelings, suppress and bury them.

There was no Internet, no support groups, no doctors one could talk to. It was just me trying to understand why everything was so difficult and tiring. I had no concept that you could be born male and change that. I had never heard of transsexualism. I was totally isolated and couldn’t connect properly to the world at all. It certainly affected my studies and created a further deep sense of isolation and loneliness as I could not interact with my peers without enormous pretence and artifice which was eventually over time exhausting.

As my body changed and the distance between my physical self and the female physical world started to get further away I found this very painful but excepted an inevitability about it. I had not the slightest sense that one could ever do anything about it. I was very slim however and that made me feel slightly more connected, although my height increasingly made me look male. I started to envy the idea of breasts as I saw them develop on girls in my mid teens and felt my own physical shape was now certainly incorrect or at least not developing along lines that I wanted it to. I continued to dress at home and continued to assume this would be the only place I might be able to ever be myself in quiet intimate moments behind locked doors.

Part 3 to follow.

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric

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Part 1

From an early age we embark upon this marathon. The start is usually slow and we are not sure of why we feel different or indeed what might be amiss. We feel not quite right, fitting in seems difficult and from a very early age we start to keep secrets.

We keep secret the items of our sister’s clothes, or mother’s clothes we borrow. We always place them back so carefully and make sure that it looks like they have never been moved. We sit, if alone, in the house and try make up on and look at ourselves in the mirror and never really question why we do this. We are too young to understand. I do not understand why I would want to stand outside our home in make up when I was 9 years old and just stand there. The strange sensation has never left me. I had not a clue why or what it meant.

As I got a little older I started using sanitary towels and borrowing my sisters. It has no common sense to it at all and I am still unable to figure out why I was doing this at 11 years of age.  There was much loneliness and secrecy in all of this. I was always in fear that I would get caught. I equally could not stop, I had to dress it was essential to me. This to a child from the age of around 6 is a long time to keep secrets. Children should not be keeping those kind of momentous secrets. Childhood is not a time for secrets only in play. A child should not lie in bed alone and wonder if he will be discovered and live in fear of what will happen. I didn’t know it was wrong I just got a sense others might see it as not right and stop loving me. There is a big difference there in thinking the thing itself is wrong and fearing an outcome. My fear was always the outcome. I simply would be unable to explain something I had no hope of understanding myself.

I was afraid without knowing why.  In essence I was suffering anxiety from a very early age. Rather as we get older panic or anxiety can overtake us and we find ourselves needing outside help to control our feelings. I was a child who did not have the faintest idea about anxiety or being trans gender or being anything else for that matter. I was just a child who would withdraw rather than integrate and this I look back on now was always probably being in fear of being discovered. Of letting something slip about my secret. To give myself away somehow. I was therefore lonely as a child, I found it hard to express myself and equally found it hard to relate to others around me. I found boys intimidating and I found girls impossibly pretty and I was envious of their clothes and their hair and their complexion and would see myself in them, in a way I cannot describe.

As puberty came I never experienced anything other than attraction to boys. I had no sense of that not being the most normal thing in the world. I was attracted to their shape and presence and even though I was one myself I never felt an affinity with them. I always looked on them as different to me somehow and that I was different to them. I therefore now had to keep my sexuality secret. I could not share or enjoy that as I had no knowledge of anyone else who might feel like me. I was again very lonely and felt outside as boys began to talk of girls and I had nothing to say.

These are the times as you start to mature that you learn to adapt and fit in. You begin to learn the things to say that will make you accepted. You begin to learn the way of doing things that will make it less likely you are found out. Teenage boys have lots of secrets and it was a time when I felt although my secrets were different other boys still had them. Things like smoking and girlfriends and drinking alcohol and I had mine too and parents were so dull and they wouldn’t understand. They problem was I was lying and lonely and never myself. I had learnt what to do, but I had still to learn how to cope with how I was and what I felt deep inside about me and about my attraction to boys. I was dressing more at home as my room was now a private space and people knocked before they entered. The only thing I could safely wear was underwear and it was the safest thing to borrow. It was the easiest thing to hand that made me connect with some outside aspect of my femininity.

I started to feel uncomfortable with my body and how it was developing and it started to make me more anxious about seeing myself change into something I didn’t recognise at all now. I was always rather feminine in the face and indeed at up to age 16 or so if you put me in a dress I would look like a girl, if you disregarded my height and size. The problem was my body was moving further away from the girls I saw all around me. I was taller, broader, my voice was now much different and I could see this huge difference and I was starting to find that increasingly stressful in my private moments. Again I had no idea what this meant. I just thought there was something wrong with me without having any sense what wrong was. to be continued…

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Why must Gender Dysphorics know all the answers?

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I wrote in a previous post about the costs involved in trying to make oneself the person one believes themselves to be. I would use the word ‘knows’ themselves to be, but even the most ‘celebrated’ transsexuals in the world often have their doubts and some have even come out fervently against how they were advised. How many people out there know anything definite, how many people do we hear say I did my best at the time. Well people with gender dysphoria are no exception they do their best at the time to understand what is happening to them and they hopefully take a course of action that is right for them. Having gender dysphoria doesn’t unfortunately give you a super power to see into the future.  It doesn’t imbue you with this unquenchable insight, a burning fire in the land of knowing. We are exactly the same as everyone else, we have our failings and we have our doubts, we make mistakes, and we sit and ponder forever are we doing the right thing.

When anyone takes a major life decision, I am convinced that at that particular moment in time time they did it believing it to be for the best. They do it for a better future and in the hope they are taking the correct path.  No one sets out to make their life more difficult or problematic.  Of course our decisions may be ruled by flawed human emotions and by particular psychologies based upon our own unique life experiences and the subsequent world view this generates. Others with their own unique world view shaped by their experience  may of course say well I would do it differently. These are the things that give rise to debates and discussions, places where we open our minds up to other viewpoints and we take what we think is best and that add value and make sense to ‘us’. We ultimately are the guardians of our own standards and our own decisions but these are formed not be trying to ‘know’ a certain answer but by trying to listen to ourselves honestly and by listening to others who we feel have the intelligence and sincere motivation to honestly contribute.

If you speak to anyone who has gender dsyphoria they will tell you of the disruption it creates in their lives. They will tell you of numerous difficulties that lead them to look for a solution to ease a burden they are not sure why they have.  It is not something that goes away, it is not something that one can forget about and it is not something that helps with any particular aspect of living unless perhaps one talks of increased empathy and feminine understanding of the world, which I am not saying is not a blessing. The world could do with much more empathy in it. What I am saying is we have this, that is the only difference to the neutral reader that doesn’t have this. Of course our lives may be different in lots of other ways but in the topic under discussion if you aren’t gender dysphoric then let’s say that is our difference. It would be hard for me to explain to you how this feels and it would be as equally hard for you to understand. I would tell you I don’t know, I am not sure and that at other times I have never been more sure of anything, but I would expect you to empathise with that in some other sphere of your own life. You might say well you either are or you aren’t and I would say of course I am sure I am gender dysphoric, what I am saying is I am not sure what to do about it.  You might then say sure I see you have big decisions ahead of you. Hopefully in that small paragraph I have expressed the minutest thing but also a great thing, namely that as gender dysphorics our lack of knowing is not about what we are but about what we do about what we are.

The variety of things gender dysphorics do about what they are is as varied as each of the individuals that experience it. They do what they do in honest hope that their particular choice improves the quality of their lives. This is sadly often overlooked particular in the transgender community where you either are this or your not this and if you don’t fit my world view of gender dysphoria then you are not truly this or truly that. What a shame this has found roots in gender dysphoric ‘communities’. It is as helpful as burning bibles when people are trying to heal and be understood.

In closing the treatment pathway for gender dysphorics is also about forcing the position of ‘know’ upon us. It says that if you are gender dsyphoric this is the treatment pathway for you, which is funded and how it works. This is terribly flawed and forces vulnerable people into pathways which can lead to poor outcomes as the path to finance is already set based upon a particular range of criteria. The patient walks in and is expected to know and their knowing must fit this pathway. If it doesn’t fit this pathway are you truly gender dysphoric, will you receive emotional counselling and support, do you have to exhibit certain behaviour patterns, will you be denied financial support. All of this continually challenges our own thinking are we right, we have to be right. They tell us we have to know the answer, they even provide us with handy hints to help us find the answer that will access the funding. The answer may be theirs but not ours. The answer may arise from desperate necessity not to go back to the isolation of these feelings. I am in a gender hospital this is where I should be I can’t walk away from this back to the internal silence of my feelings.  I would caution that here most vividly, we see the ‘know’, we as gender dysphorics face for treatment in the UK. If there is one thing psychiatry could do to improve patient outcomes it would be to listen to the individual story, don’t present us with the pathway to ‘cure’ first. Listen to us and together we will ‘know’ how difficult life and how we feel about ourselves is and how fluctuation and uncertainty are far more truly human than the blind certainty we are continually asked to provide.

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Libido & the crazy 8.

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I am not going through a particularly easy time in my life at the moment. I don’t think the Internet is the best place in the world to get too specific, suffice to say I am dealing with several bereavements in a very short space of time which are major losses. They are as close as one could possibly experience.

Why therefore am I online writing blogs and updating my Twitter accounts and so forth and why also along with this have I seen an enormous increase in my libido?

I have been pondering why often in the past when situations or life events have been difficult have I sought outlet in sexual fantasy or extreme desire. I came across an article and video made by Anthony Robbins where he puts forward a psychological theory as to why people do this, which I thought was appropriate for me and equally appropriate for the person he was explaining things to. They were experiencing a similarly overwhelming amount of stress and reacting in their own extreme way to it just as I always seem to have done.

Let me explain the crazy 8. Anthony Robbins is basically identifying a loop of behaviour we get into when we feel things in our lives are not within our control. He also talks about  how the external stresses in our life give rise to a wide spectrum of emotion. These fluctuations in emotion and response result in different physical states in our body. The body needs to move between states as it can’t maintain these emotional extremes for long. The emotional responses are our attempt at regaining control or at least to convince ourselves we are gaining control.

For example sadness and depression is at one end of the loop. Here we find solace in the withdrawal and attempt to focus deep within. Here we can think of having control by feelings of disconnection and low mood. We are fed up and the world is a bad place and we are a victim of cruel misfortune. This is a form of control by convincing ourselves we are victims of a dreadful world and taking back some power by perhaps thoughts of ending things or removing ourselves from that world.  This produces a very low state in the body.  At the other end of the loop we find anger aggression and blame and an inability to forgive, we look at other people and find emotions such as hatred for doing this to us. These emotions produce a different state in our bodies one that is fuelled by adrenaline. our muscles tense and our heart beats faster and we feel a physical response to our anger which is totally opposite to the depression state.

We get caught within this loop. Each swing is designed to give us control where we otherwise feel powerless. So what do we do? We seek an outlet from this cycle and what usually happens without us realising is that we break out of this not by moving upwards and creating a new model of our world and rephrasing our problems. We break out of the cycle more often than not by moving downwards. That is into addiction of some type or another where we feel pleasure for brief moments and we are taken out of the despair of the endless loop.  In my case this could be represented by my increased sexual desire and the risk, excitement and danger involved in that.  In others this could be alcohol or gambling or drugs or any other form of instant pleasure that quickly fixes the endless crazy 8 loop of our lives in response to our problems.

This is as brief as I could make the explanation but I think it is an important piece of thinking. I titled it Libido and the crazy 8 as that seems to be my response to my difficulties. I don’t gamble, drink or do drugs so pleasure is sought in finding conversations with men online for example that enjoy trans women such as myself. I use my normally quite politically correct ideology of myself as a trans person and convert that into an attractant for admirers. I seek them out in chat rooms and look for their sexual responses to me. This only happens at times of great stress for me. I use the power (control) I have as an object of sexual desire for some men who are deeply attracted to pre-op trans women such as myself and I gain solace from that fact that in some way I am in charge again.

It may be squeezing a theory to fit something I am denying about why I want to be female and the strong sexual attraction I have always had to men. I don’t know but at least I am looking and examining and that can only be beneficial I would hope in the long term. I hope those who read this may find it helpful in their life and that seeking to re frame our model of the world and the problems we face would seem to be the best option we have of breaking the crazy 8 pattern. The addiction problem merely brings us back into the loop either through guilt, depression, self loathing and further anger again.