Whatever you do, don't look up

 Perhaps one of the most unsettling and life-altering experiences which a person may experience involves an empty field at night. Instead of letting their gaze wander over the ground, or use a torch to light up the path in front of them, they let their eyes adapt to the faint light before they raise their gaze towards the sky.

Assuming it is a largely cloudless night, the lack of the deceiving effect of refraction and scattering, from when light from our nearby star blasts the atmosphere above us, will be most apparent. Instead of a shade of blue or grey, our gaze is instead met with pitch-black darkness. As we keep looking, slowly our eyes can resolve more and more features in the night sky. Until suddenly the Universe opens right in front of our eyes.

The experience of looking up at the night sky and seeing countless stars, the Milky Way and so much more is a special one. It's not unlike when an astronaut during a space walk takes a moment to look away from the Earth and sees this endless expanse of the Universe right in front of them. And you, as the watcher, just a very small part of it.


This will often come with the realisation both of insignificance and that the only place where we humans can realistically live in this Universe is within this narrow sliver of a biosphere on a planet in a remote and mostly barren part of the Milky Way. Even so, our imagination may begin to wander after such an experience, questioning whether maybe humankind will be able to venture into the depths of not just our solar system, but also beyond.

Although we have looked at many features we can discern in the night sky, and we have sent a number of spacecraft equipped with powerful sensors and cameras to take a closer look at the rest of our solar system, there are still so many questions that are left unanswered to this day. Perhaps the most pressing of which is whether we are truly alone in the Universe.


It might be that there truly is no other life in this part of the Milky Way, and maybe not even planets which would be suitable for humankind to live on. All of these are sobering thoughts, but yet it's also essential to remember that all of this is speculation. It hasn't been more than about a century since we gained the ability to really take a look at nearby planets in great detail, the feat of which resulted in the dispelling of many fantastic ideas and hopes for what these worlds might look like.

In the sobering shade cast by those decades, the notion that the Universe out there would be teeming with civilisations much like our own would seem rather preposterous. Mars nor Venus are home to prospering civilisations, but are hellscapes in their own right, either blasted by radiation or baked by enormous temperatures and pressure.

Is there another welcoming home for us humans out there, or will we be spreading out into the quiet darkness of space, carving out niches where we can, but never truly belonging anywhere but on Earth?


All of this is just idly speculation and vague questioning, of course. The only way to figure out the answers to those questions is to face the challenge head-on, to develop better and faster ways to explore the secrets of the Universe. While nobody is forcing us to do so, the very human trait of curiosity does.

Such are the dangers of looking into the depths of the Galaxy itself: the hazards of which have led for thousands of years to people questioning the nature of this Earth, what is out there, humanity's role in its functioning and inevitably the meaning of it all. While the point of our actions on this planet would often seem questionable indeed, there can be little arguing about the statement that for humanity to truly learn its role in the Universe, it will have to look for these answers out there.


Keep looking up.


Maya

A non-binary body is a body too

 Dealing with a non-standard body is not easy. When society has decided that you are either male or female, and biology largely concurs with that sentiment at least from a reproductive point of view, it's a tough point to argue. But here I am, with a body that is both, and neither. How much of that really matters to me today, after so many, mostly unpleasant years?

I'm still grateful that my body finally sorted out this whole 'puberty' thing at last, after getting stuck in some weird standby mode for over a decade. Having had those changes towards an adult female body, it's interesting to note the remaining male characteristics alongside this, even if this pertains essentially just to the genitals.


Most recently I have felt this sense of longing, back towards the less complicated state of being 'male'. In some ways I guess that this is because of the added complexities of a female body, from monthly cycles to having those lumps of mostly fat dangling from your chest, serving mostly as a painful spot to bump into doors by accident, it would seem.

Even so, I don't feel any antagonism towards any part of my body. For me I think the biggest part of the experience was actually getting to know my body, to finally have that meet-and-greet and to be able to compare our mutual notes on expectations and requirements. Gone is the external pressure of many years ago inflicted on me by society, of conforming to one or the other body type, with the lure of having an 'Awesome Genuine Female Body' as promised by the transsex ideology.

The strong notion that I had to choose, that somehow my brain 'knows' whether my body has to be a Genuine Female or Genuine Male body. That pseudo-scientific notion has been well and truly shot down at this point. Not just by scientific studies, but also by my own experiences. My brain just contains my personality, my memories, dreams and hopes. And an appreciation for having a healthy body.


Does it matter which genitals this body has? Not really. That neither side is fertile doesn't bother me either. It does not reduce the value of my body, nor that of me as a person. A healthy mind in a healthy body. That's really all that one can ask for.

Most of the problems only appear with societal and cultural traditions, which I have largely resolved for my own purposes by being registered as 'female', to match the mostly female phenotype of my body. Yet I still get annoyed at the widespread discrimination between the sexes, even when it makes zero sense to do so when it doesn't concern the physical characteristics. Like, giving preferential treatment to either, or by essentially forbidding that either doesn't get to wear certain clothing items, or even like things that have a particular colour, or things that are 'cute'.


I'm not male. I'm not female. I'm both. I'm neither. The liberation of being able to let go of the madness of too many years and literally just accept things for how they are is immense. The realisation that the only authority I answer to whether my body is okay, and whether clothing is okay on this body, is me.

That whatever preconceived notions society has about what behaviour is 'proper' for someone with my gender designation and social status is absolute bunk. I'll decide that myself, thank you very much. If that gets me a called a 'tomboy' and such, then so much the better. I'm still that 'boy' who grew up doing 'boyish' things because they were fun, and I carry zero regrets for having a good time.


The short version is that society can basically stuff it when it comes to dictating to individuals what they can and cannot do or like, as it pertains to themselves. Society doesn't teach you how to be yourself, or how to be happy. Those are things that you have to figure out yourself, with the experiences by others potentially helpful in that discovery process.


Maya

On being accepted as a person

 Sometimes a new perspective comes from unexpected influences. Suffice it to say that the past years I have spent plenty of time thinking and writing about what I think the relationship between me, society and reality is. Yet it's so hard to see clearly when you have your nose pressed virtually into the tarmac of some aspect of reality. To regain this global perspective, you have to get back up onto your knees, onto your feet, so that you can finally take that look around you. Make sense of what happened.

When I got confronted with Dave Chappelle's newest Netflix special 'The Closer' and decided to give it a whirl to see what the fuss was about, it hit me in a way that I had not seen coming. The comedy show starts off coarse, with very uncouth jokes that are sure to offend anyone with a disposition for easy triggering. Yet when Dave starts digging deeper into his experiences with the LGBT community and especially his friendship with a transgender person: Daphne Dorman and her struggles with making sense of life. [1]


What hit me the most about this story was that Dave Chappelle does not believe that a transgender person who starts off male can become a biological woman. Gender is a fact, in the sense that biological sex (gender) is something that at this point in time cannot be altered. And yet none of this has any bearing on these transgender people. He has his views, others have theirs, and yet he doesn't have a stake in the LGBT community. Instead he is more than happy to respect others for the people they are.

The key point here is that one does not have to agree with the other person's views and opinions in order to treat them as a person.


We cannot expect that everyone around us understands the larger parts of what makes us into the person we are, never mind the infinite number of small details, but the one thing we can expect and ask for is to be respected as a person. Someone living their own life and going through their own human experiences.

The liberating and perhaps cathartic part of listening to this part of Dave's show was in how it made it obvious that I do not care about this LGBT community either, and never have. What was instead happening to me was the very human experience of coming to terms with my intersex body, amidst the strong desire to - just once - feel that I was being accepted as a person. My frustrations and perhaps jealousy when I was spending so many years of my life on getting nowhere with the struggle to get answers about this curious body of mine, even as in my eyes this LGBT community got all the help and attention they could ask for.

When you feel invisible and mostly ignored. Even when appearing on talkshows and in the media it didn't feel in hindsight that I was there as a person, but more as a curiosity. Who truly cared about me as a person?

Certainly not the doctors who dismissed me as being 'transgender', and who tried to push me into that direction. A direction I didn't want to head into, because it didn't feel right and didn't make sense, and yet it appeared that nobody was interested in my opinion. I felt so terribly alone and frightened for all those years.


Now, years later, with a body has well and truly asserted that it was - in fact - always that of a hermaphroditic intersex person, I have been able to at least put a lot of those questions to rest. It's easier for me to look at what remains at this point. As I get back up on my knees, and onto my feet, I can see with clarity now how everything related to gender and biological sex ties together. The main source of confusion for so many years. Now it's clear to me how the brain is just this neutral entity that has no specific preference for a particular arrangement of genitals. Which is a good thing since I was worried for years that I might have to pick a set to have removed.

But above all, that my brain, and the person inside it is just that: a person. Something that transcends basic things like gender and sexual preferences, skin colour and the languages one speaks. In learning to accept myself as a person, I have also learned to accept others as such. EAch of them individuals with their own lives and experiences.

While I may not agree with everyone's views and opinions, and cannot understand everyone's motivations, that shall never take away the basic notion that every person is deserving of sympathy and respect. You owe it to yourself to respect yourself as a person, as much as others deserve it to be respected as such. Respect and sympathy do go both ways, after all.


Maya


[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer

The Cosmos from the perspective of a biochemical reaction with self-delusions

 In the zoo, a man is standing in front of an enclosure which holds a group of primates. Of the latter, most are doing the things that primates like to do when left to their own devices: eating, sleeping, arguing and so on. Yet one primate in this group is different. From where he is standing in the primate enclosure, he is looking outside, beyond the walls of the enclosure. Beyond the bars. To the skies and the freedom, but also this primate that is standing there. Outside the enclosure, looking at him.

As the gaze of both these primates meet, many thoughts flash through their minds. Who is this other primate? What are they thinking of? What would it be like outside these walls that confine? What would living inside the enclosure be like? Might these other primates at the other side of the confinement also hold similar thoughts?

As night falls and the group of primates is herded back into their night enclosure, this one primate in the group steals one last look behind him. At the night sky with so many points of lights, and the place beyond the enclosure where that odd primate was standing earlier that day. The thoughts they shared with that one gaze. Maybe one day...


If there's one thing which is remarkable beyond description, it truly has to be the ability of the human species to both amaze and disappoint. When on one hand you have thousands of years of science and the most brilliant minds that humanity has produced so far, and on the other the ceaseless attempts by humanity to not only sabotage itself and destroy as much of itself as it humanly can, but also to ruthlessly ignore or even destroy the scientific works produced by others.

After reading Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', one cannot help but feel a sense of intense loneliness and pointlessness, along with desperate hope and appreciation for the amazing feats that humanity is capable of during its better moments. Even so, humanity as a species has barely registered in a geological sense, never mind on a cosmic scale. Are we alone in the Cosmos? What is the point of all of this?

Unless we are actually just that group of primates in an enclosure called 'Earth', while being observed by other intelligent species, it is highly likely that we are in fact alone. Or at least in this tiny, minuscule, mostly deserted part of the Milky Way, which itself is a rather dull galaxy in a Cosmos that is so vast that the primate inside the enclosure has more of a chance to grasp the vastness of Earth's surface, rather than us human primates of grasping even the vastness of our neighbourhood of the Milky Way, never mind the Cosmos.


Most of the Cosmos we have never even seen or observed in any fashion, as all electromagnetic radiation and other forms of signals that we could observe are still on their way to this part of the Milky Way. Even after billions of years, the speed of light is not fast enough to cross these vast distances. On such vast time scales, it leaves one to wonder whether maybe humanity reached this stage in their evolution too early, or too late compared to any potential other intelligent life.

Perhaps these other civilisations don't live near enough, but a few galaxies over. Perhaps there simply is no way to communicate with another civilisation that far away which doesn't take thousands or millions of years at light speed in each direction. Or perhaps we really are the only form of life that is capable of any level of inter-planetary communication and beyond that happens to be around at this point in time.

Perhaps another civilisation will show up on a world within easy communication and perhaps even travel distance, within a mere few thousand years after humanity has managed to destroy the Earth's biosphere sufficiently that survival is no longer an option for even the most wealthy or influential members of the human species. Perhaps they caught the radio transmissions we sent out many years before that, and decided to pop over in their faster-than-light (FTL) capable spacecraft.


Carl Sagan worried when he wrote 'Cosmos' in the late 1970s that humanity would wipe itself out in a great nuclear weapons fuelled fire amidst the feud between the Empires of the USSR and USA. That fear has fortunately not come to fruition, in no small part due to the strategy of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This had both sides essentially in a stalemate position with each only a hair trigger away from obliterating the other Empire and plunging the Earth's biosphere into a violent and highly uncertain nuclear winter. Since neither side felt like a suicide attack at any point in time, and a few technical glitches fortunately didn't culminate in the accidental launch of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, Sagan was able to write further books well into the 1990s, until his death in December of 1996.

Since that time, humanity has launched the International Space Station (ISS), and robots are scouring the surface of Mars and soon other planetary and other bodies within the solar system. The Voyager space craft, which Sagan was involved with, have made it far out of the solar system and beyond the reach of our Sun. Humanity has never before been this close to making new discoveries and cover ground in new explorations that may - and likely will - change our fundamental understanding of this solar system and everything beyond it forever.


Humans are a primate species which has made it pretty far through a series of lucky coincidences. We are now at a level where we should theoretically be living in peace and safety, as no predators can harm us, and we have the means to not have to fear lacking shelter, food or clean water to drink. And yet here we are.

Maybe it is that humanity is held back by its evolutionary roots. Courtesy of many millions of years of evolution, adding and tweaking, primate brains are built up out of distinct regions, identifiable as belonging to distinct eras in the evolutionary tree. We are after all self-replicating, highly complex biochemical processes that didn't form this way overnight, but had to fight to survive, to replicate and evolve. This may put certain constraints on what the average human being would prioritise and focus on. Because it was the right thing to do for millions of years.


It's depressing to consider how close humanity came well over two-thousand years ago to having a scientific revolution courtesy of the Ionian culture that spawned most of the great thinkers we often refer to as just 'Ancient Greek'. Yet ultimately humanity instead ended up dragging itself through thousands of years of darkness before the Renaissance began to revive those old ideas about science rather than superstition and kin. Tragically even today we can observe today the ongoing destruction and vilification of the scientific method and those who seek to adhere to it. All of this paint humanity as a whole into a rather grim light.


Even without the Sword of Damocles in the form of thermonuclear destruction dangling above our heads every moment, most of humankind is like the rest of the group of primates in their zoo enclosure. Uninterested in learning more about the world and everything else around them, content to live out their brief lives, or too occupied with procuring the means to maintain their existence before it naturally expires to ever really notice that there's a whole world beyond the bounds of Earth.

Those of us who gaze at the stars and wonder what else is out there find ourselves torn between hope as well as the fear both of, and for the human species. The good we can do, and the terrible things that many of us end up choosing. Will we ever make it out there, among the stars? Or will human civilisation flicker and die, leaving barely a scratch on Earth's geological record, left there for perhaps another, an alien civilisation to stumble over and wonder what things must have been like back then?

That history is still left for us and future generations to write.


Maya

In space nobody can hear your screams

Delete your blog, your social media profiles, burn it all, and pray that whatever it was that was bothering you will go away. Move to an isolated mountain cabin, in the midst of a dense forest located on an island in a remote part of Siberia. The quiet will be nice for a while, I imagine.

That's when it begins to dawn on your that reality doesn't care about anything what you did. Nothing you did or said online will ever go away, along with many other things.

Much like those awkward baby and early school photos which your mom likes to show off sometimes to her friends, especially during family gatherings. Those good old days. Yet nobody said that you have to like everything in your past.


Just roll with it.


Stuff happens, water under the bridge, etc.


Especially when we feel like a ship that's been torn loose from its moorings and is cast adrift into a major storm, all we can do is our best while we hang on for dear life. Until things calm down again and we can take stock of the damage and losses.


You're not a bad person.


Unless you actually are, of course. But very few people willingly seek out to do harm. It's hard at any rate to put the blame squarely at the feet of individuals, when the society they live in judges them mostly by their monthly income and status. Desperate people do desperate things, which can lead them into a downwards spiral of negative consequences.


What is your worth as a person?


To society?


Does society love you?


To yourself?


Do you love yourself?



There are countless things in life we do not understand yet, and there is so little time to make sense of it all before our time as a coherent biochemical process in this Universe expires.


Don't sweat the small stuff.


Go and watch a series like the recently released Squid Game [1] and realise that things could always be so much worse, even as you feel rotten inside for days because its story rubs in so hard why modern day society is so cruel and hostile to individuals. How far would you go to stay afloat in a world that demands constant dedicated and sacrifice from you?


But do you love yourself?


Why silence your own voice, insignificant as it may seem?


You cannot expect kindness from society, but that's no reason not to be kind to yourself.


Maya



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_Game

Why I should delete my personal blog

 It's been nearly fourteen years since I began this personal blog. Back then I remember it being mostly an outlet for what I was going through at the time, as a way to let others share in my experiences while I was trying to figure out my body and my place in the world as a then presumed intersex person. Above all it felt like a way to not feel so incredibly alone.

Until earlier that year, I had felt that keeping my struggles with being intersex and such a secret was the right thing to do. I didn't need to share it with anyone, because it simply was something you don't talk about. Of course, when a friend back then not only convinced me that it was nothing to be ashamed of, and proved it by dragging me in front of a (virtual) crowd of people, I found a level of acceptance and understanding that I had never thought possible.


When I look back on the many years of blog posts since that time, however, it's hard to be confronted with the thoughts which I wrote down back then, and the actions taken. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see the spiral my life took, down the path of frustration and depression as I got nowhere with getting sensible answers from medical professionals. When I read those old posts, I am reminded of the frustrated attempts at trying to get answers, to get something changed for the better, only to always end up at rock bottom again.

It's not just the medical side either that's hard to read back. Clearly I had no idea or plan how to get out of this cycle, nor did I know what I really needed, or what would have made my life better. While it's easy to argue that I was obsessed with getting answers about my body, or even with getting answers I liked instead of accepting the 'gender dysphoria' and other diagnoses (e.g. autoparagynaecophilia) I did get handed, at the same time one could argue that it was reasonable to expect an honest attempt from medical professionals.

Especially for something as important to a person as the identity of one's body, as it didn't match the descriptions of male or female bodies, and this uncertainty fed back strongly into the uncertainty I felt about my identity and self-image.


The mean part about this psychiatric theory of gender dysphoria is probably how it flips biological reality upside-down. Rather than having the brain as the neutral element and the body as the element that is subject to certain levels of masculinisation, away from the default female phenotype, it assumes that the brain is what defines a person as either 'male' or 'female'. Because of the strongly held beliefs by the gender teams and other experts I consulted that the gender dysphoria and not the biological model was the appropriate one to use with an intersex person, my interest in learning more about my body was dismissed.

Who cares about what your body is like, when all that matters is what you feel it should be like?

Who cares about this 'intersex' thing, tell us whether you want to be male or female.

We can make you into a beautiful woman.


My body is now working its way through what I presume are the final stages of my long-delayed/extended puberty. I'm grappling with the realisation that my body was essentially female all along, and not male as it was assumed even by those specialists. What does this even mean for me? The most interesting realisation here is that I can still be myself, with any expectation of 'feeling' or 'behaving' in a male/female fashion being just ridiculous societal biases. This is a very liberating and empowering feeling.

Clearly, now that my body has gone off on its own like this and wrapped up a female-style puberty, even years after I stopped doing hormone therapy, I think that the question of whether I have an intersex body has been resolved. No thanks to medical healthcare professionals, sadly.


With that one reason for starting this blog has been basically resolved. All I have to do now is finish writing that autobiography and get it published and then I can move on. Easy peasy.


As for the 'not feeling so incredibly alone' part, I'm honestly not sure in how much this blog has contributed to resolving that. Part of me thinks that due to many of the things that I have written over the years, most likely I scared people away, rather than make them feel like I'd be a person they'd want to learn more about. Heck, I don't even like that person I see when I read back those old posts.

That makes me think that perhaps it is for the best if I were to archive this blog. Saving only a copy for my private perusal, to look up details while writing that part of my autobiography. Maybe this blog has served its purpose, if it ever had one.


Maya

On the health benefits of having a penis and the horrors of sexual obsessions

The incidence of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in adult men is approximately 30 times lower than in adult women, mostly due to many natural defences [1]. One of these is a urethra that's on average between 18 - 20 cm long, compared to approximately 4 cm for adult women [2]. As a result, while 50 - 60% of women will experience at least one UTI in their lifetime [3], most men will not experience an UTI, with most UTI cases among men occurring either as a young child or among the elderly.

UTI is an increasing problem that, if left untreated, can lead to renal damage, sepsis and death. [4] While antibiotics can treat most types of UTI, some types are not an effective therapy [5]. It is the most common type of bacterial infection in women [6]. Here the very short length of the female urethra and the proximity of its exit near the vagina and anus highly increase the likelihood of bacteria like E. coli making their way from the GI tract into the bladder.


The obvious conclusion from research like the above is that the female anatomy is somewhat lacking in terms of features. Especially when one considers that the clitoris is literally a vestigial penis, with the developmental pathways that would have led to it fully developing and the urethra extending and merging into the thus formed penis simply not having been triggered. If this pathway would be restored in human females, it could prevent most cases of UTI and save an incredibly amount of suffering as well as medical and other costs.

So why is this not considered a viable research topic?


For me personally the most fascinating aspect about something like this is that because of my chimeric nature - with both male and female stem cell lines making up my body - I get to literally experience such a thought experiment in real life. With the advantage of this long urethra, I essentially do not have to worry about getting a UTI, even though my body is otherwise female. To say that this is a feature that I appreciate would be understating matters.

If I had to name a disadvantage of being essentially a woman with a penis it's the way that society deals with it. Not just those who respond with disgust when they learn of it, but also those who clearly feel that the right way to respond is to fetishise my body for being this way. I can see this being a major reason why most women would not be interested in such a change, even if it meant avoiding medical troubles and possible complications from a UTI.


While to some extent I can understand the curiosity involved, when perfect strangers start gabbing and asking questions about just how my genitals work and what I can or cannot do with it, that's a point where I don't feel like I'm being treated like a human being any more, but rather an attraction at the local freak show. I wish that this didn't happen regularly, but sadly, it does.

So even though through sheer chance I have gained a bodily feature that every woman (potentially) could have, and I have no issues with having been grant a boost in my health and convenience aspects, it has also made me so clearly see the ugliness in humankind, both in its narrow-minded way of thinking about what bodies should look like, and its obsession with sexuality and genitals.


What is one supposed to do with any of this? I'm not sure. For me it is both an interesting factoid and a sad conclusion about the human condition. For others I hope it can serve as a way to learn to think outside the box, and perhaps consider viewing aspects of life from different angles.


Maya


[1] https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/231574-overview
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urethra
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502976/
[4] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/urinary-tract-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20353447
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457377/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinary_tract_infection

Defining oneself by the things that do not matter

 Assumptions make life easy. If you replace doubt and uncertainty with rock-solid assumptions, suddenly life seems much happier and easier to navigate. Not that it really changes reality, of course. It merely covers what is there with pretence and deception. Who can say what is real, after all?

And yet we have had the facts staring us down like the headlights on the front of a truck as it barrels towards a deer caught in the sudden light. It's just too bad that the deer is blind and isn't even aware of the light. Just like how some of us find ourselves suddenly caught by the fender of the truck as it tosses our limp body to the side of the road where we get to figure out these facts if we wish to survive.


When the violence and pain subsides and you find yourself truly seeing for the first time in your life, it doesn't feel good. More like waking up from a drug-fuelled trip that had one feeling all good and awesome, only for it to end and leave one trembling and shivering to face the grim reality of the run-down existence one is squatting in, while surrounded by others who are still caught in the cruel lie.

Like Neo waking up in his pod in The Matrix, naked and confused, and confronted by reality. Not the cushy, make-believe world that would be so comfortable to slip back into while forgetting about the real world. Choices have to be made and the consequences of one's actions confronted head-on. After all, only one of these worlds can be allowed to exist, Mr Anderson.


The feeling of being jaded, of having seen it all and yet the charade still continues even after you have lost all interest. After the confusion of escaping the make-believe world about gender roles and gender identity, to look back on all those wasted years is enough to fill me with bitterness along with a strong sense of fatigue as it becomes clear to me that many others are still caught in this delusion, this artificial world of fantastical imaginings that have absolutely no bearing on reality.

When the choice between a male or female body was offered to me, I thought that was all there was. Yet I could feel my mind slowly shattering as I tried to grasp my own identity within that context, to redefine myself as existing as merely an amalgamation of only male and female attributes. The reality of that experience was as pleasant as the one captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation went through while imprisoned and asked to perform one simple task. Merely to state that he saw five lights, when above the head of his torturer it was clear that there were only ever four lights present.

Everything starts with a small lie. Just a small white lie to make the annoying thing go away, or perhaps a larger one. Lies grow and develop, they multiply and procreate, until it develops into a society and a way of living. Up till that point, I had not found myself overly concerned with defining matters in terms of male or female, finding myself perfectly happy just seeing everyone as fellow human beings. All of that got destroyed when I found out about being intersex and began to think about my identity.


How do you define yourself in a society, when this society has no concept of a being like you? As jaded as I am today, I find that none of it matters to me. Not any more. Things are pretty simple, after all. Biologically speaking, male genitals make for a man, female genitals make for a woman. Simple. That is before society then comes in like a party crasher who ends up lighting the whole joint on fire by accident, through segregating by genitals and making up rules and limitations that lead people to believe that there's any meaning to one's biological sex beyond intercourse.

The freedom that I found in the end was this realisation and with it the relief that I have no obligation to define myself using an arbitrary and non-deterministic set of qualifiers. It's fine to just be you and not worry about the genitals of people around you and the possible implications that their genitals may have on your life. Unless you are in fact intending to date them, of course.


Along with this sense of freedom came the release from having to 'pass' as anything. I am seen as a regular female by society, even though biologically I'm male and female, yet none of this matters to me. Just use those female pronouns so that we can skip the bit where I can awkwardly explain to very confused people what this 'hermaphrodite' thing is all about. I'm too jaded to care about any of those things that do not matter.

Of all ludicrous notions that societies have come up with, the notion that one's biological sex would somehow intrinsically play a role in and limit one's capabilities is perhaps the most cruel. Slipping insidious poison needles into one's psyche that make one believe that something should be easy, or hard because of one's biological sex, or to feel like a failure because one does not live up to the lofty expectations tied to those stereotypes.

None of that is real. None of that matters. Most of us just assume that it does, because that's part of the make-believe world we live in. Except for those of us who experience that high-velocity kiss with reality and live to tell the tale, and the rare few who manage this process in a less traumatic way. To wake up to the reality that this obsession with genitals is not helping any of us, and psychiatric intervention is more than overdue.


Maya

Thoughts on getting vaccinated and the buffet of ignorance

 Before the recent pandemic, the only major vaccination campaign that I have participated in took place during HS, after a girl in our school had died from encephalitis as a result of some virus that was going around. As a result a mass-vaccination campaign in that region of the Netherlands was set up, which saw me and the rest of my family driving over to a nearby town where a vaccination centre had been set up.

I do not remember hearing of any issues with getting people to show up to be vaccinated, although my younger brother was hesitant on account of the possible side-effects. Once we got at the vaccination centre, however, and he met up with his friends who were also there, they all got vaccinated together. After this vaccination campaign, the viral infection petered out, no doubt helped by a sudden spike in immunity.


For my generation ('Millennials'), being vaccinated never was a topic of debate. As a child you'd of course get vaccinated against measles, mumps, TBC, etc. For our parents the luxury of having effective, safe vaccines against just about any childhood and adult disease was something you'd have to be a fool to pass up. They, after all, had been raised by parents for whom yearly epidemics and outbreaks of everything from polio to smallpox and measles was commonplace. Our parents told us stories of measles-injured children by them at school, who had suffered nerve damage, or of children with permanent injuries from surviving polio.

We're the first generation for whom smallpox is just an entry in the history books, and who were able to grow up unafraid of the spectre of childhood mortality as did previous generations. And yet now this SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shown us just how fleeting this appreciation is.  While people are quick to point out the fraud committed by Wakefield [1] the fact there remains that his goal wasn't to prove that vaccines were unsafe, but only that the combined MMR vaccine was. His goal was to promote the individual vaccine doses by the manufacturer who had paid him to commit this fraudulent study.


What his article did, however, was fuel pre-existing sentiments, and a general movement of anti-intellectualism. First in the 1970s the notion of 'natural living' became mainstream, with a growing group of individuals subscribing to the notion that the post-war style of living was somehow 'unnatural'. That our food, our houses, our clothes and medical science were all in some way harming us. Whether any of that is true was beside the point, because it sounded and felt right. We had to 'return to nature'.

This is how people today end up rejecting medical science, at the cost of their own life such as with Steve Jobs [2], or spin up conspiracies that common seasoning salts like MSG [3] are somehow harmful despite the absence of any evidence that MSG is more harmful than sodium chloride (table salt, which has a 4 times lower LD50). Along with the pseudo-sciences of homoeopathy, astrology, detoxification and kin, there has rarely been a more diverse smorgasbord of choice when it comes to picking your flavour of ignorance.


The best part of this all is that we can do so in nearly perfect safety, because of the sacrifices of those who came before us. The countless children who didn't live to see their first or second birthday. The women who died in childbirth, and the millions who died from what we now regard as easily preventable and curable diseases. Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, germ theory and other potent weapons of science, we're better protected against the forces of the natural world than ever before.

Yet, as every single zombie and similar monster film teaches us, what we need to be truly afraid of is not what is out there, but what or rather who is amidst us. All it takes is for one person to open that backdoor, then another and another, to slowly have the zombies creep into the complex and eat everyone's brain. But those people who let the monsters in were so sure that they were doing the right thing, that they were willing to die to prove that they were right. Shame that they were wrong.


I must to my shame also admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid at some point, when I was really into supporting Greenpeace and going along in the whole 'nuclear power is bad' vibe. In hindsight this was me peaking on the Dunning-Kruger [4] graph. But Greenpeace was right about saving whales and put their lives on the line there, so they couldn't be bad, right? These days, however, Greenpeace doesn't care about whales any more and just focuses on shutting down nuclear plants while selling climate change accelerating natural gas [5]. This despite that nuclear power is extremely safe [6] and one of the best low-carbon power sources we have.

In hindsight, I should have never sent my pocket money each month to Greenpeace as donation, and instead sought to inform myself a lot more than I did. What that experience taught me was that idealism may feel good, but the assumptions that come with it make one significantly more likely to be a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect rather than a participant in some revolutionary vision. Just because you think you're on the right side of history doesn't mean you are.


In that regard, the articles I write for Hackaday such as a recent one on RNA therapeutics [7] feel both like a sort of penance and an opportunity. As the common saying goes: you do not really understand a topic until you can explain it to someone else and have them understand it.

With the massive amount of information available via the internet since the 1990s and the ease of cross-checking one's sources, the only excuse for being a Dunning-Kruger example is sheer intellectual laziness. Although writing the aforementioned article on mRNA vaccines didn't change my mind on whether I would get a SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) vaccine, it did make me appreciate and understand why these mRNA vaccines are so special and likely to herald a new revolution in medical treatments for everything from viral diseases to auto-immune conditions and cancer.

When I got my second BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine shot now nearly two weeks ago, it made me both very aware and appreciative of exactly what this vaccine was doing inside my body. To get a better-than-natural antibody response to a disease that's still foreign to my body's immune system (so far) without putting myself in any appreciable risk is truly what makes this a marvel of medical science.

It is said that the only thing to fear is fear itself, to which I think I'd like to add that fear is bred from ignorance. Ignorance is best cured with evidence and facts, which then resolves the fear and allows the ignorance-afflicted person to live healthier, happier lives. All it takes for this process to take place is to allow for curiosity and a desire to learn to take hold. Who enjoys living in fear, after all?


Maya


[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
[5] http://greenpeace-energy.de/
[6] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
[7] https://hackaday.com/2021/07/26/rna-therapeutics-and-fighting-diseases-by-working-with-the-immune-system/

On Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in your Eyes, death and control

 After stumbling over Caitlin Doughty's videos on YouTube and learning her thoughts on not only the (US) funeral industry but also many other death-related stories from all over the globe, I felt I had to get a copy of her first book: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, And Other Lessons From The Crematorium. What follows are my thoughts on this book, as well as (probably) copious spoilers for those who haven't read the book yet.


In this book, Caitlin details how her fascination with death formed at a young age due to a confrontation with the (presumed) traumatic death of a child at a shopping mall. The sudden disruption of a cheerful and carefree life to that point made young Caitlin realise the nature of mortality, and that - in fact - everyone around her would die some day. Perhaps less common a response, Caitlin felt compelled to 'do something' with death and mortality, to the point of making her career out of it.

Imagine spending part of your twenties shoving corpses into an incinerator, or retort as these corpse-burning machines are called. Shovelling bone dust and chunks of bone out of the machine and grinding these down into the fine ash that is commonly recognised by society as 'corpse ash'. Even though all organic matter got burned off and escaped into the atmosphere (with or without filtering) already.

The way society looks at and deals with death says a lot about the society. In the US, the funeral industry has moved more and more towards taking the 'death' out of the 'death industry', instead adding glamour and kitsch to it. From overly fancy caskets (instead of body-shaped coffins), to elaborate final resting places and of course the process of embalming, which aims to make a corpse as decay-resistant and eternally appealing as a McD Happy Meal, modern day (Western) society has become highly divorced from the true nature of death.


For the people who work at a crematorium or funeral home, there is the constant process of picking up bodies. Every few seconds another handful of people die, after all. That means that in a big city like San Francisco there are (white, unmarked) vans driving every which way each and every day to pick up the dozens of new corpses. These include everyone from the wealthy, rich and famous, to the poorest and most anonymous. Death is the ultimate equaliser.

One day each of us will die, and be whisked away by one of those vans or equivalent to be buried, cremated, chopped up to be fed to ravenous predators or given a Viking burial. So why are we (as in Western societies) so good at pretending death doesn't exist?


Here I feel I should interject my own thoughts as someone who grew up on a dairy farm. My view and that of others who grew up in similar conditions is that 'city folk' are the ones who are detached from reality. Not just in the sense that they often haven't the foggiest where their milk or meat comes from (beyond the grocery store or butcher), but also in the sense of having seen life and death from up close.

From a young age, the spectre of death was ever-present, as one of the aspects of running a dairy farm is that you have a lot of animals, some of whom will die on a regular basis. Of course we had the young male calves who'd be taken away by this big truck, knowing that they'd be fattened up and butchered, but we also had the occasional sheep and cows who'd succumb to some illness or injury. Seeing cattle, sheep and other corpses alongside the road near some farms wasn't uncommon. They were just waiting to be picked up by the corpse truck, much as human corpses get picked up.

Death is the great equaliser, no matter your species.

Except of course that a cow doesn't get a funeral or cremation. The remaining cows and sheep will often notice the absence in some manner, and a dead calf would lead to a distressed mother cow. Yet none of them got upset to the point of demanding a viewing of their dead family member or ask to receive the ashes. Where would a cow even leave the urn with ashes of her dead mother?

Growing up in this world where new life and new death is just part of everyday life, you come to accept it as The Way Things Are. Which is not to say that there are things which fall outside this pattern. I remember finding one of the farm cats as a child one day. She was frozen stiff, but I still took her into one of the stables and put her all warm in some straw, hoping she'd revive. Of course corpses do not come back to life.

Each year we'd also have litters of new kittens everywhere, from the farm cats that were roaming not just on our farm, but also between the other farms in the region. As nobody had bothered to neuter or spay these cats, there were a lot of kittens, and my dad would sometimes take a litter he found and drown a sack full of kittens in one of the water-filled ditches around the farm. Learning about that made me very upset. It didn't seem fair to me that such new life should face capital punishment for merely having been born. Even if they were seen as 'unwanted'.


While reading Caitlin's book, you can see the pattern of people moving into cities and pushing away this spectre of death. In a sense, a city is the ultimate death-denying place. Here one can see, hear, feel and experience people being alive every second, without a moment of solitude or reflection. Since there is no need to get to know the neighbours or everyone else who lives in the hundreds of anonymous flats within throwing distance, people dying in those apartments and being taken away by people emerging with a stretcher from an unmarked, white van is of little concern and easily forgotten. Even inside hospitals anything that may resemble death is quickly whisked away, smoothed over and scrubbed off.

Living desperately to ignore the spectre of one's death coming ever closer, this seems to be the overarching theme.


Would people be happier if they could just accept death for what it is? Caitlin thinks so, and I would agree. Death is a reality of existence, and to pretend that it doesn't exist, or - perhaps worse - that corpses are something to be terrified of, is not helpful in the slightest. To not accept death is akin to not accepting that a machine or electronic device will cease working one day.

The body is a marvellously complicated piece of biochemical processes, all working synchronously in order to sustain a living, breathing organism, which in the case of humans at least is also gifted with a brain that allows it to contemplate and consider the cessation of these processes and how this makes one feel. Here one can seek to further escape the obvious conclusion of oblivion by suggesting that the cessation of the body's essential functions is merely the prelude to 'something' else. To deny not death, but to deny what death means.

With the cessation of the heart's beating and the rapidly decreasing activity in the brain before complete neural depolarisation makes revival impossible, the person that was created inside that brain is no longer. All that remains is the now defunct body that used to sustain it. That's both a tragic, but also comforting thought, as there still is something physical and tangible there that used to be part of this person. Through rituals including the washing and clothing of the body, before it is put to rest for the last time, family members and loved ones can come to terms with this death, and channel their grief and mourning.

Taking away these rituals and by turning death into something abstract is in that sense as cruel as hiding the death of a child's pet by swapping them with a newly bought one, or by pretending that Fido didn't die, but just moved to the Big Dog Farm up-state where she's all happily hanging out with other dogs. Hiding death from a child who grows up on a dairy farm would be hard to impossible, and my parents never even tried to hide the truth from me. I do not feel that this in any way, form or shape harmed me. In fact, it probably is for the best to confront a child with mortality in such a safe setting as soon as possible.


Finally, Caitlin also touches briefly on the subject of immortality, and denounces it, stating essentially that this spectre of death looming over her shoulder is what drives her. Here I want to state first and foremost that I have absolutely no problem with people who feel comfortable with their own impending death and have no issues with embracing it. I do however think on the same note that it is equally wrong to have issues with those who do feel that they would like to 'cheat death'.

I think an important distinction here is how one regards the body. Whether one sees it as part of a cycle of life & death, or more as a machine. If one sees one's existence more as just a brief flicker in the former, then it would seem wrong, almost sacrilegious to not embrace the sweet embrace of death whenever it comes to you.

Yet to others the view of the body as a biological machine is obvious, and with it the same impulses that drives us to conserve countless parts of human history that by all rights should have turn to dust by now. From reconstructing ancient settlements and ruins, to restoring machines and devices decades to centuries old, we find the notion that with the right drive, spare parts and skills we can keep more than just a 1930s truck or 19th century steam engine running.


The funny thing here is that this also appears to tie into the whole 'right to repair' movement. When you 'own' a device or machine, shouldn't you be able to repair it if you desire so? Whether it's performing maintenance on an excavator or combine harvester, a computer-controlled gadget or a laptop or smartphone, nobody should have the right to tell you that you cannot repair it, or that it isn't worth it. That's up to you as the owner of the machine or device in question to decide.

If we extend that idea of ownership and control to one's own body, then I think that the notion of giving everyone the freedom and control to either repair their body or let it decay naturally is the only right choice. Yes, we should bring back the understanding of what death truly is - and with it put nonsensical scaremongering like zombies to rest - while also not demonising medical science today and tomorrow. After all, we happily embrace antibiotics, vaccines and living in clean, hygienic houses, instead of accepting 19th-century levels of death and not naming newborns as they'd likely die before their first birthday, conceivably along with their mother. We have been 'cheating death' for countless millennia at this point, and it seems unlikely we will cease doing so any time soon.


Today we know that we will certainly die one day, yet at the horizon we can see the day when this will be a personal choice. To me that represents the most beautiful part of what it means to be human: to use our intellect and reasoning skills to create more choice, health and happiness rather than settle for just raw survival as back in our hunter-gatherer days. The point of a brain is after all to use it, not merely to have it rot away in the ground or sizzle and evaporate in a retort's fiery embrace after decades of gathering proverbial dust.

Here is to life, death and human genius and intellect.


Maya

Self-image versus reality

 What do you really look like? It's not a question which many people struggle with. After all, we grow up with ourselves and see this face and body every single day of our lives. Some of us could probably even draw their own face from memory. Yet despite this what really hits me more and more as I try to be more... extroverted, expressive and I guess myself, I find myself constantly running into the realisation that I do not really know what I look like, and that this is a major problem.

The clearest indication of this problem was probably in 2007, when I could literally see my reflection in the mirror shifting between what I apparently imagined I look like and at least part of the actual reflection. Experiences like those remind me of just how much our experience of 'reality' is coloured by our interpretation of this reality. Everything we see, touch, hear, taste and smell is filtered through these layers of experiences and memories. And traumas.


I was supposed to look male, but as it turned out I did not as the people around me simply do not see me as such. My body has been further hammering that home the past six years by rapidly continuing this female puberty so that the curves and such are even more pronounced female. And yet I find myself struggling to make sense of any of this. Of course it doesn't help that part of my memories are of this 'male' part of my life, when it was assumed that was what my body was, and I merged that into my self-image because it made sense.

Then decades of doubt and uncertainty, as my environment struggled to see me as male, me finding out about being intersex and a hermaphrodite, and yet the constant efforts by those professionals who were supposed to have my back medical and psychologically to make me accept and believe that somehow my body was actually male, but I just wanted to see my body as being female.

Cue the 'autoparagynaecophilia' nonsense and the brainwashing attempts with the 'transgender' thing. Many years of trying to figure out what this 'feeling male' or 'feeling female' thing even was supposed to be about, even as my body got thus classified into a kind of superposition of both male and female. So many hours that I spent in front of a mirror, looking at my reflection and trying to make sense of what I thought I saw.


Having the feedback from people whom I felt I could trust to be as impartial and objective as possible was incredibly helpful during that period, as it provided some kind of lifeline and form of stability. That I wasn't deluding myself into seeing my body as something which it wasn't. Here I felt disturbed by the idea from mental healthcare professionals and doctors, but also from some regular people that it would be okay to 'just be what I felt like'.

To me that never really made sense, because I never really felt like anything but confusion. Maybe if I was a case like those who suffer from the notion that they need to have certain limbs or genitals removed or resized, tucked and nipped because seeing their body in the 'before' condition makes them unhappy. Have they ever really seen their own body, I wonder.


When I go through the motions of setting up a new recording studio as recently and I find myself confronted with having to look at myself, and listening to audio samples of me talking... that's tough. I really notice how I have some days when I feel fine with how I look, whereas other days I can only see some kind of horrible freak which barely looks human. Is that weird?

Even today, there are still medical professionals who would classify me as being 'transgender' or having some other psychological disorder. Regardless of the state of my body. Clearly their opinion is irrelevant. Yet where there should be clarity, where I should be able to just look at myself in the mirror and see only my body there, what I really see are those decades of confusion and trauma.


A body is so much more than just 'male' or 'female'. That's a nonsensical simplification, really. Your body is you. Every part of it is a bit of your past, present and what will carry you into your future. When I look at myself in the mirror, I cannot just see a body, but I see all those years reflected back at me. Although the most recent memories and reflections are much better, some days I mostly see those bad years and memories reflected back at me.

When this dissonance between reality and one's self-image gets too strong, only dissociation can follow. Where one's mind tries to protect itself against this inability to make sense of the body and what it is or means. It's just a thing, a robotic contraption that moves the mind around. Something that doesn't mean anything and whose reflection is irrelevant.


Perhaps me endeavouring to keep doing video logs and more is a good thing, in that it may slowly help to rebuild that healthy self-image that is so damaged and tattered. Yet what would be simple tasks for others, like watching back footage and editing it suddenly turns into a minor retraumatisation event as I have to relive all those memories that seeing my body and hearing my voice bring back.

You can't escape yourself, I guess.


Maya

Race, religion, gender and the cruelty of segregation

 I'm fairly certain that little more has to be added to the topic of racial segregation: this is a situation where the social concept of 'race' is taken and used to discriminate against the people who find themselves in one of those groups. Got qualified as 'coloured' or happen to be Irish? Sucks to be you. Happen to be Japanese or Chinese during certain parts of US history? Bad choice.

Yet this is just one level of segregation, if not the most well-known and infamous. Yet things get much more confusing and distressing when an individual belongs to multiple of these groups simultaneously. Happen to be the child of coloured and white parents? Good luck figuring out which of these two worlds is least likely to accept you. What is your identity even?


During the Dark Ages in Dutch history, i.e. until the 1960s, segregation based on one's affiliation with a specific church (Reformed, Catholic, etc.) or political system (e.g. Socialism) was the rule of the day, called 'verzuiling' (pillarisation) [1]. Children growing up in these dark times could only play with children from the same group ('zuil' in Dutch), and adults were only permitted to marry within that same group.

This led to tragic stories where some lovers were unable to get married or even meet up in public, simply because their parents went to different churches. Each of these groups had their own churches, schools, soccer clubs, radio stations and so on. The only way to exist within this system was to either adhere to it and belong to one group, or to find oneself essentially cast out of society. What is your identity even?


The cruelty here lies in the absolutism of these identities. You have to be part of exactly one of these groups, and that is the only option that exists today, tomorrow and at any point in the future. You can try arguing with it, but the existence of these groups, and the way that society expects individuals in these groups to behave is something which changes only very slowly and only under immense pressure.

This leads us to the other form of segregation and associated discrimination. The one based on gender (biological sex). For the longest time in human history, most societies have treated women (i.e. female humans) as being not only distinct from men (male humans), but considered the former to be inferior, infantile and thus to be kept away from anything involving responsibility, such as participating in a democratic process.

During the 19th and early 20th century, suffrage movements advocated for women to be treated as equals to men. By the late 20th century this had essentially happened in most countries, but it left intact the two pillars of man and woman. How can there be true equality if these pillars exist, and the individuals in it are treated as being different from those in the other pillar?


Even more so, watch what happens when someone does not fit into either group, as is the case with intersex people. In my own experiences as a hermaphroditic intersex person (a person who is a true hermaphrodite), these pillars in society are disheartening to say the least. Having lived in either pillar for years, it's hard to see the point of the division of public utilities like restrooms and dressing rooms, as well as sections in toy stores and clothing stores into 'men' and 'women'.

What is your identity even?

To belong to the 'coloured' group, you must be from a coloured family. To belong to the 'white' group, your parents must be white. To belong to the Catholic pillar, your parents must be Catholic. To belong to the 'male' group, you must be in possession of male reproductive organs. To belong to the 'female' group, your reproductive organs must be of the female type.

What if you're from mixed race parents? What if your parents are from the Catholic and Reformed pillars? What if you have both male and female reproductive organs?


Society's answer to the first two dilemmas was to demolish the institutions behind them as 'racist', 'discriminatory' and 'unethical'. What society's answer to the latter dilemma will be still remains to be seen. To this day the 'fixing' of this last dilemma is usually performed surgically. Just remove either set of reproductive organs and the problem is gone.

That this 'fix' is about as ethical as colouring a mixed-race child's skin tone lighter or darker depending on the choice made by the parents or a doctor seems to be a comparison that society is still more than happy to avoid.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

On finding and acknowledging your own body

 When I look back upon the years during which I was dealing with gender teams and other medical and mental healthcare professionals as a result of my intersex condition, I think that which hits me the most is the antagonistic attitude towards one's own body that was so prevalent in the communication and general attitude in this world and community around it. The idea that whatever you think that your body should be, that this is what it should be, without any consideration for what one's body is. In hindsight this attitude probably made it inevitable that I'd have such a hard time communicating my simple need to find out details about my body, instead of anything what I wanted it to be like.

When the most common question you get asked is 'what do you feel like?' along with 'what do you want to be?', accompanied by endless stacks of questionnaire forms asking you details about your preferred societal gender role and your feelings about various topics which have distinct male and female connotations in society, then one may begin to suspect that the last questions that these specialists are interested in are questions like 'do I have an intersex body?'.


I remember brushing those questions aside as irrelevant, and filling in those forms to humour the gender team, as I assumed that they were just working through some procedures. Yet as the years dragged on, I began to feel ever more stonewalled and not taken seriously. Even the few tests and examinations that ended up being performed turned out to be not factually correct, as later evidence fully contradicted their findings. Details such as the testosterone levels in my blood, and the presence of female reproductive organs and related in my body, along with indications of my distinct female phenotype.

It's of course impossible to say that any of this was done on purpose, but when I heard from this one rather friendly urologist that my name had come up during some congresses he had been to, and that when he had finally met me I wasn't at all what he had expected, that would strongly suggest that at the very least there's a subconscious bias among these medical professionals that did not work in my favour.


During those years I often found myself confronted with the question of whether maybe I was the one being incorrect here, or confusing matters. Maybe the right way forward was accepting these professionals as the authority on this matter instead of pursuing my own internet-researched and semi-educated guesses. Maybe they were right about my body being that of a regular male and that what I really wanted was to be female. Yet the more I dug into these questions, the less certain I became of anything they claimed.

Even aside from the heavily contradicted medical claims about my body alongside my own objective measurements and e.g. the hormone level reports I got via my GP, and the MRI scan and biopsy findings obtained via private clinics, I found myself struggling with these core questions of what 'they' meant with things like 'wanting to be female', and 'feeling like a woman'. Although at face value I thought that I knew what that meant, the more I looked at it, the less sense any of it made to me.


At some point it begins to dawn on you that all of it was just a kind of smokescreen, or a societal illusion, or whatever you want to call it. Every society defines its own concepts of gender roles, often adding additional categories based on not only one's genitals, but also one's skin colour, country of origin, chosen religion if any, wealth of one's parents, college or university one went to, etc. None of this is real, but we are taught from a young age that all of this matters and all of this is something on which we are supposed to be judged and on which we shall judge others.

For me the breakthrough came when I realised that I didn't need to have society tell me what my body should be like, or what presumed social role I'd have to conform to. That this straitjacket that had been laid out for me in the form of 'corrective' genital surgery and the narrow-mindedness of whatever role society deems fit for people with my ethnicity, education level and current genital set was not a straitjacket that I had to put on and wear. I could instead just be my own person.


There is now an increasing body of scientific evidence that corroborates with these conclusions that I reached after more than a decade of feeling lost and adrift, supporting the notion that each human brain is a unique mosaic, and that none of us are bound to some label or stereotype. That beyond the genitals and reproductive organs we are born with, there is nothing tying us to 'being male' or 'being female'. They're merely descriptors for a part of our bodies which provide no meaningful difference in daily life, least of all at one's workplace or at other public events.

From this we can conclude that the only reasonable approach here is to accept one's body and mind as-is, as to do otherwise would be to restrict oneself to a society's views of what is right and proper. To accept a societal role is to limit oneself as an individual, removing possibilities and a future that could have been. This can be observed in things such as 'female' and 'male' behaviour, along clothing, decorations, toys and even specific colours which a society will restrict to specific groups in society.


For myself, when my body decided to wrap up this 'puberty' thing and finalised the development of female secondary characteristics which it had been chiselling away at for more than two decades, it didn't mean that I lost anything. For me it feels like I do not have a dual nature. Duality would imply that there's some kind of difference, or conflict.

Despite my body being the amalgamation of both a female and male stem cell line, it is still in balance. To me it is a perfect symbol of how ultimately there's no duality between 'male' and 'female'. Both develop from the same DNA, after all, with as e.g. the CAIS intersex condition illustrates merely one (SRY) gene away from pursuing the development of a female or male phenotype. For a CAIS woman her phenotype is female, yet her genotype is male (XY).


Ultimately, nature as well as society are highly complicated structures and systems. Yet the only question which really matters to the individual is whether they can accept themselves for who and what they are, not whether society deems them worthy. Without personal acceptance, there can be no personal happiness.


Maya

We'll always have tomorrow

Memories of the past and visions of the future. That's how we find ourselves moving from childhood into adulthood, gathering more of the former and watching the latter evaporate like a Fata Morgana. In the background there lingers the thought to revisit pleasant old memories and follow their trail. Tomorrow we'll do something with that, we'll tell ourselves.

As our lives wind their paths through the often murky and shadowed depths of the future, we come across many things that demand our attention. To become an adult is a demanding task, albeit one mixed with many pleasures and dangers. While navigating through this new world, our childhood's memories and dreams fade away into the mists, accompanied by the longing echo of 'tomorrow...'.


When the blinding light tears away the fog and shadows, we can suddenly see the full scope of these comforting illusions that have accompanied us during our journey into adulthood. When the message arrives that suddenly there is no more 'tomorrow'. When that person in those memories is no more and the door to retracing that past forever barred.

The choking realisation of the end that awaits all of us as we cling to those evaporating fragments of sweet childhood delusions. Nevermore, sayeth Death, as it swings down its scythe to sever another thread that binds us to our past.

Standing at the grave, all that is left behind are silent memories and turbulent thoughts.


Farewell.


Maya

The Open Source model vs the Open Exploitation model

It's interesting to stand still by the big changes in the software we are running on our computers today versus back in the 1990s and early 2000s. When I bought my boxed copy of SuSE Linux 6.3 in 1999, that year was hailed by the computer rags which I read at the time as the 'year of the Linux desktop'. The evil closed-source Mac and Windows operating systems would be banished and replaced by an operating system produced by the honest hands of the working classes.

None of that really happened, of course, but today it's hard to imagine a world that is not built upon the plentiful availability of freely available software. Whereas in the 90s you'd be paying for the operating system and any software for it - aside from freeware & shareware applications - today you could theoretically spend money only on the hardware and nothing on the operating system and even professional tools.


An example of these tools is for example compilers. In the 90s you'd generally have to pay to get a copy of Borland, Visual Studio or any of the other major players in that space. The open source GCC compiler only became a good option for general development by the late 90s, and today GCC along with LLVM are solid options for software development that have essentially obsoleted pay-to-play compilers like Visual Studio (MSVC) and Intel's ICC.

Similarly, for office suits LibreOffice and Google Docs have made the proposition of paying for Microsoft Office or similar a quaint idea unless one needs some of the rare features offered by the latter. For 3D modelling there is Blender 3D. Basic audio editing? Audacity and others. Need to design a PCB for a new electronics device? KiCad or some of the new-and-upcoming open source options have your back.

Of course, the one question that is always true with 'free' is who ends up holding the bill in the end.


First, one preconception about closed source is that it is necessarily something commercial, NDA-ed and for-profit, with open source always community-driven and following an open collaboration strategy. This ignores the many free tools that are released by hobbyists but who do not feel comfortable sharing the source code to these. It also glosses over the realisation that open source projects can be equally as abusive as the worst commercial office setting.

There have been a few high-profile situations in the world of open source so far where essentially all of the primary (volunteer) developers packed up and left to resume the project on their own terms. XFree86 is one such example, where the fallout from an inflexible project owner resulted in the Xorg fork. Similarly with OpenOffice's developers disagreeing with Oracle's harsh management of the project and resuming the project on their terms in the form of LibreOffice.

This shows clearly how open source projects are not immune to the worst traits of human nature. From oversized egos, to poor or lacking communication and so on, open source projects are nothing magical. In the end they are still software projects, with the same management challenges as a commercial or closed source project. Just generally with the dirty laundry being put out more clearly in sight of the world to see.


Then there's the more concerning aspect of free/open software: the exploitation of 'free' labour. It has happened a number of times now that a small hobby project got absorbed into the global ecosystem that has sprouted on this fertile soil, only for the maintainer of said hobby project to get inundated with support requests. A few years ago this led to the demise of the WiringPi project [1] that had become essential to countless Raspberry Pi (Python) projects. More recently the Babel transpiler project on which countless large web frameworks and companies depend announced that it'll likely be shutting down soon unless it can obtain more funding [2].

This shows the immense pressures that project owners are put under when their project suddenly takes off in ways they had likely not imagined. Balancing what likely was 'just a hobby project' with their day to day obligations and job becomes increasingly more complicated. As the author behind WiringPi makes clear, some people who contacted him for support got rather violent and aggressive when they didn't get the help they felt they deserved.


Clearly the open source movement that began in the 90s has spawned a massive ecosystem, but one has to wonder just how sustainable it truly is. There are disconcerting signs that at least a section of it is built on what is essentially exploitative (unpaid) labour. This is not just something that concerns small project owners who get overwhelmed by sudden attention, but also within larger projects. As mentioned, it's easy for a large open source project to feature the same abusive behaviour seen elsewhere.

Ideally a project uses an open collaboration model [3], where there is no strong hierarchy and yet there's a clear progress towards to a common goal. Yet, much like the economical/social model of Communism which has similar goals, there is a significant risk that at some point a hierarchy is established, with a dictator establishing absolute rule along with a number of lackeys.

If one is lucky, said dictator is of the more benevolent type (though possibly potty-mouthed, like Linus Torvalds) and helps with herding the developer-shaped cats. If not, then as one saw with the XFree86 and OpenOffice projects it can spell the end of the project. When those who seek to contribute to a project do not feel valued or appreciated, they will likely abandon that project forever. The more often this happens, the worse off a project becomes.


In this light one also has to consider what drives someone to contribute to an open source project when they can expect no monetary compensation for this. For many it is because they use the software in question, and wish to improve it. Either by suggesting improvements or by directly contributing code, bug reports or patches. There's a significant time investment involved in these activities, which is for the individual contributor the investment they are willing or capable of contributing.

This leads to the expectation of some level of return. Much like with any other type of investment, a lack of return negatively affects the desire to invest again in that particular project. With my own open source projects this is something which I had to work on with e.g. the communication when someone files a ticket. It's easy to assume that the person who filed the ticket is doing this as a hostile act, but it's much more likely that they genuinely like the project and are doing their little bit of investing into the project to see whether it will make the project better. If so, then the project owner and the person filing the ticket will win out.


In this regard it saddens me to see project like e.g. KiCad steering in a direction that's clearly not optimal. Most recently in the run-up to the 6.0 release a new icon set for the user interface was 'decided upon', which seems to have been one of those 'upper management has decrees' level of decisions. As the new icons are hideous violations of UX rules and based on the KiCad forum communication on the topic, it's clear that this was not a decision made in consensus, but rather on a whim. This is just one example there of many small details of a similar nature.

A similar lack of consideration is present with the Audacy project, whose management recently had to backpedal heavily after previously announcing telemetry that would be enabled by default [4]. At best this showed incredibly poor judgement on the side of the project owners, at worst it shows that every major open source project can just as easily become the next BonziBuddy [5] if one isn't careful.


With all of that said, I too happen to be the author of a range of smaller and larger open source projects (BSD 3-clause licence). Some of these get more attention than others, but when looking at other projects, it does make me reflect on what my response would be if any of them suddenly got really popular. After I had attention for my NymphCast [6] project explode with over 51,000 views on the original blog post [7] last year, I felt the rush and pressure to 'do something' with that project.

Since then the attention has died down a lot, and I have since regained the appreciation for NymphCast and my other projects as 'just hobby projects'. Since I'm not making money off them, the only compensation that I seek from them is to get the satisfaction of having accomplished something for myself. That's after all the point of a hobby project.

That also then shows the counter point to open source as a hobby: open source as part of a business model, or paid projects involving open source software. In my view open source project is nothing special and adheres to the same basic rules as any other project: either it's a hobby or it's work. If one doesn't receive monetary compensation for work, it's exploitation.


Or to cue the (in)famous line that artists hear too often when asked to create something: "You'll be paid in exposure!".


Maya


[1] https://hackaday.com/2019/09/18/wiringpi-library-to-be-deprecated/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/babel_money_woes/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collaboration
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/audacity_telemetry/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
[6] https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast/
[7] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/03/nymphcast-casual-attempt-at-open.html

Do you love yourself?

Want ik hou van jou
is niet de sleutel tot de ander
maar ik hou van mij
al klinkt het bot en slecht
want wie van zichzelf houdt
die geeft pas echt iets kostbaars
als hij ik hou van jou
tegen een ander zegt

(Because 'I love you'
is not the key to the other
but 'I love myself'
even though it sounds bad and wrong
because those who love themselves
give something truly precious
if they say 'I love you'
to someone else)

- Harry Jekkers 'Ik hou van mij' [1]


There are a lot of things which we are told to love. A family, that special person, a nation, a pet or a job. But what about loving yourself? What is so bad about considering loving oneself to be the ultimate goal in life? What does loving something or someone else truly mean if you cannot feel the love for yourself and your existence? Can you truly be yourself and find happiness if you do not love yourself?

Self-love is often regarded as something 'bad', in the sense that it makes someone 'selfish' and possibly narcissistic. Someone who cares about themselves first and foremost cannot be a good person, after all. That's why self-sacrifice and altruism are the proper values to follow in one's brief existence in this world. [2]


When raising a child, it is generally recognised that what a child needs the most to develop properly are stability and safety. It is thereby the task of the parents and the environment to ensure that this environment exists, in which the child can learn, grow and discover themselves. To become a person who understands and loves themselves, so that through this love of themselves and their existence, they can learn to love the existence of others, and this world in which we all live.

It should therefore come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that during experiments with a so-called Universal Base Income (UBI) participants found themselves much happier, much more relaxed and much more productive. The clue here is the shift in expectations between 'being a child' and 'being an adult'. Instead of the low-stress, nourishing environment of an ideal childhood, the adult is faced with a high-stress, uncertain and unstable environment. An environment in which one's self-worth depends solely on one's performance and ultimately the most crucial resource needed to survive in society: money.


A human adult roams around, doing what has to be done to survive, which generally means exploiting themselves in the service of others to obtain monetary compensation. But money alone doesn't nourish the soul. Nor does having shelter and food. Starved of love, they will seek this love externally. To feel the rush of appreciation as they do something praise-worthy online, or in the conquest of others. But what does any of it mean if you cannot love yourself?

Society has always been about paying attention to the exceptional. Not necessarily the ones who have something to say, but rather those who can manage to draw attention. The more attention one draws, the more external love one receives. This is the rush that drives many to crave the road to fame and fortune. As an infantile longing back to that safe environment of one's childhood, whether real or imagined, where there are no worries and one is loved.

Yet without the ability to love oneself, none of that matters, and as the rush and excitement dies down, this stark realisation will hit home for too many. They're not loved for who they are, but for this role they play. This is why plagiarising other people's works is so tempting, and yet so dangerous. You may have gained those fifteen minutes of fame, but in the end you will have lost yourself.


Much has been written about the ideal ways in which to construct a society, and the framework for a fair and equal society and economy. Here it seems quite simple and straightforward: the ideal society is formed around the concept of self-love and through it the drive that everyone can live in an environment where this is possible.

This means no punishing (negative attention) to those who are having troubles surviving in society. This is very much the concept behind UBI, and also the tragic thing about what it tells us about society today: when people are given money with no strings attached, they will still ask 'what does this cost me?'. Because they have learned that outside of childhood, nothing is free and no one can be trusted.


The ideal society is one in which someone who can truly love themselves can say with conviction 'I love you' to others, to society and to every living and inanimate object in the world, thus enriching it with a true love for life itself.


Maya



[1] https://www.songteksten.nl/songteksten/40786/harrie-jekkers/ik-hou-van-mij.htm
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/07/altruism-is-anathema-to-humanism.html

The trauma of proving a negative: the transgender delusion

 I think it is fair to say that one's identity is a crucial part of one's overall well-being. To know what your body is, to know your own mind, and to understand one's place in the larger whole. When any of these elements are incomplete or missing, one's mental health suffers.

When I think of myself in the period between me finishing HS and my parents divorcing followed by the repeated moving to new homes, it'd seem reasonable to see this as the time when I first began to firmly lose touch with these aspects of my identity. With new, unfamiliar surroundings, no sense of direction when it came to education or a career, I eventually began to also lose any sense of what my body was about.

This was the time when I began to question a lot of things which I had held as self-evident about my body. Which included my sex. Partially using online research and partially using intuition, I ultimately figured that I had to be intersex. This was based on my assigned sex of male, along with the requisite male genitals yet a lack of secondary male characteristics, and what I identified as female secondary characteristics. The latter including the shape of the pelvis and some breast growth during early puberty.


Looking back on this period now, I can see how this discovery gave me a lifeline in a period when it felt that my whole existence had been cut loose and was just drifting around aimlessly. I would figure out what was going on with my body, and build up my life starting from there. With the knowledge of what I was, it should be straightforward to figure out my position in society and my identity.

Many times I have written about this already on my blog. The dismissive attitude by the Amsterdam gender team whom I contacted about this. The hostile attitude from Dutch GPs, along with a massive lack of knowledge by these experts about what intersex is and how to diagnose it. The Groningen gender team whose radiologist tried to convince me that what could be seen on the MRI scans wasn't a blind vagina, but just some air either outside or inside the large intestines. The refusal by the same radiologist to contact his German colleagues who had diagnosed my intersex condition a few years earlier.


I have lost count of how many times a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist has tried to convince me that I could only be transgender, because obviously my body was that of a male. The first & second MRI-based diagnosis at private German clinics which showed and confirmed the presence of female genitalia along with a normal feminine skeleton were dismissed and disregarded by every subsequent visit to Dutch and German hospitals. Except one.

There was the orchiectomy procedure which I required to have my legal gender changed from male to female in the Netherlands was only possible in a country like Germany, where it can be an elective surgery if there are reasonable grounds. Since I suffered significantly from having the physical appearance of a woman, but the official identity of a man, this provided the grounds, and I was able to find a German surgeon willing to prepare the procedure.

In addition to the orchiectomy, this surgeon also performed an exploratory surgery in the perineum, confirming in the process the presence of the vagina. This provided the necessary documentation to have my official gender changed in the Netherlands using a never-before used law for intersex births. Finally, I also got the biopsy report for the testicles that were removed, showing them to be underdeveloped and non-functional.


In hindsight, I'm not sure how much good much of this did me. Yes, it is undeniably a good thing that I had those non-functional testicles removed, as they were not providing any useful service and were a potential cancer risk due to their aborted development. I'm also grateful that I got my official gender changed to 'female', just so that I do not have to keep explaining to people why my appearance and listed gender do not match up.

Yet despite all of the evidence I have gathered over the years like this, it does not feel like it really matters. Even though my body has since that surgery continued a female puberty and it's undeniably 100%-female-except-for-the-genitals - i.e. that of a hermaphroditic intersex person - there is still so much that I do not know or understand about my body.


Meanwhile, the weight of being told over and over by people who are supposed to be intelligent, educated specialists doesn't seem to be lessening. While I got over the worst of the uncertainty, such as that experienced when I stood in front of a mirror and tried to pin down whether I could 'pass' as a woman, the whole issue feels unfinished and the mental injuries I suffered raw and bleeding.

For so many years I was essentially trying to prove to these doctors that I was not transgender and could not be transgender. That me taking female hormones until a few years ago was only to fix a hormonal imbalance I felt existed in my body. The low levels of both testosterone and estradiol should have supported that notion, but instead I was told by the first gender team that their tests showed my testosterone levels to be at normal male levels. Something which was physically impossible due to the underdeveloped testicles.


How does one process this? How can one give this a place, and put it into the past? To this day, my body is the very representation of the struggle over those many years. And even though I know my body to be a hermaphroditic intersex person, it feels that this knowledge has further divorced me from society, instead of bringing me closer as I had hoped.

Maybe it's just the bitterness and disappointment that inevitably came with those traumatic and other negative experiences. To have lost most if not all faith in doctors, psychologists and kin. To feel that society does not care about or acknowledge intersex individuals. To feel like a square block in a society of round pegs and spheres. Being different and a minority (true hermaphrodite) within a minority (intersex) does not give one that feeling that it helps with settling on that identity.


Perhaps a major part of the problem is not with me, but with society. Instead of seeking to define oneself using properties which are genuinely individualistic, the average person's identity seems patched together using existing concepts within that society. Yet within that society it more or less works. Pick a template, tweak it a bit and off you go as a newly minted member of that society.

At this point I think I am coming closer to understanding how this all works, and how I can figure out both my own identity, as well as a way to make it work with society without compromising on my own identity, but it's definitely not the 'as seen on TV' simplicity. Like the documentaries which I have seen about e.g. transgender people where all their worries are taken away by having their genitals and secondary characteristics of their sex removed, or BIID patients who get their legs or an arm removed. Just tweak the body and it's all fine.

I'm pretty sure at this point that none of that is how it works at all in reality.


Maya