tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58517485143187886142024-02-29T00:43:58.475+01:00Maya PoschPh33r the whining and drama~Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.comBlogger1231125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-29411302447232850682023-09-05T14:51:00.000+02:002023-09-05T14:51:02.899+02:00On whether intersex is compatible with life<p>Is being born intersex the worst thing that could happen to you? Misery is a pretty miserable field to compete in, so I will not even attempt this. Yet of all the things which have personally affected me as a human being - living in human society - I would however have to say that being born intersex is the one thing which has made my life quite consistently into a miserable experience. Sure, there's the post-traumatic stress disorder from what would appear to be early childhood trauma, the details of which I can only remember as fragments and vague impressions, but so many people have childhood trauma that it almost feels like something you can comfortably share and relate to. Also, you're an adult now, so we can get you treatment and therapy, to give it a place. It'll be fine.</p><p>Finding it hard to make friends and to find a career path because of having been born gifted is also pretty miserable, as is having your parents divorce and you losing touch with the place where you grew up. I would not want anyone to go through those experiences, but so many marriages end in divorce these days, that anyone can relate to it, and even make fun of it. Similarly, being gifted is a hindrance, yet it's one of those things where once you learn how to deal with this handicap, it can become one of your strengths after that moment of self-realisation. It's just a part of who you are, and society has a place for us, even if us nerds get bullied and beaten up at school.</p><p><br /></p><p>I so strongly wish that I had never been born intersex. Especially with something as pronounced as true hermaphroditism, which is both rare and also the hardest to ignore form of intersex. If you're one of the many XY women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, it's not a real big deal, unless you really insist on getting pregnant. Similarly with other forms, like XXY where you're still a regular woman, just with a bit more pep in your step because of elevated testosterone levels. That honestly doesn't seem like such a bad deal, even if society gets pretty uppity about it.</p><p>However, when your form of intersex is one of those whereby your body is literally neither female nor male, or perhaps both - depending on your perspective - just where do you fit in with society? You don't fit in with the liberal view of a binary body and binary brain gender that can flip between male and female, nor with the conservative view of women having a female brain and men having a male brain. From experience I know that there's no such thing as a 'brain gender', also after more than a decade of being pushed to 'choose' between undergoing surgery to become either male or female. To be purely a man or a woman, basically. This is the curse of hermaphroditism.</p><p><br /></p><p>A woman with a penis. A futanari, as it's also known among connoisseurs of Japanese hentai. Also a freak of nature, an abomination. A trannie if people get their slurs confused. A pre-op transgender person, according to one highly educated Dutch urologist. Those are just some of the names and responses that get associated with my... condition.</p><p>An intersex woman with CAIS or XXY chromosomes can use a public dressing and shower room, or a sauna without any odd glances. That is not me. I have to hide my body and who I am, because of the stares, the shame, the humiliating, ignorant and lewd comments. My body isn't allowed to exist, or only as the subject of other people's obsessions.</p><p>When I want to talk about my horrible experiences of being treated as a transgender person by so-called medical professionals, and being forced to accept their ideas of treatment and surgery, I don't even get to finish my sentence. Usually I get called 'transphobic'. Just another slur to add to the list.</p><p>When I want to open up and find others who can relate to my experiences, there is nobody. I tried for years, but it's been all futile. Maybe there is nobody. Maybe I'm too numb at this point to even want to talk about it any more. It still hurts so much, even though I'm so numb from all the pain.</p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe I should have done what so many other intersex people have done, which is to pretend to be transgender. Get that surgery to cut off the bits that do not match your binary phenotype, and be happy. In my case I wouldn't even need to do hormone therapy or such, as my body already does the female hormone thing, including monthly cycles. I just need to get rid of the 'male' appendage. Though they'd most likely want to rip out the vagina too, and make an fake one. It never mattered to the doctors that I have female reproductive organs as well, except to the one who did the exploratory surgery. What use is medical evidence if it is ignored by other doctors? You're just a lowly patient, after all.</p><p>Aside from more intimate settings, I can already fake being just another regular woman. It's after all just a small part of my outward appearance that's different. Yet if I deny the rest of myself that is not this outward image, along with the experiences that I have had, and the fact that I'll likely never be able to consult a doctor on medical issues beyond the body's basic functionality, what is there to live for? A life that is basically a charade, where I hide the trauma, the disturbing parts about my body and everything else that might inconvenience others? A life where the thought of finding love is inconceivable because you're first and foremost prime meat in the freak show?</p><p>What kind of life is that, and is it a life that I wish to keep living?</p><p>Thus it is that having been born intersex is the worst thing that has happened to me. It's miserable and lonely, yet there's no point in crying about it. Either you find a way to live with it, or you do not. At least there are some options, unpleasant as they are.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-71275329738310954382023-07-02T22:29:00.001+02:002023-07-03T21:23:03.442+02:00On gender ideology and why there's just one side<p> It's been a while since I last posted on this blog. I have been writing a bit on a new blog that I started on my personal website, as part of my attempt for a year or so now to get away from the whole legacy of both this blog that I began in 2007, and the countless unpleasant memories that I made along the way. Suffice it to say that perhaps as part of writing my autobiography (which should actually be ready this year) I have had an opportunity to reflect on many things, thoughts and events along the way.<br /><br />Perhaps most interesting about these reflections was being able to finally put the sore finger on why exactly it is that gender ideology and associated groups manage to rile me up so much. After all, aren't intersex people supposed to be on the exact same side as those of various sexual persuasions and those more gender ideologist of all: the transgender folk? This never felt right to me, and the reason for it is actually pretty simple: the binary is a lie.<br /><br />When I watched Matt Walsh's 'What is a Woman?' [1] a few months ago, I realised just how incredibly cathartic it felt to see Matt tear apart the whole delusion that was constructed around the nonsensical term of 'gender identity', something about which I have ranted previously on this blog. Yet in the intro to this documentary and reading up on Matt's overall views on gender/biological sex, it would also seem quite clear that he's a strong believer in men and women being very different mentally and emotionally, leading to each having distinct roles in society. Naturally, that doesn't quite jive with my own experiences, or my physical reality.<br /><br />What is however an interesting notion that becomes apparent here is that in order to believe in gender ideology and the notion of 'gender' being somehow distinct from biological sex, you can be either on the conservatory side - like Matt Walsh - or be a fervent proponent of transgenderism. The only significant difference between these two groups is whether or not they believe that this 'gender identity' is intrinsically tied to a specific biological sex or not. In the end the distinction between these two groups is about as clear as between Catholics and Protestants: although they love to lock horns, they're both still part of the same overarching belief system.<br /><br />Yet much like the Christian dogma, so too is the gender ideology's dogmatic system devoid of scientific evidence. There exists no clear evidence that would support the notion of a 'gender identity' any more than we have been able to identify a 'soul' within the confines of the human brain, and generally speaking, nurture seems to be the deciding factor in gender roles, rather than nature.<br /><br />For me as an intersex person this feels like something that should have been obvious, yet much like a 'former' Catholic who escaped the Church's clutches, you can run from the dogma, but it's hard to fully shake off its effects after being exposed to it since you were a child. Whenever I see the 'I' of intersex meshed into the alphabet soup of LGBTQI+ and what not, it is mostly as a reminder of how little intersex people like me have to do with any of those groups. <br /><br />Transgenderism and conservative views on gender both fly in the face of factual reality for intersex individuals, especially those of us who have been forced to navigate all sides of the gender role spectrum, and for those of us who have bodies that are both male and female. After all, how would you even go about defining terms like 'homosexual', 'bisexual', or heavens forbid 'heterosexual' within this context?<br /><br />In the end those are all just convenience terms that have been assigned to fit within a narrow spectrum of personal interpretations of physical reality, yet this also means that they deny reality the way any dogmatic system does.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_a_Woman%3F">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_a_Woman%3F</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-22861051880321986792022-04-05T21:05:00.006+02:002022-04-05T21:05:52.645+02:00The transgender curse<p>If dreams are indeed a way for our subconsciousness to communicate with our conscious mind, then some dreams are as subtle as taking a brick to the face. Case in point last night's dreams, or perhaps closer to nightmares. In them I found myself in a number of scenarios in which I felt shamed for having (exaggerated) masculine features, such as (excessive) leg hair, or ways that served to remind the me in the dream that I was not a 'real woman'.<br /><br />Upon groggily awakening from this delightful ordeal it still took me a few hours to really process its message, but in hindsight I don't think that it's that complicated. I think that at its core lies the way that I was made to look at my own body, and the messaging alongside this about 'passing' as a specific gender. A lot of what I went through in my dealings with medical and other specialists was after all about 'proving' that my body isn't that of a male. It would be one heck of a way to hypersensitise me to anything about my body that wasn't in line with this notion.<br /><br /><br />Compared to yesterday when I went to bed, I can feel the shift that occurred somewhere in my way of thinking, and also in how I perceive myself, both via my senses and when looking at myself in the mirror. It feels as if some level of desynchronisation has been resolved and I'm now (mostly) back in contact with my physical body instead of whatever distortion was in the way before.<br /><br />The ironic thing is perhaps that I have said so many of these things before, but I just didn't seem to really believe in them, perhaps. Some lingering fear that I might suddenly wake up one day and all of these things would turn out to be just a dream and all clarity is gone again, perhaps?<br /><br />Since I'm pretty sure that I am in fact awake right now, and nothing will change about factual reality any time soon, I feel confident in reaffirming that my body was always the way it is today. The abnormal situation that was in place for many years was that my body was perceived as that of a male, when the actual, normal situation was in fact that it always was that of a hermaphroditic intersex person, with a clear female phenotype. A hermaphroditic woman, for short.<br /><br /><br />When I regard my struggles to look at the body I inhabit today as real, I can also see and remember the many specialists who told me that I am male, that I have a male body, but that I 'want to be female'. This whole mess with the transgender protocol and the many years that I spent trapped in its bowels are clearly a type of brainwashing that was inflicted on me when I was in a very fragile state, emotionally. When you seek help and answers, and instead of finding those things, you are absorbed into this abusive, cult-like system which cares nothing about you as a person, instead only injecting its ideologies and lies into your veins like venom.<br /><br />Looking back, it's hard to deny that things would likely have been a lot easier if I hadn't had this 'transgender curse' put on me. A curse that made me worry about nonsensical things like 'passing' as something which I already am by birth. A curse which took away many years of my life, and denied me medical help and answers because I refused to comply with The Protocol and submit to it.<br /><br /><br />The abnormal situation in which I started my life was that neither my environment nor myself were aware of my intersex condition, not helped by my body struggling to kickstart the whole 'puberty' thing which massively delayed the development onset of the secondary female characteristics. When this development ultimately did start a few years back, it especially has helped me to establish the normal, healthy situation which I am learning to accept now, and slowly shake off this 'curse' that was put on me.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-1985394849967525532022-04-05T21:02:00.009+02:002022-04-05T21:02:56.413+02:00Thoughts on the NymphCast project before its first release<p>Now that the first release of NymphCast (version 0.1) [1] is coming up soon, it's interesting to reflect on its development over the years, and what I imagine its future will be like. <br /><br />Originally NC was intended to be just a simple way to stream local audio to a HiFi system or similar in the same room, as an alternative to proprietary solutions like AirPlay and ChromeCast, as well as Linux-only solutions like PulseAudio. This came largely from personal annoyances with the status-quo a few years back: AirPlay was a very Apple-centric thing, while ChromeCast didn't work reliably with anything, while the remaining solutions like PulseAudio brought little joy as well.<br /><br />Now, a few years later, I have a couple of NymphCast systems set up. Some are just for playing back audio, while others can also do video. There's also a screensaver mode that shows images from a local folder when no content is being played back. The discovery of not only the NC Servers (connected to the speakers and/or display) as well as NC MediaServers (sharing media content on the LAN) is performed automatically using a custom UDP Broadcast-based protocol called NyanSD (Nyanko Service Discovery) that I feel improves on mDNS and DNS-SD if only on functionality and simplicity.<br /><br /><br />What I also like about the system in this v0.1 state is that it doesn't complicate matters with transcoding (video) content, instead putting the burden of decoding on the playback device alone. This means better quality, smaller content size (during network transfers) and the ability to stream content from even low-powered devices (cue Raspberry Pi-based NASes).<br /><br />The drive towards efficiency has been a central focus during development, with a number of optimisations such as a lock-free ring buffer [2] for the local data buffer, and a zero-copy refactoring for the underlying remote procedure call library, NymphRPC [3]. Along the way I have learned many interesting details about hardware & operating system aspects, wrestled my way through sometimes vexing debugging challenges, and teamed up with a number of friends and acquaintances in making NC work.<br /><br /><br />I think perhaps the most difficult question to answer at this point is what NymphCast means to me. As many are eager to point out, NC is hardly the only (free/open source) project that allows for streaming of media content, and there are large HTPC-oriented projects that do everything plus the kitchen sink. In that sense one could say that I have 'wasted my time', but I feel that's rather unfair.<br /><br />As mentioned, I have learned many things along the way, things which along with the gained experience have made me a better developer today. There are also many reasons why I prefer NC over any of those other projects for my personal use. Not the least of which is that I know every millimetre of it and have made it to fit my own needs first and foremost. <br /><br />As a continuing way to challenge myself as a developer, its value is also hard to discard. I think the trick for me is to find more synergies with my other interests, such as embedded development, while ensuring that it all stays enjoyable. After all, it's still just a hobby project.<br /><br /><br />One thing I think will be fun with NymphCast in the future with v0.2 and beyond is that with the tough foundation work done, it is now relatively easy to add 'cool' features. Things like the AngelScript-based 'apps' that can be used to extend the functionality of a basic NC Server system somewhat like a ChromeCast or Apple TV system, only not necessarily restricted to just consuming commercial (streaming) content.<br /><br />What exactly will happen with the NC project during the next development cycle for v0.2 is hard to say exactly as nothing is set in stone, but I'd be lying if I said that I'm not looking forward to it. Whether it'll ever become more than just a hobby toy is of no real concern to me. At the same time I have found some of the interactions with others about the project rather interesting and inspiring, and I'm flattered that the FreeBSD and Alpine Linux package repositories have up to date builds of NC.<br /><br /><br />It's been a long journey, with occasional intense stretches of work on NC. I'd be lying if I said it was always easy, but learning to temper my expectations and accepting it as a fun hobby project rather than as something more has made me feel that it was worth it. Today and hopefully in the future as well.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast">https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast</a><br />[2] <a href="https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/lock-free-ring-buffer-implementation-for-maximum-throughput/">https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/lock-free-ring-buffer-implementation-for-maximum-throughput/</a><br />[3] <a href="https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/2021/11/11/refactoring-nymphrpc-for-zero-copy-optimisation/">https://mayaposch.wordpress.com/2021/11/11/refactoring-nymphrpc-for-zero-copy-optimisation/</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-4916906200754549212022-03-27T20:43:00.004+02:002022-03-27T20:43:20.997+02:00Self-sabotage, terror and the futility of dreaming<p> There are times when you have to be brutally honest with yourself. As much as modern day life is about quick solutions, when it concerns something that has deeply sunk its roots into your very being, finding a suitable solution and implementing will take time. Any such solution begins with the recognition, identification and analysis of the actual problem. This is an aspect which is essential with any kind of long-term trauma, such as that experienced with abuse during one's childhood and/or youth, fighting or surviving in a war zone, and so on.<br /><br />With how one's personality is formed from the amalgamation of successive experiences, each of which are influenced by preceding experiences, the earlier and more severe a traumatic experience was, the more severe its cumulative impact is likely to be if not quickly identified and treated.<br /><br /><br />When the term 'post-traumatic stress disorder' is mentioned, it sounds relatively cuddly and adorable. Even when for too many it means forever being stuck with this demon inside your head that feasts on any positive emotions. As some have described it, it feels like you're dead inside, aren't living in the same reality as everybody else and have become detached from everything, including yourself. Old hobbies from before the traumatic events don't feel enjoyable, subjects and entertainment you could relate to previously no longer make sense to you. And that's before the triggers and re-traumatising events that feel designed only to torture you.<br /><br />Reading through the tales by survivors of war, abuse, as well as the stories of war veterans hammers these constant themes home. Simple things like feeling joy, or performing basic tasks in standard, civilian life have gone from straightforward to impossible challenges.<br /><br /><br />What am I complaining about here? <br /><br />I don't remember much if anything of what happened to me as a five-year old child that made me reject everyone overnight, including my own mother. What happened that was so severe that I'd reject physical touch and the company of others? All I have to go by are some fragmented, unreliable bits of memory and the memories of others. Yet even so, that is where it appears the fear began. Instead of trusting others and continuing to seek out companionship, I withdrew into distrust and fear.<br /><br />Should something have been done about that back then? Possibly. My mother, herself sadly personally acquainted with childhood abuse, never felt that a therapist or similar would be beneficial, and I guess my father didn't care enough. Thus I grew up safely on the family farm, even as the spectre of adulthood and its challenges crept closer.<br /><br />Between my father cheating on my mother, their divorce, the repeated moving from place to place, first with my mother and brother, then by myself, I guess it fed into the whole internal fear and distrust about others. Of being left alone, of being abused by others, of not being able to trust others. Even as people helped me out along the way, I can see how I never managed to engage sufficiently to maintain social bonds. <br /><br />As the years of trying to get medical answers about my intersex body dragged on and on, it too fed into this early trauma-based narrative. With conflicting conclusions and reports by medical professionals, and extreme, often conflicting views expressed by psychologists and psychiatrists along the way, it led me to a new narrative. That I do not know and therefore cannot trust myself. Not my body, not my own mind. I was wrong before about what it is, what I am, what is going on. Why would I ever put my trust into anything again?<br /><br /><br />The horrible thing about losing faith in yourself like that is probably that you end up in a situation where you either try to extract promises out of yourself - only to see them being broken - or to force yourself to do things that really need doing, the strain of which neither conducive to your mental health or energy levels. Until at some point you just break down, I guess. Getting out of this feedback loop, even if you're aware of it, is hard as it goes essentially against everything that your own mind is telling you.<br /><br />There are a lot of things which I know I should do. There are many things which I know I could do. There are the things which I know I'm capable of, and yet between the terror I feel inside and the mental exhaustion it just makes me afraid that any illusions I hold of a better future are just that.<br /><br /><br />Despite acknowledging the problem I'm struggling with, I can find no clear-cut answer. Over the years I have done the whole thing with psychologists, psychotherapists, SSRI anti-depressants, EMDR therapy and what not, but I think what I'm missing there is that it doesn't really address the root of the problem. This is the problem that apparently began when I was a child, and which has seemingly only been worsened over the decades. <br /><br />What I reckon would be immensely helpful would be the establishing of stability and safety. In a previous blog post a while back I mentioned that I'm looking for a job. Something that would provide me with more financial stability and certainty than the freelancing gig that I have been attempting the past years can offer. By reducing daily stress levels, it should become easier to address other issues.<br /><br />Yet what I find causes me problems here is that it costs me an incredible amount of energy to wrestle through one impersonal job interview process after another, especially after going through dozens of them back in 2018/2019. As fun as it was to see more of the world with the on-site interviews, dealing with rejection after rejection did not help matters. Cue this process worsening the problem that I'm trying to address with this solution.<br /><br />If I'm truly an experienced senior software developer, why am I still struggling? Cue imposter syndrome and the loss of more faith.<br />And even if I landed a job, would I be able to retain it? Cue more fear and deadly fatalism.<br /><br /><br />I guess at this point I'm trying to revert the long process of self-sabotage that comes courtesy of the positive feedback loop that is inherent in dealing with the cancerous growth of such doubts and questioning of oneself. Even though I cannot revert my past decisions to waste half my life on finding answers to impenetrable medical questions, or undo what someone apparently did to five-year old me, what I can do is to think of what is best for me, in the present. Even if that includes admitting that I cannot do this by myself, and exposing myself to the risk of trusting others.<br /><br />Even if that somehow works out, there is still a lot more work to be done about myself and many more layers of old experiences to dig through for analysis. Yet with a bit of progress every day there can be a hope for an actual future. One day I hope to go through life not feeling afraid of everything, but feeling relaxed and safe. To be rid of this near-constant, instinctive fear that seems to fill me practically every waking moment while draining all traces of mental energy to cope with even daily life.<br /><br />After all, what is there really to be terrified of in life? I'd like to find out.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-51012484530806778262022-03-22T19:44:00.004+01:002022-03-22T19:44:55.784+01:00Brain, not groin: how the concept of gender destroys individuality<p> What is a person? A human being, who is born and grows up learning and discovering along the way. Because no person is born with exactly the same brain structure, and no person goes through the exact same experiences in their lives, each of them is an individual. Each individual has their own wishes and dreams, as well as their likes and dislikes. Each person thus forms a part of the rich tapestry of humankind, of which the most distinguishing feature is that of constant change and the betterment of humanity through the efforts of individuals.<br /><br />The wish to erase this uniqueness, this sense of individuality, is something that occurs repeatedly throughout human history. Whether it is through tyranny or the social pressures that are exerted within societies upon individuals, the end result is that individual thought and action are suppressed, with a central view instead imposed upon the individual. The class systems that are still prevalent today are one form of this, somehow normalising the thought that some people are in fact better than others. Not due to merit, but by accident of birth - or as is common today - through commercial exploitation as in the case of e.g. idols and commercial sport.<br /><br />A very specific class system is that involving the biological sex of individuals. This, too, is an accident of birth, with a roughly 50/50 chance of ending up with either set of reproductive organs, or - for a certain percentage of births - a mixture of both. What relevance does the reproductive system have to the individual? Since the reproductive system is not functional until puberty commences, the answer for children is 'very little', with society's discrimination based upon these organs playing the largest role by far.<br /><br />Before a person is born, much of their life has already been determined by the sheer coincidence of their biological sex. From the colour of the baby room's wallpaper, to the sheer discrimination when it comes to baby and children's toys, clothing and entertainment. Not only are 'boy' and 'girl' individuals thus segregated, but also exposed to social programming that will continuously reinforce certain truisms which are kept in the society's subconsciousness.<br /><br /><br />One of these recurring truisms is that men and women are inherently different. That not only are their bodies obviously sexually dimorphic, but so too are their brains. That's why in some cultures, men are regarded as violent, impatient and poor at multitasking and finding things around the house, but also good at map reading, spatial awareness and being tough superheroes. It should not take one very long to discover that these are things which are in fact not true, just as is the case for similar platitudes and statements made regarding women.<br /><br />The simple reason for this is individualism, and a distinct lack of sexual dimorphism in the human brain. Even when regarding the human body by itself, a wide variety can be observed in body types, even as society prefers to present certain body types as 'ideal'. In the past this has led to such atrocities as the 'wasp waist' - which was generally achieved through a very tightly bound corset and occasionally the removal of ribs - as well as bound feet among Chinese women until this practice was forbidden by the Communists. That these fashion styles were not beneficial to the health of the individual should be obvious without saying. Yet even today such practices still exist in some cultures.<br /><br /><br />In the end, what thus makes one's biological sex more than just a coincidence that affects one's personal development, is mostly society's social programming and indoctrination in the form of social gender roles, and less the influence of our body's endocrine system upon our mood and behaviour. Thus the question of what the effects of such social gender-based discrimination and segregation are on the individual. It should not take a brilliant mind to regard such social roles as essentially a form of society-promoted tyranny.<br /><br />When scientific studies fail to show evidence for the truisms in society which underlie such gender role-based discrimination, then the reasonable action is to abandon these truisms. In a truly enlightened society, an individual could be themselves, while participating in said society out of their own volition. When an individual is instead coerced into a specific role and way of thinking, then that person has lost aspects of their individuality, having instead become a victim of that system.<br /><br />Ultimately, the most essential sign of (human) intelligence should be the acknowledgement that what makes a person is what is going on in their mind, rather than their groin.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-56110205921952080032022-02-05T14:46:00.001+01:002022-02-05T14:46:05.652+01:00The end of science, and humanity's fear of being alone<p> If there is such a thing as real-life good versus evil, it may be found in humanity's struggle between reason and dogma. <br /><br />When wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers established the seeds of modern society in places like Sumer and the subsequent Akkadian Empire, it would blossom into (among others) the civilisations of Ancient Egypt and Rome, bringing to people a life where clean water, hygiene with bathing houses and sewer systems, and general prosperity and happiness became attainable. Along with this came the liberty to contemplate the broader sense of life beyond mere survival, which culminated into the great thinkers of the merchant state of Ionia in what is now Greece, and the establishment of the great Library of Alexandria.<br /><br />That is when the dogmatic rot began to set in. Rather than the violent destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the Roman Empire, their demise was marked with increasing corruption and reduced intellectual freedom. This is perhaps best illustrated by the adoption of one of the then new branches of the Abrahamic religion, which we now know as 'Christianity'. Rather than a pantheon of gods who were a reflection of fallible human beings, instead it was assumed that there was this singular Abrahamic god who was not only omnipotent, but also perfect and infallible.<br /><br />Rather than gods as a sounding board for the internal struggles of humankind, this transitioned society into one where dogma and absolute obedience are an absolute given, something which probably pleased leaders, but also coincided with a neglected Library of Alexandria and the slow demise of ancient Rome as a beacon of civilisation and engineering prowess. As the bright flame of human civilisation guttered and turned into a sickly yellow pinprick of light, European civilisation descended into its thousand years of medieval regression. At this point it might have seemed that all hope was lost, and humanity was on its final, dystopian course towards its demise.<br /><br /><br />Yet beneath the suffocating blanket of dogma and Holy Wars, reason and with it science persisted. From monks tinkering with plant biology to the increasing trendiness among the affluent to 'do scientific experiments', science and engineering re-emerged like new growth after a wildfire. Throughout the Renaissance of the 15th century and subsequent Age of Enlightenment which began in the 17th century, the old became new again, and society began to pick up where the ravages of dogma had left it floundering for over a millennium.<br /><br />In many ways, today's society is still struggling with the same old questions of the Enlightenment, churning over and over through the benefits versus disadvantages of separating church and state, to question freedom of thought. Not only with religious freedom, but also including the freedom to discard dogma altogether. After all, what reasonable argument can be made for the Roman or Greek pantheon of gods being any less real or vice versa than the Abrahamic god or the gods of any of the world's other religions? Aren't they, when reasonably regarded, not merely allegories and reflections of the human mind?<br /><br />Throughout history, humankind has rejoiced in the opportunity to convince others of them being wrong on some dogmatic topic. Whether it concerned religion, nationalism, or another topic which seemed so incredibly important and just at the time, dogma has caused untold suffering at the hands of those who were convinced of this dogmatic belief. At the same time, dogma also has provided humanity with something it craves so strongly: a sense of belonging and stability. These are things which are now being threatened more than ever.<br /><br /><br />When we look at science-fiction stories - whether in book, TV or movie format - they all share a common theme: there is other life, other civilisations out there. Surely the Milky Way Galaxy must be teeming with life, after all? Yet it's easy to forget that, although from a recent historical perspective it seemed natural that explorers would find other humans living elsewhere on Earth, those humans too originally came from a central location on this planet. Many thousands of years ago, the first human explorers were the first humans ever to visit parts of this planet. They did not meet existing tribes, just a world devoid of humans.<br /><br />Based on everything we know today, from Earth-based telescopes and space probes we sent out into Deep Space, there is no sign that there is other life elsewhere in this entire Galaxy. That would mean that as we find our way outside of our solar system, through Deep Space and explore other solar systems and galaxies, we would be the first one there. There would be no cheerful, aggressive, paranoid or idyllic civilisations and worlds waiting for us like Sci-Fi wants us to believe. No Klingons and Romulans, or Vulcan faster-than-light ships zipping by Earth. Just the complete silence of galaxies devoid of humans.<br /><br /><br />Amidst this silence, we would find our dogmas falter. We'd have no nationalism (or planetism?) to fight over, nothing to prove, argue or defend. Just empty worlds and quiet, sometimes dark worlds amidst the void of Outer Space. Quiet places that will only reflect our own humanity back at us when we look at them. There is nothing to conquer, no enemy to defeat but our own ghosts. All the comforts and certainties we have established on Earth over millennia are meaningless here.<br /><br />Will new dogmas arise in this environment? Will reason and science win out at long last? Can humankind survive when it is thrust back out into the wilds like this, to face its own solitude? In some science-fiction works, such as the Gundam series, humanity establishes colonies beyond Earth, followed by those worlds eventually turning against Earth, setting the stage for interplanetary conflict. In this scenario humanity would continue what the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians already did: nationalism, conquering and keeping the bright red flame of dogma burning as it is fed with more blood and more suffering.<br /><br /><br />Perhaps the biggest challenge for humanity is thus not whether it can establish a foothold beyond Earth and travel among the stars, but rather whether it can conquer its own internal needs and fears, to let go of this infantile desire for dogma, and to work up the courage to look up and see things for what they truly are. Even if it means abandoning comfortable self-deception.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-62778612514815208252022-01-23T14:09:00.003+01:002022-01-23T15:54:37.459+01:00The gendered brain myth and excusing sex-based discrimination<p> Everyone knows that women are more emotionally sensitive, while men have the emotional capacity of a turnip. It's also a common fact that men have better spatial awareness, can read maps unlike women, and this is then portrayed as an evolutionary left-over from our hunter-gatherer days. Back then, it is said, women would stay back at the camp to take care of the children while the men would take their grizzled selves out to take down more big prey.<br /><br />In many ways it's a comfortable fantasy, one which supports the current societal notion that men and women are simply different, and thus it is only natural to assume that they will have different interests and paths in life. While some changes here are noticeable - such as in most societies granting women personhood in the form of voting rights and not requiring a guardian to handle their affairs - the notion that a child is confronted with even before they are born is that men and woman are simply different.<br /><br />Although the generally less muscular nature of women is used with these arguments too, primary to this statement is that male and female brains are somehow 'different' (dimorphic). Essentially this is a modern-day version of phrenology, the once seriously considered pseudo-science that assumed that it could deduce anything of worth from a person's skull and related features. Phrenology supported everything from slavery (as non-Caucasians were deemed 'inferior') to the treatment of women as less than men, along with other pseudo-scientific views that excused what was essentially wide-scale discrimination against anyone born with female genitals.<br /><br /><br />Many years ago, I was indoctrinated in this way of thinking as well. All of these statements about how men and women were supposedly different rang true for me, even though neither I nor my brothers were raised in a gender-discriminating manner by our parents. It was just the way that the world supposedly worked. What changed my views there were the years that I spent dealing with the discovery of my intersex body, and coming to terms with the fact that my body was not as assumed previously male, but phenotypically primarily female. <br /><br />What did this mean for my brain? Based on what I had been told, and what I had grown up with, the assumption was that this meant that my brain had to be either male or female. For years I would struggle with this notion, while being reassured by psychologists and medical professionals that I just had to figure out whether I 'felt' more 'male' or 'female' so that I could decide on what my body should look like to match my brain's gender.<br /><br />The irony here is perhaps that while initially I translated my discomfort with my situation into the notion that I 'felt female', while having a male body, and even began hormone therapy to establish female hormone levels, at some point my body reasserted its own female hormone production and I was hurled straight into a proper female puberty. My 'male' body turned out to be a hermaphroditic intersex body, with naturally female phenotype and hormone levels. Some biochemical messages had apparently just been delayed by years.<br /><br /><br />When it came to figuring out the 'feeling' part, one of the biggest revelations came to me in the form of a study by Daphna Joel et al. (2015) [1], which examined the brains of male and female participants with an fMRI scanner to see whether in their brain activity any indications could be found of this purported 'male/female divide' within the human brain.<br /><br />As it turns out, they couldn't find any indication of this, with each individual brain forming its own unique mosaic of activity. Alongside my own experiences this completed the picture of each human being having their own unique brain, without any sign of dimorphism, together with a body that showed many degrees of variation as well.<br /><br /><br />Today's society still seems to insist on discriminating between individuals based on their genitals and presumed 'brain gender', with no sign of letting up on this practice. Yet as science shows, this is an outdated practice, with no basis in reality. Individuals are denied or granted privileges purely based on this presumed 'gender', and societal gender-based roles are the norm rather than the exception. All of which raises the question of just how far society has truly progressed since the first cries for equal rights for men and women.<br /><br />What was instructive for me here was how many years I could live as a 'male' in society with only the occasional bouts of confusion due to my more feminine build. When asserting a female identity, however, society's views and treatment of me as a female person changed noticeably, even though I did not. <br /><br />This raises the uncomfortable question of why society continues to discriminate between men and women, when in the end the only aspect that truly differs between them is their reproductive system and associated hormones. If that is the aspect that matters, then intersex people would necessarily be partially carved off into their own 'societal gender roles'. After all, where does a person like me with female hormone levels, but both male and female genitals fit in with?<br /><br />Any division made here that doesn't acknowledge people as their own person without segregation feels both unnatural and unethical.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468">https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468</a><br /><br /></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-35732608304617172522022-01-11T20:26:00.008+01:002022-01-11T20:26:46.992+01:00Getting a career back on track<p> There are those moments where you find yourself wondering what exactly it is that you're headed towards in your life. If the answer is 'not much', then that might explain some frustrations you're experiencing. Whether stuck in a dead-end job, or dealing with the fall-out from years of a tumultuous, traumatic life, the hardest but also most important step is to admit for yourself that you're not happy, and that you want things to change.<br /><br />What does it take to be happy? If I were to consider my own life the past few years, it would have to be about regaining a measure of control, instead of being tossed around passively like a piece of driftwood. Merely promising myself that things would suddenly change for the better through a project like NymphCast [1], or by having my autobiography published. Pinning your hopes on such things doesn't make you regain control of your life.<br /><br /><br />Of course, I will readily admit the things which I have learned from the NymphCast project. It's been a great lesson in project management and development on embedded systems, getting to know the intricacies of aligned memory access with the NymphRPC project [2] on ARM processors while implementing a zero copy optimisation. Also small things like creating a lock-free ring buffer implementation [3].<br /><br />Implementing service discovery in a more light-weight way than that offered by mDNS and kin in the form of NyanSD [4] taught me a lot about UDP broadcasting and provided NymphCast with a reliable, cross-platform way to discover NymphCast receivers, clients and media servers on the same network. Much like my experiences with the Nodate STM32 embedded C++ project [5], none of that was wasted time or effort, as it all gave me the opportunity to nurture my skills as a software developer.<br /><br /><br />When I left my previous job at the end of 2017, I literally travelled around the world for job interviews. I clearly was making a solid enough impression during the early (remote) tests. Where things would fall apart was always with the in-person interviews, and when I looked at some short videos I made of myself in late 2019, I understood why.<br /><br />The glassy, distant look in my eyes. The impression of someone who isn't really quite present in the here and now. Having had a few years now to work on this aspect, I think I'm doing much better now in that regard. As evidenced by the videos on my YouTube channel of the past years where I read the short stories I have written, I'm gradually learning to open up more and come to terms with the fact that I do have an actual body. Same with the way that I interact with people.<br /><br /><br />Of course, the past few years also have been a major confrontation with the traumatic experiences that I have been pushing ahead of me for many years now, including those involving my existence as an intersex person and what this fact means to me. I'd be a terrible liar if I said that any of this was easy to deal with, or that I'm done dealing with all of it.<br /><br />What I do know is that I'm doing much better than I did a few years ago, both physically and mentally. Also that I'm now at a point where I seriously have to seek the next steps in fixing up my life. This one involving my career.<br /><br /><br />Although as stated the projects which I have tinkered with the past few years have been and continue to be interesting and useful, in the end they are hobby projects. Great additions for my CV [6], of course, but you don't build a career and livelihood on top of a few hobby projects unless you're incredibly lucky.<br /><br />So, as a result I'll be actively seeking out new (remote) jobs the coming time that will allow me to expand my career and horizons, continuing my progress the past few years. No doubt it'll be anything but easy, what with the entire world currently (still) being on fire, but one has to start somewhere :)<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast">https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast</a><br />[2] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphRPC">https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphRPC</a><br />[3] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/LockFreeRingBuffer">https://github.com/MayaPosch/LockFreeRingBuffer</a><br />[4] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/NyanSD">https://github.com/MayaPosch/NyanSD</a><br />[5] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/Nodate">https://github.com/MayaPosch/Nodate</a><br />[6] <a href="http://www.mayaposch.com/cv.php">http://www.mayaposch.com/cv.php</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-24686729793149385742021-12-12T23:38:00.000+01:002021-12-12T23:38:07.086+01:00Whatever you do, don't look up<p> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Keep looking up.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-25269719444589692872021-12-06T14:41:00.000+01:002021-12-06T14:41:02.613+01:00A non-binary body is a body too<p> 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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-46181913532055165552021-11-01T22:20:00.005+01:002021-11-01T22:20:45.884+01:00On being accepted as a person<p> 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.<br /><br />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]<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer">https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-83602714967401013542021-10-11T22:11:00.005+02:002021-10-11T22:11:25.705+02:00The Cosmos from the perspective of a biochemical reaction with self-delusions<p> 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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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...<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />That history is still left for us and future generations to write.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-76432451446029155242021-09-21T13:24:00.001+02:002021-09-21T13:24:23.052+02:00In space nobody can hear your screamsDelete 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Just roll with it.<br /><br /><br />Stuff happens, water under the bridge, etc.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />You're not a bad person.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />What is your worth as a person?<br /><br /><br />To society?<br /><br /><br />Does society love you?<br /><br /><br />To yourself? <br /><br /><br />Do you love yourself?<br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Don't sweat the small stuff.<br /><br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />But do you love yourself?<br /><br /><br />Why silence your own voice, insignificant as it may seem?<br /><br /><br />You cannot expect kindness from society, but that's no reason not to be kind to yourself.<br /><br /><br />Maya<br /><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_Game">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_Game</a>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-82279193104265470362021-08-31T12:13:00.002+02:002021-08-31T12:13:17.950+02:00Why I should delete my personal blog<p> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Who cares about what your body is like, when all that matters is what you feel it should be like?<br /><br />Who cares about this 'intersex' thing, tell us whether you want to be male or female.<br /><br />We can make you into a beautiful woman.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-22442544579855507712021-08-22T17:54:00.002+02:002021-08-22T18:02:14.228+02:00On the health benefits of having a penis and the horrors of sexual obsessionsThe 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />So why is this not considered a viable research topic?<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/231574-overview">https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/231574-overview</a><br />[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urethra">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urethra</a><br />[3] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502976/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502976/</a><br />[4] <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/urinary-tract-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20353447">https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/urinary-tract-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20353447</a><br />[5] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457377/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457377/</a><br />[6] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinary_tract_infection">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinary_tract_infection</a>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-68951501311708363312021-08-15T23:13:00.001+02:002021-08-15T23:13:13.146+02:00Defining oneself by the things that do not matter<p> 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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-53234655961254237052021-08-08T18:06:00.005+02:002021-08-08T19:12:14.586+02:00Thoughts on getting vaccinated and the buffet of ignorance<p> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />Maya<br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/</a><br />[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems</a><br />[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate</a><br />[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect</a><br />[5] <a href="http://greenpeace-energy.de/">http://greenpeace-energy.de/</a><br />[6] <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy">https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy</a><br />[7] <a href="https://hackaday.com/2021/07/26/rna-therapeutics-and-fighting-diseases-by-working-with-the-immune-system/">https://hackaday.com/2021/07/26/rna-therapeutics-and-fighting-diseases-by-working-with-the-immune-system/</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-33641736814379243412021-07-30T11:47:00.004+02:002021-07-30T11:47:35.002+02:00On Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in your Eyes, death and control<p> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Death is the great equaliser, no matter your species.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Living desperately to ignore the spectre of one's death coming ever closer, this seems to be the overarching theme.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Here is to life, death and human genius and intellect.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-87200636915529081192021-07-07T22:03:00.001+02:002021-07-07T22:03:03.833+02:00Self-image versus reality<p> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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?<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />You can't escape yourself, I guess.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-53580440719352085782021-06-26T21:07:00.004+02:002021-06-26T21:07:19.065+02:00Race, religion, gender and the cruelty of segregation<p> 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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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'.<br /><br />What is your identity even?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-71116485347085833712021-06-20T20:27:00.005+02:002021-06-20T20:27:37.426+02:00On finding and acknowledging your own body<p> 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.<br /><br />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?'.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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). <br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-49975997269864989362021-06-08T14:11:00.000+02:002021-06-08T14:11:25.964+02:00We'll always have tomorrow<p>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.<br /><br />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...'.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />Standing at the grave, all that is left behind are silent memories and turbulent thoughts.<br /><br /><br />Farewell.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-42645688519515217222021-05-23T22:13:00.007+02:002021-05-23T22:13:52.276+02:00The Open Source model vs the Open Exploitation model<p>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Of course, the one question that is always true with 'free' is who ends up holding the bill in the end.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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].<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Or to cue the (in)famous line that artists hear too often when asked to create something: "You'll be paid in exposure!".<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://hackaday.com/2019/09/18/wiringpi-library-to-be-deprecated/">https://hackaday.com/2019/09/18/wiringpi-library-to-be-deprecated/</a><br />[2] <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/babel_money_woes/">https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/babel_money_woes/</a><br />[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collaboration">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collaboration</a><br />[4] <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/audacity_telemetry/">https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/audacity_telemetry/</a><br />[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy</a><br />[6] <a href="https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast/">https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast/</a><br />[7] <a href="https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/03/nymphcast-casual-attempt-at-open.html">https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/03/nymphcast-casual-attempt-at-open.html</a></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5851748514318788614.post-45141926418486849002021-05-20T10:32:00.001+02:002021-05-20T10:32:14.760+02:00Do you love yourself?<p></p><blockquote>Want ik hou van jou<br />is niet de sleutel tot de ander<br />maar ik hou van mij<br />al klinkt het bot en slecht<br />want wie van zichzelf houdt<br />die geeft pas echt iets kostbaars<br />als hij ik hou van jou<br />tegen een ander zegt</blockquote><blockquote>(Because 'I love you' <br />is not the key to the other<br />but 'I love myself'<br />even though it sounds bad and wrong<br />because those who love themselves<br />give something truly precious<br />if they say 'I love you'<br />to someone else)</blockquote><br />- <i>Harry Jekkers 'Ik hou van mij'</i> [1]<br /><br /><br />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?<br /><br />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]<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><i>Maya</i><br /><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="https://www.songteksten.nl/songteksten/40786/harrie-jekkers/ik-hou-van-mij.htm">https://www.songteksten.nl/songteksten/40786/harrie-jekkers/ik-hou-van-mij.htm</a><br />[2] <a href="https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/07/altruism-is-anathema-to-humanism.html">https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/07/altruism-is-anathema-to-humanism.html</a><p></p>Maya Poschhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01747916275364501887noreply@blogger.com1