Thursday, June 18, 2015

On Gender.

Gender.

Rupert Sheldrake, in his critique of science, said that its origins were with in the Mechanistic view of the world. The origins of this were pragmatic on the part of the Christian Church. If God could be conceived of as a Mechanic, and all the world were His Machine, then there need not be room for other Gods, and the monotheist avoids pantheism.
The alternative that these thinkers rebelled against was that of the Platonic model where in every being manifests its Nature.
This is my view on Gender. Each being manifests its Nature. You will know the Soul of a person by Its fruits. A Woman whose Soul is Female will be born Female; the physical world will tend to take the shape of that spiritual pattern. A Man whose Soul is Male will be born Male. HIS development will follow masculine lines. As Marie Louise von Franz attested: Women tend to have slightly more feminine qualities than men do, and men have more masculine qualities. This was meant not only in referent to the physical body but to the spiritual body – all so known as the Subtle Body* or the Wisdom Body** – as well.

Gabriel Marcel warned that Modernity tended excessively to reduce the Human Being and the Individual Journey to two sets of functions: Social and Essential. The one refers to the abstract conception of the individual as a societal unit. The latter refers to the “biological functions” of the body as they were de-lineated by the scientific community. Both the sociological school and the biological school, following a Structuralist (and thereby essentially counter-progressive, by contemporary intellectual standards) model, one founded all so in Structural Functionalism as an aesthetic movement, Utilitarianism as America’s dominant ethical theory, and the Materialism that Sheldrake was criticizing, reduced the human being to a mere machine. By so dis-empowering the individual they sought to eliminate the “illusion of free will”, and with a growing Mass of Information Technology this is the greatest threat to our freedom: That man forgets how to STAND UP TO the Mass that seems at times to be the very central force of Nature. Of course, the Mass has little to do with Nature. The Mass operates by mindless idioms and unyielding trends that allow people to stop thinking, at the expense of their humanities.

People who preach that gender is a social construct would do well to admit that Gender Dysphoria is a social construct. Yet they are oddly silent on the matter, and they tend to delete you from their social net-working connections if you ask too many dis-comforting questions. But since the dis-comfort affects you, the questioner, most strongly – as evidenced by the fact that these others can so easily throw it off in avoidance of the Question – you must persist to find your own answers.
This I have found: That Gender is not reduce-able to a Bureacratic distinction. It is not distinct, to my mind, from sex, which I use inter-changeably with it except where the classical associations of one word be-fit the context better than those of the other. I tire of proto-Fascists telling me which word to use, as though I had to be told which words were dirty like a child. Even as a child I knew that that did not matter. What mattered was the mystery of what the subject tries to convey, not what his audience EXPECTS to hear.
Neither is Gender entirely biological. Sex can mean more than biology; its experience is more than physical. The yogis can tell you that. So can any woman who has been satisfied by her lover.

I dis-trust the notion of Gender Dysphoria, even going so far as to say that I dis-avow its existence with Certainty. I do not demand that my intimations of God be acknowledged, so why should you compel me to believe some thing for which I have no evidence? I can only give you my inferences from what God has revealed to me.
Jung posited correctly and incontrovertibly that each of us contains with in his self her gender opposite. This is incontrovertible, again. The recent attempt to dis-avow Jung’s work, exploiting its esotericism and inaccessibility, is the most blatant intellectual affront to genius I have encountered. It renders effectively silenced the voices of gratitude of innumerable men and women – ESPECIALLY women – that were affected by his work in Life-Altering and oft Life-SAVING ways.
It is not inconceivable, operating in Jungian consistency, to posit that the Anima of a man or the Animus with in a woman could take over, temporarily, the Conscious Psyche in place of the ego. But this would NOT mean that one was “born wrong”, simply be-cause one’s internal life does not accord with one’s external life. This split is a sign of Health and Individuation, and only a total conformist to this proto-Fascist Mass would think other( than )wise(ly) of it.
Neither does such a split suggest a departure from the body. Because as Foucault, a favourite of sexual progressives, pointed out: The physical body is perceived in a self-conscious way (to Foucault, ONLY) when acted upon by structures of POWER.
So it is not the body at fault when the mind turns to the opposite gender. The contradiction need not bother the solitary individual. Inwardly, I am a woman. Out-wardly, I am a man. But why demand that the outer fit the inner? The problem only occurs when the PRESSURE IS EXTERNAL.
This is why many Eastern Sages are depicted as Hermaphrodites. They do not care that their out-ward body, a vessel for the Soul, to be cared for but not all too clung to, “do not accord” with their Souls. This is not actual discord, simply difference and tension, which is the Nature of Life.
Yet when the mind is turned OUTWARDS in neurotic fixation upon what others make of one’s own body, the tension occurs. One trembles to say: I am a woman! if the public perception, as it is in turn perceived by the individual, is that one MUST be a man. MUST is taken to mean an imperative, not an inference. Yet it is only through an absence of nerve that, rather than owning up to the psychic facts publically, bamboozling one’s neighbours proudly, one in stead endeavours to ALTER THE PHYSICAL BODY ITS SELF.
This I cannot condone. It is incredibly dangerous and can be irreversibly damaging. Parents are right to feel affronted that the fruit of their loins, though it is not their possession (and perhaps has more to do with the Soul, again, acting as a template rather than genetics fighting it out amidst one an other) become corrupted by worms. The metaphor may seem harsh, but so is the nature of surgery. We idealise doctors too much, and our ethics in this public regard reflect the interest of their pocket-books. It is the folly of Man to think that he can correct Nature, and it is this ENDURING attitude, in no way distinct from the zeitgeist of the past three centuries and in no way “progressive”, that should right fully enflame all of our God-given prejudices. Neither is this a sectarian issue. We know from the Atomic Bomb, the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Concentration Camps in Germany, the iatrogenic diseases created by immunization shots, the authoritarian terror of psychiatric medications, the annihilation of entire species – races—of creatures from this earth, and a growing global surveillance system, the out-come of Man’s presumption that he can “correct” Nature, rather than being corrected BY her. She does not make miss-takes, left alone, and it is purely a perversion in the Judeo-Christian Ethic there fore that endures into our popular “progressive” prejudices regarding “gender”. The sheer inconsistencies should be a give-away; if gender were “entirely” societally conditioned, would gender dysphoria not its self be such a condition? It would be born of the same naive desire to conform and to fit a stereotype, borne from what Foucault called our latent or overt desire to love our oppressors. And so it is that the individual experiencing a furthering of one’s own individuality by becoming temporarily one’s opposite shrinks from the challenge posed by the Unconscious, what Kierkegaard called the Paradox, and he or she, deciding that outward appearance is most important, in an ultimate act of American consumerism, trades one’s Natural body for an other – a fabrication intended to be an imitation, but a pale one that fools few. This way the perception of the Mass would accord with one’s inner world, and that is good, right? What one fore gets is the utter HORROR of what happens when this same tendency to want to “bridge” the chasm betwixt public life and private life turns in the opposite current. What happens when, rather than changing my body so that the Public’s view of me might fit my own self-image, I try to alter the PUBLIC in order that THEY fit MY image for THEM? THIS is the greatest threat in contemporary progressivism; that it is proto-Fascism. The speaker may not choose simply to dis-agree with the decisions of the gender-switching consumer, claiming that he would never date such a person. I might say boldly that it is an action that I do not condone, but with ambi-valence, that I can SENSE one’s Given gender Phenomenologically as a Spiritual Entity, and that I trust that the person that I love has not made such a decision. But at no point in this inquiry do I pass judgement upon the SOUL of the Switcher. That would only be done to counter-point a claim about the Soul that I would find out-rageous: That rather than this decision having been a free, willing one, the chooser may have the EXCUSE of appealing to an invisible mental disease known as Gender Dysphoria. And as one who has suffered for years of humiliation, de-personalisation, marginalization, terror, paranoia, anomie, scape-goating, and oppression for the “existence” of an “invisible disorder” that I never had – a product of Big Pharmaceutical Business Interests, parental paranoia that a psychiatric nurse had about my dating her daughter, and blatant ignorance – I have neither shame nor fear (for I have been through worse than this crowd here assembled to-day) in saying that I have no belief what so ever in these invisible illnesses. And THAT applies to Gender Dysphoria as well, for just as I had contempt and loathing for my fellow im-patients that consented to their own abuse, renouncing the PSYCHIC PHENOMENA that was given them by a Paradoxical God in favour of a proto-Fascistic desire to love their masters, so I have no sympathy for the sorrows of those people who, rather than embracing their internal world as a gift from God and their bodies as a gift from Nature, conceive of both parents – Father God and Mother Nature – as having been out of accord with one an other, divorced in intention, and choose in stead to be labeled “Queer”. I never sought acceptance for an illness that I did not have, nor did I succeed in rallying support against medical establishment that threatened to take away my psychic freedom permanently, a condition that assuredly would have ended in my suicide (though to torment me further they would have tried to prevent it). I learnt the hard way that if an issue is in the news it is not really a form of oppression; this all ways happens under the radar. It all ways has. Fuck the people who claim that I am “privileged” or “oppressive” for dis-agreeing with the DECISION to switch one’s own body around. They know nothing of true oppression. And I feel no loyalty towards weak people who bend to the will of the Mass rather than standing up for their selves.

*Vedanta; yoga.
*Campbell.


Dm.A.A.

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