In space nobody can hear your screams

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

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

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


Just roll with it.


Stuff happens, water under the bridge, etc.


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


You're not a bad person.


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


What is your worth as a person?


To society?


Does society love you?


To yourself?


Do you love yourself?



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


Don't sweat the small stuff.


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


But do you love yourself?


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


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


Maya



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

Why I should delete my personal blog

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

We can make you into a beautiful woman.


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

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


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


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

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


Maya

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

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

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


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

So why is this not considered a viable research topic?


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

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


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

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


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


Maya


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

Defining oneself by the things that do not matter

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


Maya

Thoughts on getting vaccinated and the buffet of ignorance

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


Maya


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

Death is the great equaliser, no matter your species.

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


Maya

Self-image versus reality

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

You can't escape yourself, I guess.


Maya