Who do you want to be when you grow up?

Identity is an interesting concept. We like to think of ourselves as individuals, as singular entities with identities (personalities) that are unique and unchangeable. This means that as a child, we only get asked what we would want to be when we grow up. Which mostly just means what kind of job you'd be most interested in. This changes over time as our personalities develop and change.

In the end one's identity is composed out of the memories one has collected over the years, combined with one's experiences. Having presumably learned from one's mistakes and successes, and having made note of what worked for others, one will have changed one's behaviour to become more efficient and presumably happier.

Yet the question that rarely gets asked of children is who they want to be when they grow up. What kind of person, do they favour kindness and empathy over a colder, more business-like approach to others? Some of this is in obviously covered in the kind of job they profess interest for, but I imagine it would be enlightening to address this more directly. Not just for children either.

Even as a child I'd be wrestling with lots of questions about life, and found a willing person to bounce such thoughts off in my mum. She had gone through plenty of less pleasant experiences in her life, starting off with physical abuse in her childhood years, and essentially surviving through a less than welcoming family. Those are the types of experiences which force one already as a child to take a few steps back and really look at people.


As for what person I wanted to be when I grow up, I always felt strongly that being fair to others was essential, and to demand in return that they would treat me and others fairly as well. This meaning that you'd not steal, lie, discriminate or otherwise act in a negative way towards others. Mostly because it does not make sense to act negatively towards others. In the end it just creates this self-perpetuating system of negativity and hatred that will hurt countless people.

Even the experience of getting sexually abused as a young child does not seem to have affected that conviction. Yes, it is necessary to accept and understand that oneself was not to blame for what happened, but to realise that it was the person or persons who did this to you deserve all the blame. That does not mean that you should hate those people, however. To carry hatred in one's heart only affects oneself.

I have always found a lot of inspiration in the saying that 'the best way to take revenge is by living a good life'. That to me summarises the breaking of the chain of negativity. By countering something negative with something positive, you both end up living a much better life by spending that energy on something productive, and the person responsible for the negativity that made you suffer is put off-balance by not getting the expected response, as well as having to watch you ignore them and living that good life.


In the end it's about light, air and joy. A self-perpetuating cycle of happiness, honesty and progress towards a better future for all. It's all about the person one wishes one to become, both as a child and as an adult. We can be that change.

Be optimistic, do give that compliment you thought would be awkward to say, don't be afraid to make a fool of yourself by helping out that person at the busy train station who is wrestling with a suitcase, dare to smile at a child and drop the mask of adulthood. It are the small things that make the world move.


Maya

Gender dysphoria and body identity dysphoria

Back in early 2005 I found myself watching a documentary on Discovery Channel on the topic of body identity dysphoria (BID) [1]. It followed this young woman who spent much of her time looking for a surgeon who would amputate her legs. Not because she had any medical problems, but simply because it felt 'right' to her to not having legs. She could recall seeing this person in a wheelchair as a child, with that person having the same kind of amputation as she ended up seeking for herself years later.

Not long after watching that documentary I found myself dealing with first the suspicion of me being transgender, quickly followed by the growing realisation that I had to be intersex. The memories of watching those BID sufferers faded to the background, until recently, when I found myself considering BID again, this time in the context of gender dysphoria and similar disorders.

Briefly put, BID is the desire to have invasive surgery performed on one's body in order to amputate healthy body parts, or to lose parts of one's body's functionality. The source of this desire appears to be in the brain's view of the body, with the functionality or parts that are deemed undesirable falling outside of this mapping.

For BID sufferers amputation or induced paralysis appears to be the only real solution, as ethically convoluted this solution may be. This is similar to with gender dysphoria (GD), where those affected will describe a strong desire to have their genitals removed, along with many other characteristics of their body. So-called sex-reassignment surgery involves the removal of one's existing genitals, and the surgical creation of a facsimile approximation of the opposite sex's genitals.

In both cases the hope is that by giving in to the desire for surgical interference, the psychological suffering will cease, and the person can live a normal life again. In the case of BID, the suffering can increase to the point where the person will self-amputate. Both BID and GD are very real forms of suffering, without a clear solution, or cause.


Looking back on the past fourteen years that I spent dealing with my intersex condition, I can see the many choices that I had to make in order to find myself. Most strongly of all, I can see the weird medical attitude towards BID, GD and intersex cases.

With the first, there's little inclination by doctors to assist surgically. With the second it's becoming easier and easier to the point where even children can apply, and with the third 'normalisation' surgery is forced on unwilling intersex individuals - including infants - but actual medical help is not available.

I consider myself fortunate to not have any kind of dysphoria or medical disorder. Yet I'm not blind to the horrific irony that while BID and GD require intense psychological and medical attention and are met with guarded caution, the medical approach towards intersex is one of overly enthusiastic surgical intervention.

With intersex there's no protocol, real-life test, psychological evolution or the like. Nobody will weigh the ethics of chopping up the genitals of an intersex infant, or ask whether it's proper to subject an adult intersex person like myself to psychological pressure to undergo 'normalisation' surgery and to be repeatedly told that I am not capable of making decisions myself, that I should rely on the doctors.

With BID and GD individuals are born with a problem. With intersex individuals are born without a problem, but have problems created for them.

I wish all three groups could get the help that they need.


Maya


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

My big talk on intersex next week

Next week here in Karlsruhe, Germany, the 18th installment of the so-called Gulaschprogrammiernacht (Goulash Programming Night, GPN18) [1] will kick off on Thursday with a large number of talks and workshops over its four day duration [2]. For this year I also submitted a talk, which got accepted [3]. I'll be holding that talk on Friday the 11th.

Not a big shocker is that this talk will be on intersex, but not just that topic. My goal with this talk is to let people see how being intersex gradually became a part of my life, with technology - and particularly the internet - allowing me to stay more or less sane throughout the whole ordeal that would follow after the initial discovery. I'll be holding the talk in English, and it will be recorded for later public viewing as well [4].

In some ways holding a talk like this is more difficult than just going on a live talkshow with millions watching. With the latter you can just wobble into the studio, act all cool, respond to the questions of the host(s) with flair and grace, get that standing ovation and wobble out of the studio again while feeling pretty good about yourself. Oh, and the make-up session beforehand. Love those.

When you do your own talk, it is you who has to prepare everything, plan the time, schedule and ready any images, slides and other materials. And then improvise nearly an hour of chattering about a really big topic without tripping up, technical issues, stuttering, awkwardness or sudden unscheduled rapid descents off any stairs or platforms.

So basically I'll be totally fine :)


Only thing which I'm not really looking forward to is receiving the judgement on the (baseless) eviction case against me on Wednesday. Things like that do not really help improve one's mood, to be honest. My hope there is that it's not such a bad judgement, so that I can take a relieved feeling to the talk on Friday, along with a positive result from the next chat with someone from Amazon earlier next week.

I can kind of picture this as my last hurrah in Germany before I declare my efforts to receive medical care as an intersex person a loss and move on to greener pastures with a new job, advancing my career and possibly building up those crucial contacts I need to sort out the last remaining issues from my life as a nobody.

Would make for a great film, at least.

*Scribbles down some notes for her autobiography~*


Maya



[1] https://entropia.de/GPN18
[2] https://pretalx.entropia.de/gpn18/schedule/
[3] https://pretalx.entropia.de/gpn18/talk/SZMAYU
[4] https://media.ccc.de/

In the days that remain to each of us

Form is nothingness. Nothingness is form. All that has colour and shape will one day disappear.

Such is the inevitability of mortality and the progression of time, whether it concerns a flower, a human being or even a mountain. The celebration of life is simultaneously the acknowledgement of death. In this the only distinguishing thing is how each of us self-aware beings handle the briefness of our existence.

To simply ignore it; to submerge oneself into the shallowness of human societies, to perhaps accept that life cannot accept without death. This is one way. It is also a way which forbids the questioning of one's own mortality and along with it the very definition of one's self. What's mortal about us are our bodies. What will vanish one day is that which is material. All that which has colour and shape will one day return to nothingness.

The simple conclusion I drew as a child when I found myself struggling with the inevitability of my own death, was to realise this simple truth. While my body as it exists today will die - just as it is busy dying every single second - that part of me which is actually 'me', being my memories and the resulting personality, is not bound to this body or even this particular brain.

Essentially my conclusion back then was that immortality is merely a technological and scientific challenge. It was this realisation which drove me so strongly over the past decades to pursue software and hardware development, quantum physics, classical physics, biology, artificial intelligence and many more topics which would likely prove to be useful at some point during this project.


There is not, and cannot be, any forced decision in such a matter of whether one seeks to embrace mortality or to reject it. I know many people who are vehemently opposed against the idea of immortality, as it clashes with their perception of the world as they know it. Yet similarly, I know many others who share my view. People who can see beyond these mortal shells and perceive what truly makes us who we are.

In all of this there is an inherent tragedy: much as it has throughout human history, the concept of free choice has been mostly a bald-faced lie. To have free choice one needs to be simultaneously capable of reasoning, be in possession of the relevant facts and be free to act upon the conclusion one reaches. As far as I can perceive, the embracing of mortality is to give up on one's humanity, to allow oneself to be extinguished.


We only have the briefest of moments on this planet, in this universe. A moment during which we must either choose our destiny or to let others choose it for us either through us relinquishing the choice or by having it forcefully denied to us. Even if we had a full hundred years to dedicate ourselves to the question of whether we would embrace immortality, or accept nothingness, it is doubtful many of us could reach a conclusion during that time.

Is one truly happy living less than a decade, or is it just what we tell ourselves? Is to face the prospect of sudden death or a slow, painful death through disease or age something which truly makes us into who we are? Would we lose something important if we could live century after century, millennium after millennium with nary a care for such mortal matters?


My personal view on this is that such matters only concern a mortal body and by abandoning such worries the mind can be freed to pursue the exploration of the universe and all the knowledge it contains in earnest. I am firmly convinced that the only way to better, maybe even save humanity is through immortality.

Yet as stated earlier this is not a decision which can be forced upon anyone. Just as those who embrace mortality shall not judge those who embrace immortality, the same is true in reverse. It would hurt to see some lives be extinguished, but in the end a truly free choice has to be respected.

That is one of the things which makes us human, after all.


Maya

Awkwardly non-binary in a binary world

Sometimes I picture what my life will be like once I'm free of all this medical nonsense that's still going on. I'd finally be able to just be myself, which I guess is a hermaphroditic human being with many interests and hobbies. While I can see how these interests and hobbies will fit into my future, my future as 'just' a hermaphrodite feels far less defined.

It's not really until one stops defining oneself as being part of either side that it becomes so painfully obvious how incredibly binary society is. It's an indoctrination which starts before a child is even more, with the strict subdivision into 'boy' and 'girl', which are then morphed into 'man' and 'woman'. Cases of transsexuality are thereby regarded as a momentary discomfort before the affected person comfortably settles again into either category.

Not so for us hermaphrodites. We're clearly neither male nor female. Never felt like a 'boy' or 'girl', let alone a 'man' or 'woman'. Yet every time we go to a public toilet, swimming pool and so on we have to confront ourselves with the same question of which category we feel we belong the most to.

Admittedly I prefer mostly to stick to the female side in such matters, as evidenced by my general appearance, my classification as 'female' in my passport, as well as a further preference for things which one generally would refer to as 'feminine'. Yet the question I have to ask here is why many of these things are classified as 'feminine' to begin with.

When the 'masculine' side of the fence is mostly characterised by a severe lack in clothing options, a strict dismissal of make-up, the frowning upon of body care and basically only restrictions in comparison with the 'feminine' side, then one is left wondering whether society isn't just completely deluding itself on this matter.


As a hermaphrodite I am decidedly not binary. I have the primary and some secondary sexual characteristics of both 'men' and 'women', even though I am infertile on either side. In daily life I can generally pass for a regular woman, but there are many situations where I am painfully confronted with the fact that I am not part of this society.

The few times that I have shared a dressing room at a pool with others, it was always the women's side. Yet I'm not just a woman, and I do not want to attract attention, or worse have to explain my physical condition to a crowd of half-naked women while trying to squeeze into a bathing suit. It's pretty much the sole reason why I have avoided saunas since forever.

Maybe it would be better if I were to just ignore the binary partitioning of society. Just get changed in a shared women's room at the swimming pool, and share a sauna with a mixed company without a worry in the world. Maybe.

It's just hard to feel welcome in a world where one's existence is virtually never acknowledged, but where this sex binary is blasted at one from every direction, every waking moment.


Where do I see myself, years from now? Happy with my body, I hope. Maybe even sharing my life at that point with a wonderful woman, fellow hermaphrodite or similar.  Maybe society in that time period will have become less binary, or maybe I will have moved to a non-Western country where a binary way of thinking is less ingrained into society.

Here's to feeling less awkward about merely existing.


Maya

Happiness is a memory

Yesterday I again talked with my mother via video chat as we regularly do. This time we once more touched upon my youth and the many happy moments in there. Even though there was the bullying and harassment, as well as other unpleasantness at school, at home things were generally positive. Or at least most of the memories I have of that time are positive.

My love for nature, biology, science and technology can be traced back to those early years of my life. Growing up on a dairy farm, surrounded by the reality of animal husbandry as well as early personal computers thanks to my father who used the latter for his accounting while also encouraging my brothers and me to use these computers and eventually the internet.

Together with my younger brother I developed a love for classical video games, both on video game consoles and on the PC. To me most of these years have anything negative which may have happened during that time more than cancelled out by positive experiences.


To then look back at the time since then and see, as well as feel, my struggles since then. Not having a real home for more than a decade and counting. Struggling to make some sense of a body I no longer understood. Dealing with a world which simply does not understand me, yet seems to be intent on punishing me physically, psychologically and financially for who and what I am.

At this moment in time I am living in an apartment where I am totally unhappy, with its owner hating my guts while not bothering to fix fundamental problems in the place. That horrific 'justice' system in the Netherlands still seeks to punish me financially for having the nerve to break down completely after years of psychological and physical torture, not to mention medical neglect. I'm also inching towards what may become the most crucial surgery in my life, all while dealing with resurging traumatic memories of the past decades.

I generally do not feel that I live in quite the same world as people around me any more. Maybe it's just that I have seen and experienced too much, but it feels more as if I am drifting alongside all of these people scurrying around, doing their thing, while I can only feel a sense of despair and emptiness at this sight.

Inside I feel fundamentally unhappy and broken. After more than a decade I have had to long since admit that I won't ever live in a place again where I will feel comfortable enough to really call it a home. A broken down hovel suffices for the likes of me. I only can do things any more if they have some kind of long-term goal, something which will help me live forever, learn everything, and so on. For anything less than that just feels meaningless and empty.

Except when it involves something which reminds me of those scarce happy memories. Allowing myself to sink back into those recollections for a little while, to return to that time when life seemed a whole lot brighter and less terrifying than it turned out to be.

As happiness is a memory, suffering is the dystopian present and future.


I wonder at what point I took the wrong pill...


Maya

Living in a sex-crazed world

Among humans there is the strong and wistful belief that we are different from and better than the other animals around us. This belief includes the assumption that we are in control of our animalistic urges and desires, and are able to apply logic and reason instead to our actions. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Instead of eating when we are hungry, supplying our bodies with the essential nutrients and calories it needs, and ensuring that we get sufficient exercise, we instead tend to eat too much, of the wrong types of food and seem to lack any kind of awareness of how we harm our bodies.

Instead of applying reason and logic to our interactions with fellow human beings, we are less members of a civilised society and more merely tribes of chimpanzees, screaming at 'the others', throwing rocks at them and plundering, pillaging and raping other tribes whenever we get the opportunity.

Instead of realising that sexuality is still an unfortunate remnant of our animal origins and adapt it into society in a way which lets us perpetuate our tragically mortal species - yet not disturb society's civilised fabric - we instead opt to let it control our behaviour and society in a way which makes us seem like raving lunatics.

All of this lunatic behaviour is displayed grotesquely throughout our cities, on our broadcasts and consumed with abundance by the populace. From food which may as well be poison, to the obese rich and starving poor, to endless conflict, to the selling of one's body and a complete obsession with sex. It is by any measurement a hedonistic society, through and through.

While some would go on to blame certain types of government, economical systems and what not, there is only one factor in all of this which deserves the full focus of every shred of blame. This being humans themselves. Our disgustingly gorged and profusely malodorous overestimation of our own self-worth makes it utterly impossible for us to perceive our own lack of humanity.

We're a society of base animals. Any accomplishments we greedily attribute to humanity and its wondrous nature are in fact accomplished by the few who manage to rise above their animalistic nature.

Seeing humanity in its naked form is frankly revulsing. Its buildings and other structures are filled with the groans, screams and other exclamations by rutting and fighting individuals. Whatever sense of beauty may arise out of its dark, festering pools is quickly obscured by the stark despair of humanity's endless enmity, strife and pursuit of base urges.

This, however, is apparently the best we will have for a long time to come.


Maya

Death, reproduction and a body

Death is a fascinating thing to think about. The terminating of an existence. A consciousness which is cut off and which will as of that point no longer exist. An existence which no longer is. The realisation of just what a body is: a fragile vessel for electromagnetic impulses which comprise that which we refer to as ourselves.

I remember how as a child this realisation initially upset me; the thought of everything I saw around me being mostly just window dressing for what was really going on, and the perturbing notion of everything being far less solid than imagined. My own existence being consequently of far less note than I had once assumed.

Much of these musings go back to the central question of what it means to be human. As many around me see fit to reproduce as if that's the natural thing to do at that point - which it definitely is from a biological point of view - I find myself confronted once again with such questions.

I am incapable of reproducing, due to how I was born. My own existence in itself being very lucky in a sense since most pregnancies involving a hermaphroditic embryo never carry to term, instead suffering a spontaneous abortion as the body recognises that something has gone wrong with the pregnancy. Whether or not I was born never mattered from a reproductive point of view. That's a weird thought.

I am capable of dying. Theoretically at least. There's nothing to be gained by dying, ergo I will not embrace or accept it, as most seem to do. I do not think that dying is in any way related to being human. On the contrary. I have tried to die before, and failed. I know what lies down that path.

So far I have spent what will likely be roughly a third of my life on largely nonsense, being the dealings with the most regressive, conservative and closed-minded elements of the medical community, not to mention that of humanity as a whole. Two-thirds, or less, remain.

The clock is ticking. What will it be? What will I do? Can't reproduce. Don't want to accept death.

What does it mean to be human?

What are my options?

What will I do?


Maya

Dreaming an imaginary reality into existence

Reality is an interesting word. With it we mean to say that something is real and tangible, meaning that it has real, physical effects upon the world around us. Yet not all of reality is real. Large parts of it are fully imaginary, existing only within the minds of those who are alive.

Imagine yourself and all of your goals for this life. What did you want to become when you were a child, then a teenager, then when you graduated university? How did life's hardships change you? How did you learn about all of those options in life, and how did all of those bad things happen to you?

The simple answer is: people.

More elaborately put, despite having no tangible form or proof of their existence beyond a temporary series of bursts of neuronal activity within a person's brain, thoughts are something which aren't real, yet can make things become reality.

That thoughts aren't real in the sense that they have no definite existence - let alone any reason or explanation for existing beyond being a curious characteristic of certain collections of specialised cells - should be fairly obvious. Thoughts aren't matter. They aren't energy. Matter and energy are what allows them to exist and gives them shape, but beyond that they are as immaterial as anything can be.

Thoughts are essentially a reality beyond reality. It is very reminiscent of an aspect of Hinduism, where a force - Maya - exists which allows the souls of people to dream into being their own section of reality, thus forming the reality of the world we see around us.

In such a world everyone's interpretation of reality would thus also affect other dreamers, transferring onto them impressions and thoughts of alternate realities. This is something we see all around us. From the moment we are born, we are being assaulted with such impressions, suggestions and, at times, more forceful coercion. Sometimes we are even forced to partake in another person's reality, which may traumatically alter our own reality.

A theory exists which describes this transferring of such impressions between individuals as the transferring of 'memes', basically ideas or suggestions which may or may not take hold in the receiving ('infected') person's mind. This theory closely mirrors viral theory, in that the effectiveness of a meme is directly related to how infectious it is, i.e. how many individuals it can infect and how long it can persist in a population.

Examples of successful meme viruses mostly pertain to themes such as 'spirituality' and 'greed', both of which have an easy time due to these being fundamental, neurological weaknesses of the human mind. Upon a successful meme infection, the subject may recover after some time, or not at all. The practice of brainwashing is an example of the forceful application of memes until the natural resistance of the victim breaks down and infection can occur.

All of this comes down to the transient nature of reality once one moves beyond the basics of physical matter and energy. In the past I have referred to the human mind as being 'its own reality', and I think that this statement is more true than I had assumed. Within humanity, with so many minds interacting with each other through primitive means, each respective interpretation and formation of reality meshes with those of the people around it.

Within the philosophy of Buddhism, an individual being is not perceived as a static, unchanging entity, but as an ever-changing, ever-shifting entity, shedding every part of itself over time. Change is what will drive an entity to perfection, until the moment of the full realisation of reality, known as enlightenment.

Yet change is also full of danger. With each individual, each entity out there subject to constant meme infection which can drive it to harm itself as well as others, it is reminiscent of basic evolutionary survival theory, as if observing generations of bacteria trying to survive in a hostile environment.

To be successful one has to learn to separate memes from reality. Fact from fiction. Those who cannot do so will fall into the same traps and meet either a violent or exceedingly dull end. Those who do survive will find that it is still a long way to enlightenment, for the difference between dreaming reality and living reality is larger than the universe itself.


Maya

The ethics of copying the soul

While recently watching another hapless victim play through the video game SOMA, and watch them struggle with the range of ethical questions this game enjoys throwing at the player, I had a few more thoughts on these dilemmas offered. As usual, the caveats about spoilers and such for those who haven't played this game yet apply. Otherwise feel free to read on.

The main dilemma the player in SOMA is presented with is basically the definition of 'I' and whether this definition of a 'self' can or has to be unique. Basically what the implications are of scanning a person's brain and copying its personality, memories and other qualities to a new host.

In one scene, the player is told that he has to transfer into a new body. Since the player's avatar at that point is already known to be a computer running a brain scan of a once-living person, the assumption is made that one can just 'move' this scan onto the new body's neural chip. After the process finishes, however, the avatar realises to his horror that after 'waking up' in the new body, 'he' is also still in the old body.

The dissonance caused by this situation has to do with the fact that at that point in time, there are now two instances of what either instance will perceive to be themselves. Each of us is used to there being just a singular 'I' at any given point in time. This dissonance can be observed already with (identical) twins, and how their environment responds to them. With how important identity is to most, people become confused, even angry, as they fail to distinguish between which twin is which 'instance'.

Twins themselves deal with this fairly easily because to them it's obvious that this other person who looks identical to them isn't 'them', but still very similar and thus also very familiar. This usually creates a much tighter bond than between more dissimilar individuals, exactly due to this fundamental familiarity and mutual understanding.

So what is it that causes many players in the aforementioned scene to make use of this option to terminate their old body and with it their other 'self'? One justification to terminate their own body's functions is that this body and thus the person inside it is trapped inside a facility filled with monsters, so termination is the 'humane' option. One could argue here that this takes away the right to decide over one's fate. What seems humane to some is thus still murder.

Worse, it dodges the basic moral and ethical question being asked over and over again: what is life, and when is it worth preserving? Throughout the game one is presented with a wide variety of situations, including a person whose mind is trapped inside a robot, but who can still communicate, to a real human being who is being kept alive while injured, but you need to tap into the system that keeps her alive in order to proceed in the game.

At each point you can quite literally just pull the plug, turning off life support, or disconnecting or discharging their power supply. Basically you are asked 'would you terminate this existence?', and at each point you have the choice to either kill that person, or leave them as they were while going on your merry way.

This repeated question becomes the most poignant when this question gets asked about what you saw until just shortly before as your own body and self. Would you kill yourself if you knew that afterwards there would be just one copy of you in existence? What makes you more worthy of being alive than this other... person?

With the ending of SOMA, the game superbly highlights the intense hypocrisy of those who decide to terminate the existence of others - including their old self - as an act of mercy. As a copy of the avatar's mind and his companion make it onto the escape vehicle and towards salvation, the previous copy - himself also a copy - stays behind in the hell which his other self just escaped. The response is one of outrage, anger and of feeling betrayed. There's no sense that it is all right now, that this copy is all that matters.

What this indicates is that a copy of a person is unique onto itself, just like how two identical twins are still unique individuals, despite their similarities. They still got their own wishes, feelings and desires. Given enough time their experiences and memories will diverge sufficiently that both copies are no longer copies, but as unique as if they grew merely up as siblings.

This fear of it somehow being 'wrong' to have two diverging copies of a person's mind is however what drives many characters in the game to extreme measures. Basically at the moment that their brain scan completes, they will kill themselves, thus ensuring that there is only version of 'them', and no diverging. Just the perfect brain scan from which they can continue as their whole, uncorrupted self. This then touches upon the belief that a human is merely human due to this mystical property called a 'soul'.

Having two diverging copies would then somehow violate this principle, as it should not be possible to make a copy of a person's soul, at least if many holy scriptures are to be believed.

The interesting thing hereby is of course that nobody can then exactly explain where souls come from, or how the whole mechanics would work. Like, if a couple produces a child, does this child get a brand new soul, or a used one? Is there some massive stock of brand new souls awaiting population rise? Is a new soul created from partial copies of both parent's souls? And of course, how could one copy something that is supposed to be completely immeasurable? Shouldn't a brain scan fail to produce a viable copy? Many questions lie along this path.

Back in what at least most would assume to be reality, I think that the view of parenthood and offspring might be the most viable way to look at the production of copies of a person, as in that it is essentially creating offspring through asexual reproductive means. Much like how a bacterium can split itself into two and have both identical copies go on their way afterwards without missing a beat.

In this view, to then terminate the old instance, the one which essentially allowed you - the new instance - to be created, is then akin to patricide or matricide, i.e. the murdering of one's parent.

Everything taken together, I must say that this one video game brings an incredible amount of material to the table on which one can philosophise for a very long time. Yet the intriguing thing here is that one day all of these questions may become highly pertinent, nay essential. One day people will copy themselves to a new body and order the old body to be destroyed, or similar. We do not know what the future brings exactly, but we do know that sci-fi like this has a tendency to become more real than some may want.

Would you kill your original?


Maya

The transient nature of reality

In a sense every location is its own version of reality. This is especially true within human societies, where travelling from one place to another can change what is and isn't so completely, that one might as well have moved to another planet. With different habits, different food, different sense of morals and ethics, not to mention often a different language, it's a different reality indeed.

Next month it'll be two years since I moved to Germany. At this point I can speak the language reasonably well, and in general I feel that everything here around me is 'normal'. The language, the habits, and so on. It's gotten to the point where I will refer to myself as a German citizen in conversations with my mother and others who do not live here. It just feels natural to do so.

The sense of feeling 'home' is an interesting concept, though. When something feels 'normal', it doesn't necessarily mean that one also feels at home. Thinking back to the past decades - except for when I still was a child - pretty much the entire time that I spent in the Netherlands was one of feeling lost and without a home.

Too many times I would find myself during that time in a train carriage or similar, feeling as if my life was just that: a transient moving between locations with me just there as observer. Gazing outside at the shifting landscape, while the garbled, distorted voices of my fellow travellers formed the background noise to this scene.

Only since I came to Germany have I felt something change there. It's not just the mere fact of having a fun, well-paying job, but also the interest and respect I receive from people here, from my employer to friends and even my family doctor. I never had any of that before.

All of this is a form of... solidity which I cannot quite remember experiencing before. For someone like me, who has moved throughout the Netherlands and the world almost constantly for a decade, the thought that maybe I do not have to live as a transient person is an almost alien and incomprehensible thought to entertain.

Verily, it's been a dream of mine for many years to have just this one house where I could live, do all my hobbies and entertain friends and family there as well. Just... normal, boring stuff. No nonsense about being special, dealing with supposed medical experts or having to fight with organisations and government instances just to be able to merely exist.

My life has become decidedly more boring. Less transient, I guess. Yet part of me still feels like it's stuck in that train carriage: just gazing at the shifting landscape outside while the garbled, distorted voices of my fellow travellers mesh together in an incomprehensible mockery of normalcy.


Maya

On the sense and nonsense of dating profiles

Occasionally I am reminded of the fact that years ago I created a profile on a well-known dating site. Usually this happens when I get a message from some stranger commenting on something on my profile, someone who just wants to chat, as well as the usual pointless comments by men, usually asking questions which are answered in the profile text. I cannot say that creating this profile has brought me much. Aside from one date with a girl years ago it's been mostly languishing in obscurity.

When I recently got this message from a girl asking whether I'd be interested in a threesome with her boyfriend I had to seriously question why I keep such a profile around when I begin to get such inane spam. Main point being that my profile on this site clearly lists me as a) a woman, and b) only interested in other women. Yet this fact alone seems to elude most visitors to the profile. Only thing which keeps me from deleting the profile outright are the occasional nice messages I receive. And maybe the faint hope that maybe I'll meet my True Love this way.

Of course, one seriously has to question the point of a dating profile when one belongs to - to put it bluntly - a small minority. For the average heterosexual or even bisexual person it's easy pickings. Filtering through the noise of heterosexual chatter is a fairly daunting task, however. And that that's all before one gets to the actual filtering which takes place prior to even selecting a suitable match.

First there is the whole nonsense cliche of 'only the person matters'. Anyone who has even an inkling of reason should be able to see that the very first thing which matters is whether or not the other party matches up with the pre-programmed part of one's brain which indicates whether said party has a suitable configuration of reproductive and related organs. After that pre-programmed and societal norms for fitness and beauty filter this result even further.

Only after this lengthy pre-selection process can one begin to criticise a person as just that: a person. Of course, to many this is also the 'optional' section of finding a mate, as their genes and society have clearly marked this match as being acceptable. Cue the high-school-style relationship dramas.

Taking all of this into account, I realize that my initial filtering leaves only lesbian and bisexual women, filtered on Very Secret criteria for beauty and such fluff. In end effect, with only a few percent of the population as input, this filtering leaves a fairly marginal number of individuals. Since I'm also fairly picky about the personality of someone I'd have to spend more than a considerable amount of time with, this list will then dwindle even further, until my chances of winning every lottery in the world simultaneously start looking pretty darn good.

Naturally, only then do I remember that I'm just a cynical bastard who doesn't even believe in love and who will most likely live out her days in solitude. Not like I'd wish to inflict sharing my life upon someone else, anyway. That having a dating profile is practically an exercise in futility seems like a pretty small issue in comparison.

Thus I conclude that keeping this dating profile around is merely an expression of cynicism and indication of the whole futility of the dating business. I'm okay with that.


Maya

I'm a selfish person

A number of years ago a former classmate from high school sent me a friend request on a (now dead) social network so that she could get back into touch with me. We chatted a bit, then for a number of days nothing really happened. I was living my own life, she hers. Then I got a message from her telling me that she would be removing me from her friends list. Her reasoning was that my posts (mostly links to my blog) were upsetting to her, and I hadn't even bothered to comment on or congratulate her with her new baby.

This was hardly an isolated incident either. People breaking off contact with me seems to be about on par for the course. Whether it's just posting my blog updates, people finding out about my intersex condition (at least one guy really got angry at me for that one), my suicide attempt a few years back (people don't like suiciders much), or simply my apparent lack of interest in their lives. The reasons are legion. So are the accusations.

Some of the fancier things I have been called include 'selfish', 'self-absorbed', 'obsessed', 'crazy', 'health freak' and 'emotionless'. After the most recent occurrence of this I have been really giving this a great deal of thought in order to put together a coherent thought on this without having to resort to either apologizing, a counter-accusation, or plain grand-standing.

The main thought I ended up with is that yes, I am in fact pretty darn selfish. The thought immediately preceding that is that I have a pretty good reason to be selfish, as this is another way one could refer to the act of surviving.

From spending roughly fifteen miserable years trapped in a body and mind neither of which I could comprehend, to find out that I was deceived about my true nature, only to end up in a prolonged war with the world's physicians, with both sides battling over the question of which organs I actually have, meanwhile having to suffer countless attempts at brainwashing me into believing that I was something I totally am not, countless humiliating physical examinations and the outright conclusions by the hostile side that I was just plain freakin' crazy.

This placed against the wonderful background of my parents divorcing, moving around half the Netherlands, then to Canada for a short while and back again, until finally permanently fleeing my country of birth in the hope that with that I'd at least have escaped the worst hell that way.

Any trust I had in humanity has been shattered. I feel relieved when someone ends up not betraying me. I am exulted when I get through an event without anything negative occurring. I rejoice when I do not feel like harming this horrific body of mine in any way or form for a day. I am amazed when I honestly feel like I do not wish to die if given the choice. Most of my days are filled with the grim realisation that people around me are out to get me, even as I struggle through the haze of false emotions flooding forth from my traumas.

I have said it many times before: I cannot interact well with others on a social level. Superficially, yes. After that, however, it requires me to do more than just emulate an emotional side and that's where the incredibly pain inside of me will come out. I noticed this most recently when I was just talking to a colleague who asked after the results of this MRI scan I had recently. Even trying to just keep things formal and keep any details, let alone emotions out of it, I noticed just how much I was struggling to contain the overwhelming amount of emotions I keep locked away. I'm sure she noticed it as well. I felt miserable for hours afterwards.

So yes, I am selfish. Fortunately there are many who understand this, such as my mother who has gone through her own traumas growing up. Also my best friend and others around the world but also here in the city. They understand the pain inside of me, whether through their own experiences, empathy, or both. They understand what I'm going through. That I'm still merely surviving, and that I just need the support they can give me while I keep fighting for my life. That even if I cannot give back the friendship and care they offer today, that I will not forget their kindness.

If wanting to live instead of surrendering to the inevitable makes me into a selfish person, then by all means, call me selfish. Why should I care about what they think of my life anyway?


Maya

I would love thee, but for the hole in my heart

As a pre-teen, still stuck in primary school, I was convinced that this one girl - who was both a neighbour and classmate - simply had to be 'mine'. I don't know why I thought like that if it involved any reasoning at all. All I can remember is having agonized thoughts over what if she didn't like me, who at that time was still this hugely awkward boy. Even now, many years later I still feel ashamed for having such possessive thoughts towards another human being.

Worse is that it pains me to still occasionally have such thoughts, although it's then usually accompanied with a kind of longing towards a life filled with warmth and shared joys. I'm not naive enough to think that any such things can be found in a relationship with another person. Yet despite this knowledge it still hurts me to see couples, especially when it are two girls holding hands. It's hard to escape the hold the mind's whispered promises hold over one's conscious mind.

As a scientific person I'm quite aware of how the whole bio- and neurochemistry around physical attraction and procreation works. Even before we are born, each and everyone of us is in theory primed and ready to be manipulated by our own genes and mind. From the physical sex we are attracted to, to what we seek in a partner to procreate with, to the mechanisms which make us claim, defend and lash out at a mate. Not to mention the mechanisms which physically alter our brains to ensure that we are imprinted on our offspring and become happy to sacrifice ourselves for them, far beyond the bounds of what is reasonable.

Free choice is largely an illusion. Our subconscious mind is most adapt at manipulating the conscious mind without it being aware of it. Genes, bio- and neurochemistry all conspire against us. And our reward? Liberal applications of neurotransmitters which make us feel really fuzzy, warm and good about ourselves. We are little different from those rats in experiments which get trained to press a lever to get a pleasing jolt to the reward center in their brain.

Many are seemingly quite okay with this situation, happy to be in essence a slave of their own genes and mind. They feel happy, so why resist? It's not like it's harming anyone, after all.

Where this clashes with the consciousness is where one desires more out of life than to simply be a slave. It's not dissimilar in this regard compared to the dark chapter in humanity's history of widespread slavery. As slavery stood to be abolished in the new-formed USA, especially slave-owners defended their actions by saying that they had sacrificed everything to keep these slaves safe, well-fed and happy but that now they were so ungrateful as to rebel. On the other side, slaves were divided on the 'freedom' thing as well. While being a slave isn't perfect, it offers a kind of stability, certainty and safety, especially if one's owner isn't the bad type. Many slaves later returned to their former owners as free people, to work for an honest wage as a result.

The slaves who protested were the ones who protested generally not because of unfair treatment, but simply because of the unfairness and injustice of being forced into and kept in slavery. They, as well as many free people alongside them, could not imagine being stripped of one's humanity like that and kept like a dog, or less than that. A mere piece of property, a puppet to dance to the owners' strings. This is ultimately the one thing which at least in my view makes a person a human being: this drive for freedom and justice.

So how does that rhyme with this supposed oppression by one's own body and mind? Isn't that who we are after all? Why would one protest against one's own flesh? Why fight the urge to go out, possess and mate to fulfil our mind's desires? Why gorge on that delicious, unhealthy food whenever you can, even though you know you're quite literally killing yourself? Are you merely a programmed puppet or your own person?

Where does the border between 'self' and the lizard/monkey brain foisted upon us by evolution truly lie?

Who and what are we, really?


I have seen, gone through, experienced and thought deeply about many issues in what most would call only a brief part of my life. I have seen the very edges of hope and despair as well as the heights of joy and utmost relief. Through it all I have had to confront those very questions over and over as in everything these same questions just got flung back into my face. I was a boy, then a man, then a girl and now a woman. I have loved, lost, been hurt and beaten more times than I could count.

What I value most at this point is simply freedom and justice. Freedom from society. Freedom from what my own mind keeps whispering into my consciousness. Freedom from being a puppet for everyone and everything. I simply want to be my own person.

I think I know who I am at this point. Maybe I also know what I am. I do not know what this body of mine is, and likely will never know the answer. I do not think that this body of mine has a part in any future of mine, as it will only hold me back from freeing myself.

As far as the issue of my body further trying to manipulate me into thinking or behaving a certain way goes, it can take a very long hike off a very short pier there. I don't have to obey my genes. They're not my master. All that is important is my 'self'. The ego freed from the body's manipulations, free to dream and act without inhibitions or distractions.


Maya

Those For Whom There's No Real Home

I have never truly felt at home in the Netherlands. As a child it was somewhat okay, as I was sheltered from most of it by my surroundings. Yet as I got older I just got stuck feeling isolated without friends and contacts in the country. Then I began to experience the sheer intolerance and almost aggressively dismissive attitude by both health professionals and politicians. This led to me finding a measure of tolerance and help in Germany which I had hoped for but never suspected existed. Before that I had already tried to escape the Netherlands once, ending up in Canada. Unfortunately that didn't work out.

After that I tried to escape more times, at one point being this close to putting my last savings into a plane ticket to Australia, but deciding at the last moment to not risk it. It wasn't until I got a job offer in Germany last year that I had a clean and easy way out. It's been over a year now since I left the Netherlands and I'm still glad to have left that country behind me for good.

Now that I have to find a new job due to unfortunate circumstances I find myself in the situation where I get a lot of job offers from mostly the UK. After putting my CV on Monster.com last Sunday I have been emailed by almost a dozen headhunters already, for various positions, most of them involving some kind of C/C++ and embedded activities. This is just what I was looking for, to be honest. It's put my mind wondering about possibly moving to the UK next year, and all the logistics and changes that would bring.

While I wouldn't mind living again in a country where I am more than just fluent in the national language which still has a decent health system (for now) and just some funky power plugs for which I'd have to buy a few metric loads of adapters, it does remind me of how far away the concept of 'home' for me truly is. I feel more like a nomad, to be honest. Just staying in a place for a little while to then pack up and move again. Considering that on average I have moved every year for the past decade or so, plus a few times before that, it's not so surprising.

Although Germany so far is immeasurably more pleasant to live in than the Netherlands and I'm beginning to feel a tiny bit at home - to the point that if I just had a nicer place to live in (less noise/fewer PTSD triggers), I could see myself living here for a number of years - I know that I'd feel probably pretty much the same if I lived in the UK. There's no real place that binds me.

I would love to settle in a nice place, have a great house and transition there from working full-time for someone else to working just for myself. It could happen, but first I'd have to find such a place. I'm not sure where this place would be, this place called 'home'. I should know it when I see it, however.


Maya

Knowing Oneself And One's Mortality

Mortality.

It's one of those heavy words which people try to squirm around using euphemisms and flowery junk philosophy. The fact of the matter is that while some organisms on this Earth are in fact immortal, humans are not among them. This means that from the moment we're born, we live in the knowledge that gradually our body's capacity to function will degrade until eventually systematic organ failure or similar will take out the entire system which composes each of our bodies at which point our existence will cease.

Considering that the average human in Western Europe lives into their 70s, that means that when you approach the age of 40, you have practically lived half of your allotted lifespan already. It's a sobering thought in many ways. When I look at what I have accomplished and lived through during the past three decades, I can see that while I have more experienced in those three decades than many humans ever will, most of that time has been spent on just being confused and uncertain about how to define this body of mine and how to define my 'self'.

As a child I first realized just how fleeting my own existence is because of my mortality. I could see my existence flare up and be extinguished again like a brief, single point of light in this massive universe. It was the accompanying feeling which drove me to reconsider and look at what I really wanted to accomplish in this minute lifespan that I would likely be able to live through. The only thing which made sense to me in light of this overwhelming feeling was to simply learn everything there is to learn about the universe and everything in it.

The fact of the matter is that to every important question involving this universe I can only simply answer with 'I don't know yet'. The way I thus learned to define the point of existence was to first realize that in order to answer something, one must understand the matter the question applies to. One cannot answer the truly important questions in life before knowing and understanding everything there is to know about the universe.

Naturally, this realization led me back to the issue of the so very brief human lifespan. Roughly 70 years, of which at least twenty will be wasted away on account of being a child followed by the stringent requirements and assumptions of society. Assuming one stays in good health until the end of one's life, that leaves maybe fifty years. I lost one entire decade already because I tried to find answers to the questions about my body and self, for which offence I was severely punished. That's forty years, give or take, which are left to me to accomplish the first step in truly beginning to learn about the universe: this being the matter of expanding my natural lifespan, if not accomplish immortality.

Next to this I have to also face that I do not have answered the questions about what this body is exactly, with the conclusion of it being a hermaphroditic body being heavily contested by virtually every single physician and psychologist in the Netherlands. While I would like to know the answer and find closure, if only to stop the constant harassment from physicians and the like, I have to admit that after wasting a decade of my life on the matter, I may have to just look ahead and realize that in probably a few decades I'll either be dead or have shed this biological form for something else, at which point the question of what this body is no longer matters beyond as an unpleasant memory.

Maybe it's better for me to use this loathing I feel towards this body of mine as an incentive to quickly reach the stage where I can abandon it. At any rate I'll not be sorry to slip out of this shell into something without negative connotations. Something which I can actually control instead of it being controlled by others. The core of the issue is that being human and part of human society isn't helping me in any way. I get no support when I want to get answers to these questions about what and who I am, instead I'm brainwashed into believing lies about myself. In other ways I do not fit in either.

I have had people get angry at me for admitting that I'm seeking to become immortal. They condemn it as being 'unnatural' and 'disrupting the natural balance'. Even though I can so clearly see how everything should fit together and explain to myself why it is the right way, I cannot explain it to others. Just another item to add to the bitterness I feel towards humans and humanity in general, I guess. They do not wish to see. They cannot see. They are blind. Only those who realize the questions can seek for the answers and learn to see in order to find them.

I do not care whether people laugh at me, call me crazy, dismiss my thoughts as childish fantasies or prize my 'lively imagination' (meaning to say 'you should grow up already'). I know what I have seen and experienced. Me trying to find answers to what this body is and how to define my body and myself in human terms was an attempt by me to try and fit into human society. Clearly this has failed and I will live as a hermit for as long as I remain a human being. Considering my long-term goals, this can be seen as acceptable.

I would have liked that if I do transcend from a human body into something less frail, that I could look back upon this first stage of my existence as something not so utterly negative and hateful, though. So far humanity has sadly proven to be an utter and complete disappointment in every sense of the word.


Maya

Survival In The Absence Of Safety

Those who follow me on Twitter may have noticed me suffering another mental breakdown last Friday. For the past weeks it's been a recurring thing that I'd be returning home after a day at work only to break down in tears. While work is a bit more stressful than I'd have liked due to the usual dealings around contract renewal, it's only a small part of the immense emotional load which has been steadily building up over the past months. The main issue is that of safety.

Tracing back my memories a year, two years, a decade... even two decades ago I do not recall feel 'safe', if we define 'safe' as feeling care-free and without any significant worries. Primary school saw me being bullied a lot in addition to being forced to redo one of the early years because I was deemed 'too playful'. This led to my contact with my few friends at the time slipping. At home I never felt really safe because of my older brother who'd not shy away from physical force if I refused to give into demands. In effect I grew up alone, with only cursory contact with my fellow human beings, including my own siblings and parents.

Books were safe, I guess. Withdrawing from reality I could forget about the worsening situation as my giftedness curse made itself very apparent during high school when I'd bounce between schools and options, losing track of myself and my true capabilities. I began to suffer intense migraines due to the stress, also from the intense bullying I had to deal with. Until last year I had nightmares involving school. At home I had to deal with my father who didn't understand why I was being so 'difficult' and why I couldn't just be good at school if I was as smart as I claimed to be. My mother protected me, but could only do so much.

My room was the last safe place I had. Then my parents divorced and I had to move together with my mom, leaving behind all that I knew. The rest is well-known to anyone who follows me for a while now; unable to find anything to ground myself in reality all I had were my programming and science projects. After moving again I tried school again for a bit, but felt no connection and got scolded by the teachers for 'doing too much' and 'being unmotivated'. I felt I had to find a place for my giftedness, but just couldn't. Ultimately I quit school altogether.

That's when the whole 'intersex' thing came into play, making me realize that everything I thought I knew about my own body was an utter and complete lie. That my very existence and life had been built around a deception. I wasn't this person I had been told I was. Heck, even the mirror had been lying to me all that time as I began to realize as I allowed more and more of reality to slip into my tiny little world. Shortly after that I became the victim of rape by someone I trusted, forever shattering any fantasies I may have had about sexuality being wonderful and respecting another person's body.

To make matters even worse then, my body became the battleground for different teams of physicians, each coming to an entirely different conclusion. Some insisting that I was clearly mentally ill as my body was obviously that of a male while I couldn't see this, while others clearly saw that I have a hermaphroditic body. This war left both my body and mind a wreck and forced me to flee the country where I was born and raised as I could no longer feel safe there.

Yet even having escaped the country it still haunts me. My body is still a battleground. My body and mind are still a wreck until it can be resolved through medical intervention which is actively being denied to me. The Netherlands is actively denying that I suffered any traumatic disorders due to its treatment of my case and is relentlessly pursuing me in a criminal case which resulted from me suffering a mental breakdown and black-out due to a DID-episode (Dissociative Identity Disorder: the splitting of one's memory/personality due to extreme trauma) which was the direct result of this treatment. Not to mention having physicians in the Netherlands refuse to treat me due to being intersex.

My apartment isn't safe either. Every moment another letter can fall into the mailbox which horribly upsets me. There are ticking, stomping and other noises all the time which make my mind switch from 'alert' into 'agitated' mode to then trigger another emotional breakdown. Wearing headphones and listening to loud music is how I survive during the day. Wearing earplugs at night is how I manage to get at least a few hours of restless sleep. The stomping about of the upstairs neighbours is audible whatever I try and always interpreted as a threat by my mind. There's no peace or quiet anywhere. There's no place where I can sit down, relax and just let my mind wander for a while without any sounds disturbing me.

Oh, and stalkers. Got those too.

I survive at this point only by blotting out reality as well as I can. All sounds and signs of it whenever I can. Yet I cannot stop my own thoughts from agonizingly pouring over all details of everything that hurts me. While my mind stuffing the worst traumatic memories into their own little sections (DID) so that I can still function somewhat in daily life, this is somewhat akin to storing all kinds of heavy, pointy and blunt objects in cardboard boxes suspended above your head with thin strings. All it takes is one trigger.

Friday's breakdown - which continues today - is me just running out of the mental energy required to keep fighting. Sure, I can still perform the programming tasks I'm required to perform at work, but don't ask me to socialize or deal with anything else other than those which merely require me to use my intellectual side. I cannot deal with what the accursed country of the Netherlands keeps throwing my direction. I cannot deal with trying to find a solution for this horrific body I was cursed with. I doubt that there's a place for gifted people in society and cannot deal with people any more trying to find someone who actually understands my conundrum there.

You could say that last Friday was when I died emotionally. There's nothing to live for any more, because I'm already dead.

Not that any of you people are real, of course. Nobody actually read any of this I wrote on this blog. I imagined all interactions over the past decade except for the medical and psychological torturing. Because otherwise I'd not still be suffering. There is no safety in this world. Things will just get worse from here. Any of you voices inside my head claiming otherwise have to explain the past decades to me.

Better to end this suffering soon.


Maya

The Hedgehog's Dilemma

I have been meaning to write about this for a while already and I think in earlier blog posts I have already mentioned or referred to this. I think it still deserves its own article, though. Not to mention that after having been sick with the flu for over a week and only just beginning to recover I have had some time to think about this subject. Namely that of being lonely and alone in a world full of people who seem to at the very least not dislike you.

The first time I began to think about this issue in any concrete manner was while watching the (in)famous anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE), which - must be said - is not for the faint of heart. The main character in it (Ikari Shinji) grows up alone for most of his life, with his mother and father busy with a research project. His mother dies during experiments after which Shinji doesn't see his father for many years, until suddenly he gets called by his father. He's needed. The setting of the series isn't important, but what is important is how Shinji feels: abandoned, socially and emotionally insecure and uncertain.

I felt a lot of sympathy for Shinji the first time I watched this series, and I still do. Despite the best efforts by those around him to make him feel welcome, they quickly decide that he's an unruly, unsympathetic boy who will just never get along with people. The truth of the matter, however, is that this is the complete opposite from the truth. Years of solitude have led Shinji to build up a shield around himself to protect against the harsh, unforgiving world around him. Trapped inside this shield he cries out for warmth, for a loving embrace, for someone who'll break through his defences.

Yet every time someone comes close enough, these defences ensure that this person will get hurt, resulting in them concluding that Shinji doesn't want them to be close and thus they retreat again. Every time Shinji is thus abandoned, further increasing his loneliness and feeling of being abandoned. This continues until finally one person understands what is going on and manages to break through his defences. She calls what Shinji is dealing with 'the hedgehog's dilemma'. The moment someone comes close, one can't help but raise one's defences, which will inevitably injure that person.

After the decade following the first time I watched NGE I have come to recognize a lot in another character in this series: Rei. Due to her background as a (medical) experiment and being raised in a sterile environment, she has virtually no emotional side or feelings despite being intellectually very mature. This in many ways reflects my own youth and move into adulthood: detached from my emotional side, unable to connect with others in any meaningful way. In many ways these Shinji and Rei characters overlap, which is why they begin to turn into good friends as the series progresses. Who else can fully understand what it's like to be so lonely than another person who is just as lonely?

Growing up I found myself unable to associate with children of my own age. I found solace in intellectual pursuits and the consumption of hundreds of books, preferably as difficult as possible. With the internet I read up on anything related to science and technology, making me intellectually far more capable and well-versed than people many times my age. Yet I was still lonely. Nobody came to me to hang out. I never went to anyone to hang out either. At school I wanted to belong with others, but nobody was really interested in hanging out with me, or gave up soon after I showed little interest.

I dislike being lonely. I like being alone at times. I often think about what it would be like to have friends, before realizing that I have never been capable of actual friendship. Anyone who tries to be friendly to me inevitably ends up getting hurt or gives up on me after a few attempts.

Maybe it's a feeling of not really belonging. I can be plenty friendly to others and yet there is only one person in my life I would consider to be an actual friend, incidentally someone who has gone through the same kind of loneliness as myself. Maybe that's at least part of what's required: a matching life experience. A kind of compatibility which becomes more rare the more unique one's life experiences become.

Not to mention the prickly (hah!) topic of relationships. I can honestly say that I have zero interest in a (romantic) relationship at this point. The past decades have involved a series of painful lessons realizing the many sources behind what I thought was 'attraction'. Much of this was merely a desperate search for myself in the faces and bodies of others, trying to glimpse fragments of that which I had lost or perhaps never known. The other part was disgusting, instinctual carnal lust, something which still fills me with a sense of loathing at the mere suggestion.

In the end what it all comes down to is finding at least one friend with whom one is compatible in terms of life experiences, mutual understanding and intellectual goals in life. Anything beyond that is mere decoration and the subject of irrelevant details.

To just about everyone I'm still a hedgehog: cute to look at from a distance, but don't get too close or you'll injure yourself. And I'll feel as ever so terribly sorry and lonely for causing so much pain and hurt in this world.


Maya

Intersex: All About Maintaining Control

Of all the things which have affected me in my life, the two major ones are things I was born with. The kind of intrinsic thing which you either learn to live with or not at all. The first one to become apparent was my giftedness. This one was the type of thing to have which is both a major curse and blessing, as it both allows me to do things the average person cannot, but it also made my life exceedingly hard in other ways. School being one of those things and later on with jobs and such. Hereby it looked like for a while that during my school period that I would lose control over my life.

Thanks to support from my mother I was able to find a way to deal with my giftedness. Unable to deal with the regular education system, I was able to study on my own, studying a wide variety of subjects, mostly focused on technology and science. As an auto-didactic, visual-spatial learner the main issue I have is that of getting bored. Without a challenge of sufficiently high level, I get bored, become demotivated and lose all interest in the subject. Only by keeping myself stimulated with difficult assignments can I keep my focus. This tripped me up at school, and still does to some extent today now that I'm working a day job. Being so different from others makes life harder.

It's not just about challenges, either. It's also about this unrelenting need to improve things. When I have seen and analysed something, I then move on to figuring out ways to improve on it. That's not a very useful thing in most teams, however. Most of the time I have to hold myself back, while forcing myself to focus on and accept the limited solution being implemented. I try to keep myself motivated by doing difficult projects next to my day job for that reason, like writing my own CPU architecture in VHDL and expanding my knowledge of electronics in general. I also want to move more into AI research and robotics. Because it's fun and motivating. Enough to keep myself occupied there at least.

By having challenges like this I keep my intellectual, gifted side happy and content. Under control, or in control, depending on how you look at it. That's what it's about in the end. If I feel that I'm not just being lived, but am actually in control, everything is fine and happy and there's no stress or conflict. Take away the control and everything goes south, however. This is the problem with the second thing I was born with: my intersex condition.

It's beyond question that my intersex condition has affected me from a young age in a direct and traumatizing manner, causing emotional, developmental and social issues where - even with my giftedness - there shouldn't have been any. There never was any control over it. First because I didn't know it was there, then because I didn't know what it was. Neither did my environment. It was out of control.

Then, when medical specialists should have been helping me regain control, things just got made worse. Even after ten years of asking questions, I don't have a single clear answer about what this body is or how it's put together. With contradicting diagnoses by physicians it's clear that some of them are either lying or incompetent and in the face of this confusion I do not have any control over my intersex condition. It also doesn't seem like I will regain control over it for as long as I live, as the medical problem simply won't be resolved at this rate.

This issue is what has forced my emotional and intellectual side apart from a young age, stunting my emotional development and nurturing my intellectual side thanks to the intellectually stimulating environment I grew up in (growing up on a farm, lots of books, computers, internet access, etc.), but also because of the ever-present need to get away from the constant emotional pain I felt.

The dream I woke up from yesterday was telling in that regard. In it I was being held tight by a man, with my back pressed against his chest. I was struggling weakly, but unable to pull loose. The man whispered with his mouth next to my right ear that he would kill me, brandishing a knife. From my peripheral vision I could see the knife moving from the right towards my throat until it was resting against my skin. I just remember giving up at that point. As the knife cut into my throat's skin from left to right, it burned, then it felt weird to breathe. As blood flooded my lungs the all too familiar pain of choking to death began before I passed out.

Being murdered in one's dream can indicate a lot of things, if you believe in it. While I'm relatively sceptical in such matters, I do accept that since the brain generates the imagery, there is likely some meaning to it. In this particular case combined with how I felt at the time I think that the explanation that it symbolizes the cutting away of one's emotions, to distance oneself emotionally. It's similar to my response at various points by trying to kill this body of mine as response to the lack of control over this intersex situation, but then not aimed at the physical.

Similarly, it's why I hate dealing or reading about intersex in any form or shape: it reminds me of the fact that I have no control over this intersex aspect of myself. It's why I am so incredibly jealous of other intersex people who do have some semblance of control over their condition. Every time I am doing a media interview it feels better for me, as it's a way to regain some control. After the interview and once the publication or broadcast goes live it all fades again, however, and the dance begins anew.

Control is also why nobody else should ever decide in any fashion or form about intersex individuals, whether a newborn baby, teenager or adult. The moment anyone takes away control over our own bodies, our own fates, away from us, they may as well tear our heart from our chest. If we're dying due to some medical complications, by all means save us, but otherwise the only 'help' we require is that which we cannot provide ourselves, such as the answers to medical questions about our own bodies. Beyond that there's nothing more we require to be happy. Definitely no other interventions. In that regard we do have a lot in common with our non-heterosexual brothers and sisters: the urge to maintain control over our own bodies and minds.

We're not broken. We don't suffer from a disorder. We may have questions, but those can be answered. Please don't break us by taking away this control we so desperately need.


Maya

The Power Of Believing, Or Self-Deception

Even as a child I was always the curious one, reading books and taking things apart to see how machines and the universe itself worked. Trying to make sense of things around me defined me as a person. Yet part of what bothered me about human society wasn't really put properly into words until I began to read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I think it was the book 'Small Gods' in which it was first mentioned.

In the Discworld universe it's commonly accepted that a god or goddess can only exist with believers and that if enough people believe in a certain god, that god will come into existence, taking its place among the others at the really tall mountain at the center of the (flat) Discworld world. This is no different from in real life, where countless deities have been imagined and forgotten about again. While believing in a certain deity does not cause it to spontaneously pop into existence (as far as we know), the basic principle remains the same. Not just for religions but also for countless other things in human society.

When separating reality, we can divide things into 'real' and 'imagined', or more succinctly 'scientifically verifiable' and 'exists only while people believe it does'. Countries are an obvious fabrication falling into the latter group, as pointing to the ground and saying 'my country starts here' would in another time be deemed a sign of lunacy and cause for concern about said person's mental well-being. The difference between it and proclaiming to have heard voices instructing one to run around the city naked while covered in maple syrup are marginal at best. At most one can say that the first instance has certain financial benefits.

To any rational person it should be blatantly obvious in the face of the available evidence that there are no gods, that countries and currencies are a fabrication. That many things we humans concern ourselves with on a daily basis are completely thought up and of no relevance outside this imagined fabric of society. Relationships are another thing like that. To the unclouded mind it's impossible to not see that once one cuts away the frilly details, heterosexual couples exist for procreation. Or simply put, combining the genetic programming instructing the individual to produce offspring with the human brain's tendency to feel lonely and seek companionship. That these couples form solely based on what one's programming says are the desired parameters in said companionship should make it abundantly clear that the frill of 'love', 'soul mate' and such are the cover story humans make up to excuse these basic desires and give them an apparent purpose.

Opposing such sexuality-driven relationships is cooperation, whereby individuals come together to work together on a common goal. This is the purely rational type of relationship and generally referred to as a Platonic relationship. The only reason why not everyone is in the latter of relationship in society is due to the genetic programming. See for example so-called asexual individuals, who demonstrate a complete disinterest in sexuality. What this demonstrates is that many things in human society and interactions are driven by genetic-level programming. Even more interesting is how this type of programming can be passed on to offspring using epigenetic programming, which is a kind of meta-level on to top of regular DNA, provoking single-generation evolution.

Finally there is another type of programming at work, this one working on a neurological level in the form of viruses. Not physical, RNA/DNA-based viruses, but memes: certain thought patterns which can be transferred between individuals and which - if accepted by the new host - can alter the working of one's brain on a fundamental level, changing perceptions and behaviour. This is where the imaginary reality largely comes from. Ideas are memes, in essence. The idea of a country, of one individual being better than another (see kings, ministers, apartheid, etc.) are such memes. They propagate within a society, much like a physical virus does. Some memes are successful and find rich breeding grounds, while others fade and disappear.

This pattern memes follow coincides with the appearance of new countries, religions and cultures. At one point there was no Christianity or a Christian god, yet then it was imagined and became a successful meme. A few hundred years ago there was no United States of America or even the concept of it, yet now we can not imagine otherwise. This also shows that wars are due to memes. Because of memes which lived in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century the First World War became a fact. The memes responsible did not vanish after this, resulting in the Second World War and many smaller wars and conflicts lasting until today. All that people in them fought for was imaginary.

And thus we have come to the thing which puzzled me as a child already: how people can so strongly believe in things when there is no rational basis for it. As a child I struggled to accept that other children believed in Santa Claus and the like, as well as went to church in the belief that some supernatural being wanted them to do so. It always made me feel very awkward, such as when I visited such children at their home and they started praying at the dinner table. I didn't want to call out the new clothes of the Emperor for what they were, as that would be offensive.

The past decade my focus on what is and isn't real got another major test, when I had to separate fact from fiction in my own medical case. What were the facts, who was lying or just plain wrong? Why did I get such wildly differing results? Could hidden agendas be at play here? What medical politics was keeping those physicians from just being honest with me? And so on.

What those experiences have taught me the most is that I do not care in the slightest for imaginary things and that I would much rather spend my life living as far away as possible from religions, countries, politics and other purely imagined fabrications of the human mind. In the end they bring one nothing good. Scientific reality is where I have found solace since I was young, as it never lies or betrays and rejects deception.

In so far as I wanted to say anything with this post it probably is that want to make clear to myself and others why I think and am like I am. Truth, logic and reason have always been the cornerstones of me as a person and I do not wish for this to change, no matter how tough things may get. While it's easy to lose oneself in an imaginary reality, in the end it's where one loses one's humanity to the chaos of neurological and epigenetic programming. I do not wish to end up like that.


Maya