Identities: Sex and Gender III -- Dysmorphia

There are a lot of things I absolutely loathe about my own body.  I hate the colour of my hair; I never quite feel right unless it's been dyed.  My body hair is coarse and fairly thick, and my facial hair grows quick and full; I prefer to be clean-shaved, all over.  The hair on my arms is especially offensive to me; not only is it the most difficult to cover up, but it's thick and wiry and it just makes me shudder.  I even like to shave my eyebrows on a regular basis, which is a more or less unique other-gender marker.  Neglecting these things, I have come to understand, is a pretty reliable indication that I'm slipping into depression (and, of course, it makes me feel worse about myself, which makes me neglect my appearance more, yadda yadda.)  I also kind of hate the way my face looks without makeup.  It's hard to describe how, or why, that is; I just feel like a nightmask or a full-facial genderfuck is my real face and when I'm not wearing makeup I'm trying to hide who I really am.

I've been having a serious issue with my body shape recently.  I'm not going to make it about weight, since abstract measurements are beside the point.  I also don't desire nor intend to promote fat-shaming or embrace it.  However, in the last few years I've developed a bit of a belly -- eating regular meals after years of surviving on KD and ramen will do that to you.  I used to be a skinny bitch who could wear really tight dresses, miniskirts and tube tops without a single curve showing.  None of my gender-bending wardrobe fits me any more, and it's driving me crazy.  I'm hoping that a combination of regular exercise and learning how not to dress like a streetwalker will fix that.  I've talked before about my consistent and deliberate avoidance of physical activity and any kind of fitness regimen, not just because I had no interest in it or perceived need for it, but because 'staying in shape' was a manly man thing to do and playing into social expectations of what a man is supposed to be makes me kind of sick to my stomach.  Regular daily exercise is making me feel a lot better about myself, and making a perceptible difference in both my body shape and my levels of energy and pain.

The first time I wore lipstick, it was more of a fist thrown in the face of society than a conscious embrace of androgyny.  The first time I shaved my legs in anticipation of sliding a pair of stockings over them, the first time I went shopping for clothes that would make me look like a not-male -- these were revelatory experiences.  It was the first time I consciously expressed, to myself, my intense desire to reject the way society had sexed and gendered me, to remove myself from the check-box beside the word 'male' that defined how I was supposed to appear, to act, to feel, and to live my life; the first time I consciously understood that it was something, not only that it was possible to do, but something I was capable of doing.    The vague hatred of my own appearance and body, of the unreasonable and arbitrary expectations that went with it and of the violence I was subjected to whenever I dared to transgress these unwritten, unspoken rules, had always just been something I lived and breathed; it was part of my normal.  Stripping away my customary gender presentation and rebuilding it into something that worked the way I decided I wanted it to felt better than any chemical high; better than sex, better than drugs, better than being in love.  It felt like flying.

Building the old walls of my gendered prison back up again has felt like being dragged back to earth.

***

I've never felt the need to have breasts or to get rid of my penis.  That was always beside the point for me; it's not my 'male' characteristics in and of themselves that disgust me, but the meaning and the expectations society has attached to them.  I know that whatever body dysmorphia I have felt is barely a shadow of what a person who chooses to undergo sex reassignment therapy must feel.  I can only generalize from my own experience, so I do my best to listen to them and understand their experience as they have felt and lived it.

However, I have found that when I talk about sex and gender even in what are nominally LGBT-friendly spaces I am often faced with a great deal of hostility, and that some of the most intense hostility tends to come from traditionally gendered trans-identified people.  This seems to be because certain trans-identified people are intensely invested in the concept of binary sex being a real thing, an innately physical fact rather than a socially-constructed fact.  The argument seems to be that there are innately 'male' and 'female' types of brain and that the intense body dysmorphia that these people experience is due to a mismatch between having a 'female' brain and a 'male' body.  This seems to be intended as justification for the use of sex reassignment therapy to 'correct' the 'mismatch' between sexed brain and body types.

Which is absolute, retrograde hogwash, both on a scientific and a social level.  There is no concrete scientific evidence for there being any significant systematic difference between male and female brains, beyond those directly bound up in the details of reproductive biology; at best there are very minor statistical variations in certain capabilities; and even if male and female brains do tend to be 'hardwired' differently, it would not make the sex-binary any less a social fact subject to social redefinition, a matter of statistics as to which types of bodies, which sets of organs and chromosomal codings, tend to go with which neurotypes.

But all of this is fundamentally beside the point.  Because, as far as I am concerned, the only justification someone should need for undergoing sex reassignment therapy is that it is something they desire to do.  "I don't like having a penis; I would rather have breasts and a vagina.  Therefore I will make it so."  End of line.  It's like the thing about whether being gay is a 'choice' or whether it's something fundamental to your nature and unalterable.  At the end of the day, it really makes no difference in terms of social politics.  Either way, the haters are still going to hate gays whether they choose to be or just are, and the trans-haters are still going to hate you whether you characterize your desire to transition between sex-markers as a 'mismatch' or just as something you want to have.  And by 'want', it should be clear that I am in no way trivializing intense and overpowering feelings; but why would someone whose very existence is an integral rejection of the sex-binary social construct be so invested in reinforcing it that the very existence of people who subvert it in a completely different way threatens their identity?  I'm serious, if someone can explain this to me, please do.

Greenpunk: On Having your Cake, and on Eating It

My garden was a bit of a disappointment this year; it was largely my own fault, though, as depression kicked my ass and I was unable to plant as early or on as large a scale as I wanted to.  My experiment with a 3-sisters field was too heavily interplanted, leading to a paucity of actual harvest; tomato starters were purchased too early in the year and put out too early, resulting in severe frostbite.  My entire harvest totaled a few pounds of assorted greens, a few pounds of beans, a few pounds of potatos, assorted scraggly roots and fruits, and all the fresh basil and dill I could figure out what to do with.  I fall back on the adage that failure is a learning experience, particularly when attempting to learn a skill so far outside one's accustomed comfort zone.  All of the permaculture theory is a poor substitute for genuine spade-in-soil experience.

At Saturnalia, my beloved presented me with a brilliant little book -- The Urban Homestead, an information-packed guide full of practical projects in everything from gardening and livestock-keeping, to preservation techniques and even brewing, to water management and power generation, all presented with the city-dweller in mind.  It's given me a wealth of ideas for simple experiments and longer-term projects to try my hand at.  I have a sourdough starter fermenting right now, which I'm planning to try baking with tomorrow; I'm itching to try my hand at lacto-fermentation and maybe some dairying, and look forward to the day when I can start seriously planning such ventures as chicken-keeping and aquaculture, greywater recycling systems, or getting into some serious edible landscaping.

All of this is by way of a lifestyle choice.  In economic logic, every moment not spent working for wage is the same thing as paying money for your own time.  People who think that way don't seem to have had the experience of having very little money and being unable to work for it (not to mention being humans).  Though I haven't quite given up the prospect of wage labour, a lot of my efforts right now are focused on replacing the need for an income stream with immediately productive labour which can be done in my home, at my leisure, without the need to socially interact with anyone.  In the time I spend baking my own bread, sure, maybe I could work and earn enough to buy twice as much delicious sourdough from a commercial bakery (I'm not convinced).  But I don't want to, and I feel like thinking about that abstract difference in utility-values as a "payment" for the privilege of using my time the way I see fit is a perversion of logic.  I know what paying for something looks like.

But I digress.  Complete self-sufficiency is an idea that appeals to me; it's a pleasant enough dream, to have a little compound where my wife and I (and perhaps a few close friends) can produce all of our own food, generate all of our own power, and perhaps even defend ourselves from marauding looters or the occasional fascist paramilitary squad.  But I'm smart enough to recognize that it is both a) an unrealistic aim (particularly for a paerson like myself), and b) considerably less romantic a reality than some would make it out to be.  I recognize that life in the post-collapse era will necessarily involve community and gains from specialization through trade, be it a gift economy, a local-soviet ParEcon, a libertopian really truly free market, or some juddering vestige of modern industrial state capitalism.

***

Do I genuinely believe that society is going to collapse around us?  Well, yes and no.  I spent most of my 20's in a semi-comatose haze of depressive, self-medicated, apathetic resignation.  For most of the W presidency, I was convinced to the root of my being that I was seeing the rebirth of fascism in my lifetime; but my calculated political illiteracy and Gothic cynicism made me incapable of responding to it with anything more than an occasional undirected rant and a constant attempt to party my existential dread away.  In the later years I imagined that the complete destruction of the world I knew was immanent, and became morbidly fascinated with the prospect of having to survive in a world where none of the ground rules I took for granted applied anymore.  My youthful alarm regarding the subject has waned as the years drag on and the catastrophe fails to materialize; and yet all of the signs and trends that inspired that panic in the first place are still there.  The lackeys of the plutocracy are still looting the economic wealth and social capital built up over generations.  The ecosystem is still being pounded day and night by pollution and resource depletion, and the collective decision-making systems of the world seem to lack the will to even blunt the continual impact.  The governments of the world continue to drift ever closer to unbridled authoritarianism, and the occasional victories of progressive movements feel increasingly pyrrhic.  The gears grind away.

All of my ominous talk of food security, self-defence, and catastrophic survival plans is now more in the vein of therapy.  When I was in the Boy Scouts I was taught to 'be prepared', and I took the lesson to heart.  The looming threat of catastrophe caught me unprepared, and I would like to have at least some prospect of being able to survive and protect the ones I love should it catch up with us.  I will be ecstatic should it manage to pass us by, but I have a feeling that the paranoid fear that next week everything is going to hell in a handbag will continue to haunt me until the singularity makes all such issues moot.

***

No matter how dire things get, I have no intention of giving up my computer or my internet access until it is torn from my bloody fingers.  I lust after the next neat new gadget -- e-readers, smartphones, tablet computers, and whatever this fucking monstrosity is; personal robots, smart houses, 3D printers, and maybe even my very own brain-to-wire interface.  Much as I hate how enmeshed these things are in the consumer-capitalist system, and though I understand the way that their manufacture and infrastructure contributes to ecological destruction and social harms, I can't stand the thought of such things being taken away from me.  I'm a child of the 80's; and though it may be somewhat declasse these days, I'm still a cyberpunk at heart.

One of my most consistent annoyances with the environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements is a streak of primitivism, luddism, and anhedonic anti-materialism that makes me snarl every time I encounter it.  I keep seeing images and slogans exhorting me to 'turn off the TV', to 'embrace simplicity', to 'stop buying shit you don't need'.  Well, there's not much I really need beyond a roof, clean water, and a bowl of rice every day; but that's not what I call the good life.  I can't stand pearl-clutching over what the internet is doing to our social lives or brain functions, and I don't want to see another piece pointing out a problem with our proliferating technology that doesn't at least include some sort of half-formed idea about how to solve this problem without giving up the technology.  Because I will.  Not.  Give it up.

At the same time, I tend to find myself frustrated with the gee-whiz, uncritical or half-heartedly critical tone of a lot of transhumanist writing I come across.  Transhumanism at its best should be dedicated to thinking about how to manage the transitions in our lives that technology is causing in such a way that they create the most widespread benefits while minimizing possible harm.  Maybe I'm just not reading enough transhumanist writing or the right writers, but most of what I'm seeing promotes a kind of laissez-faire singularitarianism that seems to assume all of our problems will be easily solved through individualistic, libertopian social praxis and killer apps that have not yet been invented and maybe never will.  Runaway industry devastating the climate?  We'll just fix it by flooding the atmosphere with sulfur!  Creative workers having trouble making a living in a world of one-click copying?  Let them eat new business models!  Widespread unemployment caused by automation?  Products will be so cheap that nobody will care!  Super-smart AI taking over?  We'll just make sure it's a friendly AI!  There seems to be little if any plan in transhumanist circles to deal with the potential concentration of human enhancement in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy, to fight bio-luddite backlash against neo-humanity, or to work toward economic models that don't treat finite resources as something to be 'propertized' and sold to the highest bidder (when they're not just subjected to 'enclosure' free of charge).  And the attitude toward longstanding progressive ideas on these subjects seems to be at best amused tolerance, when it's not outright derision.

I'd like to find a way to reconcile these two ideological frameworks, because I find them both valuable ways of dealing with the fears I feel of collapse.  I think of this idea as a 'Greenpunk' lifestyle and political ideal.  (I make no claim to owning, or having invented, the term -- either in general, or as a descriptor for a form of political thought.  Make of it what you will.)  Greenpunk is at the same time radically sustainable and technoprogressive, embracing both widespread prosperity and harmony with the environment, combining appropriate technology and self-sufficiency with the possibility of radically transformative change and the possibility of a singularity.  And I've become certain that embracing such a way of looking at the world and ourselves is the only way that humanity is going to walk the knife's edge of catastrophe.

Identities: Sex and Gender II -- Being Male, and Being Not

What, specifically, is it I hate(d) so much about having been sexed and gendered as 'male' for half of my life?  What is it that has driven me to the extreme of leaving the gender-binary behind entirely and setting out for the uncharted territory of the genderqueer/androgynous/trinary/othergendered/don't-have-a-really-satisfying-name-for-it-yet?  I mean, there's simple revolt at the sheer arbitrariness of enforced gender-conformity, an ideologically driven sense that we should all just be permitted to follow the paths we choose and that any restrictions imposed on us by society should ought to have a well-explicated and rational basis.  That's probably not the root of it nor the endpoint, however; it feels more like a gloss applied in the light of hindsight.  It's a theme that runs through a great deal of my thinking, but my desire to escape the cage of enforced gender conformity has roots in times long before I ever came up with so coherent a philosophy of life.

Then, there's considerable case to be made for the sheer violence I have encountered as a boy who didn't fit well into the mold of boyness.  I include in this physical violence, emotional violence, and the social violence of ostracism and rejection.  I have always been a contrary person, and the more violently I was policed for my violations of the gender code, the more ardently I was inspired to rebel against it; until, as I moved into my late teens and my confusion over my sexual identity began to assert itself, I was so disgusted with the very concept of masculinity that I was more than happy to seize on the tools that Goth culture has given me to strip it away from myself.  I come to realize now that I have deliberately avoided developing certain capacities in myself specifically because they are associated with masculinity, and embraced certain others in part because of their association with the 'unmasculine': I turn away from assertiveness, competitiveness, physical fitness and the capacity for violence, and dislike them in others, particularly for this reason; for similar reasons I have drifted into the embrace of passivity, dependency, emotionalism, and body-image dysmorphia.  These are not things I am proud of, though neither am I particularly ashamed (except in my darker moments of depressive self-flagellation).  They are simply things that are.  So sometimes I'm not sure if my personality is authentically my own or if it is composed primarily of reaction to the violence of society against me.

As I stated last time, I have carefully folded up a lot of my deliberately calculated re-gendering of appearance markers and packed it carefully away in favour of a sort of don't-give-a-shit path-of-least-resistance false cisgender conformity.  That's something I am coming to find extremely distressing, particularly in light of the feelings that have been stirred up by my previous post on the subject (I literally didn't know I was going to write the phrase 'I feel like a butterfly with a broken wing' until it was sitting there staring at me.  After I finished that post, I cried for a straight hour.)  It's part reaction to circumstances (it's hard to flaunt one's rejection of genderstraight appearance-policing when one is looking for a job, living with one's parents, and has very few occasions that merit or support the hour's effort of a full nightmask and gender tease) and part simple subsidence into the morass of depressive apathy.  But I think part of it, too, has been an attempt to find who I am without what has ultimately itself been a deliberate, calculated performance of un-gendering.  I wanted to know, if I no longer looked so different outside, whether I would feel the same inside.

The short answer is, of course, yes and no.  The intense feelings of loss and dysmorphia I have only recently acknowledged but have been experiencing for some considerable time now have demonstrated to me that genderstraight and cisgender conformity are not something I can maintain in the long run.  Internally, however, my feeling of being something fundamentally other, something beyond the binary definition of sex and gender constructed by society, has become stronger than ever.  In fact, now that I have come to terms with the extent that my construction of my own identity was predicated on wholesale rejection of masculinity, I feel that I can begin reconstructing myself much stronger as a genderqueer person.  I can embrace that which is strongest in the masculine, the feminine, and those aspects of human personality that are assigned to both or neither, while rejecting the weaknesses that are created by the fracturing of a holistic personality into male and female 'halves'.

The Artists's Work

In modern capitalist, market-driven societies, human labour is commodified.  It is a product for sale to the highest bidder (where 'bidding' is taken to mean giving someone a job - an odd sort of role reversal, in that it implies that the employer is the one attempting to convince the worker to provide their services, whereas in the vast majority of cases the reverse is true -- but that's a subject for an entirely different post.)  Workers sell their labour time as a 'factor of production'; just one of the components that goes into the production of a service or saleable object.  This is why Marx referred to the labour of workers under capitalism as 'alienated'; they do not, in any real sense, own their labour and emphatically do not own the products of it.  From the moment they star their shift at the factory or on the sales floor or in the cubicle, their time belongs to the company and the work they do is not their own, but the company's work.  Only capitalist 'entrepreneurs', the creators of enterprises, truly own the time they are putting into their businesses, in addition to the commodified time they have purchased from their employees; only the labour of entrepreneurs is inalienable, and only entrepreneurs have the right to keep what is produced by their labour: profit.

The work of the artist cuts through this system in some interesting ways.  I'll leave aside for a moment the examination of collaborative media and focus on types of art in which a single worker is typically responsible for the production of a complete work -- the writer, the painter, the sculptor.  It is entirely possible for these workers to sell alienated labour as a commodity, 'creative workers' producing on demand the images required of them by managers incapable of artistry themselves; but this is widely considered a debased form of 'true art', and those who engage in it are in a significant sense not true artists for all that they are engaging in essentially the same activities.  In order to be a true artist, then, the worker must be self-directed.  They must produce only at their own demand; their labour must remain inalienable.

This, of course, creates a problem for the artist living in a capitalist society.  After all, everyone needs money to keep a roof over their head and food in the pantry.  If a person is to devote enough of their time to self-directed work to create significant works of art, they cannot afford to sell much of their time as commodity labour -- to engage in by far the most common and socially approved method of securing an income.  In a sense all true artists are entrepreneurs.  If they are to make a living, they must find ways to profit from their labour, to commodify and monetize what they have produced.

Art is an intrinsically different kind of work from the production of most goods and services, because what artists produce is essentially information.  It is a novel arrangement of symbols designed to produce a reaction in the human mind.  As such, a particular piece of art is not best used if its message is experienced by only one person, if it is 'consumed' as a good service; art demands an audience, a noun which is inherently collective.  This presents an even greater barrier to the process of commodification; not only is it difficult to get any one particular person to pay an amount of money for a piece of art commensurate with the labour that went into it, but it flies in the face of the purpose of art, to communicate with as many people as possible.  A painting which is bought by a rich person and secreted away in a room where only they can appreciate is simply not fulfilling its intended purpose the way a painting hanging in a public gallery is.  Furthermore, an artist lives and dies by their reputation, by convincing people to desire and seek out their future work, and for a reputation to be built, as many people as possible must be allowed to experience the messages which the artist's work communicate.

Society has a vested interest to encourage the production of art, which most of us agree it's important to have in our lives; even as a large segment of society looks down on art as being somehow superfluous or as not real work, I think even they would find their enjoyment of life considerably impoverished if all art disappeared, or even if all artists gave it up and got jobs in the workaday world.  To this end we have created certain tools in an attempt to bridge the tension between the need for the artist to monetize their work and their need for an audience.  One such tool is copyright.  It's a strange beast, a kind of property right which applies not to an object but to an idea -- an arrangement of symbols, a piece of information.  In the vast majority of cases, once a product has been sold, its producer -- be they a crafter who created it entirely through their own labour, or a conglomerate which combined the alienated labour of several workers to produce it and then sold it for a profit -- have no further claim on the object in question.  It becomes the sole property of its purchaser, who can do with it what they wish.  Copyright interferes with the property right of a purchaser by enjoining them from copying the artwork they have paid for and profiting from the sale of these copies.  It is an attempt to ensure that, in disseminating their work to the public, the artist is not forfeiting their livelihood, their ability to monetize their work by producing copies for sale to their audience.  It was intended to be a fairly simple arrangement.

In the intervening years, large industries have grown up around the process of commodifying the work of artists.  I will again focus on publishing, the industry with which I am most familiar.  Traditionally, a writer sends a manuscript to a publisher.  If accepted, the writer assigns part or all of the copyright for their work to the publisher in exchange for a percentage royalty of all sales.  The publisher then employs workers to proofread the manuscript, typeset and print it, design a cover, market the book and offer it for sale through retail outlets.  This is a beneficial arrangement for both parties, as it has traditionally required a lot of work and capital to print books and to market them throughout large territories.  Publishers make a profit by keeping the lion's share of sales; writers receive a reasonable income while retaining the freedom to pursue their work, and are relieved of most of the burdens of commodifying their work and finding an audience.  However, it does introduce a degree of exploitation into the artist's life.  Their labour remains inalienable, at the cost of alienating their copyright, their legal right to directly profit from the production and sale of their own work.  In other industries, those like film production and music recording where greater capital investment and collaboration between artists have been necessary, the exploitative nature of the relationship between the artist and the production company is considerably more intense; it is routine for copyrights to be owned by large companies rather than any of the artists which created the work.

The rise of the internet has changed things considerably for many artists.  Where once copying a work of art such as a book or a recorded song was a fairly labour- and capital-intensive process which benefited considerably from economies of scale, it is now trivial.  Where distributing these copies once required shipping trucks and stores constructed of brick and mortar, all it now requires is the touch of a button.  The rug has been completely pulled out from under the industries of art commodification and their comfortable, exploitative relationship with artists.  Their entire raison d'etre has disappeared.  Of course there is still plenty of room for a publisher to be profitable by embracing the tools provided by the internet, as the success of Amazon among other has shown; but the relationship between writer and publisher is changing dramatically, and companies which are heavily invested in a particular way of doing things are having trouble keeping up.  And under capitalism, when large and powerful corporations are threatened, they have a tendency to lash out, using their money and power to crush that threat.

This is not about 'piracy', the infringement of copyrights by people sharing copies of movies and music over the internet.  For artists, finding an audience is more important in the long run than monetizing every individual copy of their work.  The notion that 'nobody will pay' for what they can get for free is shown for a lie by the thousands of artists who have found ways of effectively monetizing work that they have deliberately released to be shared without charge.  The only challenge is finding the effective ways of balancing the need for an income with the need for an audience -- the problem which copyright was originally created to address.

What this is about is control -- not of content, but of artists.  Production companies don't want to have to give up that comfortable, exploitative relationship.  They don't want to give up the position of power, from which they are able to dictate terms.  Technology allowed them to put artists in a role where their inalienable labour could be artificially, synthetically alienated using the legal tool of copyright; and now that technology has undermined this role, they want it reconstructed using a new legal framework.  The problem with this is that technology is a fact of nature, whereas laws are a social fact; thus, technology simply works the way it works, whereas laws require social enforcement in order to work.  That is why, no matter how harsh the measures taken against 'pirates' become, they will simply not suffice to achieve these companies' aims.  The intenet was designed to allow communication in the event of all-out nuclear war.  A few petty laws are not going to stop it from fulfilling its function.

Identities: Sex and Gender -- The Long and Short of It

We are defined by the identities society assigns to us and by the ones we assign ourselves to.  In order to get down to the meat of what is true about ourselves, we must peel away layer on layer of superfluous labels and frames.  This series of posts is part of my attempt to define what and who I really am.

I begin with the topics of Sex and Gender, two separate but inextricably connected types of identity.  Our sex is the identity constructed for us by society based on our perceived biological characteristics.  I say 'constructed' because sex categories are based on perceptions, not facts.  There is no possible definition of 'male' or 'female' which does not exclude a vast number of people commonly socially assigned to the male and female sexes, and one does not commonly inquire after a person's chromosomes or reproductive capacity or even necessarily their genitals before assigning them to a sex category.  Every year, thousands of newborns are surgically 'assigned' to a sex category because the appearance of their genitals does not permit them to be sexed using the less invasive 'cursory visual inspection' method applied to the rest.  I stress this to dispel immediately any hint of sex-determinism here, any conception that sex is something 'intrinsic' to who a person is.  Biologically speaking, there are no 'males' or 'females'.  There are people with certain organs, people with certain genetic structures, people who are capable or incapable of supplying certain types of gametes to the reproductive process.  Male and Female are statistical artifacts, convenient labels we apply to people to simplify and streamline the process of social interaction.

Once we have been sexed, the concept of gender comes into play.  Where sex is the social construction of our biology, gender is the social meaning attached to sex and the social expectations one is expected to fulfill once one has been sexed.  Because sex is as much a social construct as gender, the separation between the two is not as strong as a lot of people like to think; but it can be a convenient distinction to draw.  The socially assigned definition of your sex is more or less static from the moment it is assigned to you.  Transsexuals and the Intersex movement have made significant headway in redefining the social construction of sex and the possibility of altering sextype once assigned, but it is still a significant social fact that having been born male one is largely considered male for the rest of one's life no matter what one's biological or social reality may be.  Gender, as commonly understood, consists of expectations that are inherently nonbiological; sex, though also a nonbiological construct, is grounded directly in biology whereas gender is grounded mainly in the perception of assigned sex.  Therefore, gender expectations function at a remove from any explicit reference to biological reality.  Where the construction of the sextype explicitly references such biological facts as penises and testicles, vaginas and uteri, breasts, beards, and X or Y chromosomes, most gender constructs not explicitly involving body shape and the physical acts of genital intercourse or reproduction reference only the sextype, using it as shorthand.  Gender constructs therefore tend to be more fluid, culturally dependent, changing with time, place and observer.  Gender is much more amenable to social manipulation than sex.  Its boundaries are more nebulous and, must be policed much more actively and continuously than sex.  Cisgendered people -- those who perform, be it enthusiastically or reluctantly,  the gender obligations attached to their assigned sex -- gain considerable social privileges over the transgendered, those who for whatever reason cannot or will not conform to gendering and sextyping; but those obligations are often implied rather than explicit, unwritten rules rather than codified laws.  They can be adapted, subverted, remixed, and deliberately altered.  Sex is a hard and fast social fact, but gender can be negotiated.

At birth, I was assigned to the 'male' sex for commonly accepted reasons.  (No surgical intervention beyond routine circumcision was involved.)  I grew up as a male, with masculine gender expectations.  I have a vivid memory of being at a friend's house, wanting to watch My Little Pony, and being told with intense disgust that "that's a girl's show".  Likewise, I always preferred She-Ra over He-Man; and looking back, I think a large part of it was the latter's explicit gender policing, its offering of the eponymous man-among-men and the craven, laughingstock Prince Adam as delimiting points of the continuum of masculinity.  I often took on female roles when playing make-believe, and was incessantly mocked for it.  I came to internalize the idea that I was somehow broken, that I was continually failing at being a boy.

Around the age of 15, I began to lose interest entirely in performing the social expectations attached to the male gender role.  I had never been especially good at it, having little aptitude for understanding these rules and regulations; my behaviour had never been particularly 'masculine' as commonly defined.  But this was the time at which I underwent a transition in self-identification from being less-than-a-man to being something completely other.  It was slow at first, and was bound up in the various processes of 'searching for identity' that are part of adolescence, in my embrace of satanism, anarchism, feminism, transhumanism, and the goth counterculture.  My yearning for freedom from the strictures of gendered behaviour was part of what drew me to these ideals and philosophies, and in turn they helped me loose those internalized strictures and redefine what gender would be in relation to my own self-concept.  I moved into social circles in which it was much more acceptable for males to modify their appearance in ways traditionally reserved for females -- wearing their hair long, wearing makeup, jewellery and nail polish, dressing in styles of clothing generally reserved for women.  Bit by bit I moved along the continuum from acceptable masculine appearance to 'guyliner' and black nail-polish Gothboi; then, in a sudden rush, to full-on transvestism.  For a brief period I tried to 'dress like a girl' -- to make my appearance over into a perfect performance of femininity -- but soon came to understand that feminine gender expectations (particularly those attached to appearance) are even more restrictive and more actively policed than masculine, and that no matter how perfectly I performed them it would never be satisfactory, to myself or to most of the population, not even to my friends and social circles.  But I had no intention to give up the feelings of freedom and comfort in my own body that deliberate defiance of gender norms inspired in me.  Instead, I went in the other direction, wearing women's clothes and outrageously elaborate night-mask makeup while making little effort to conceal the obvious markers of my 'male' sex.

It was not long before I began to learn that many of my male privileges were largely contingent on properly performing my assigned social role.  Though my wild 'costumes' were accepted, sometimes enthusiastically, by my friends and acquaintances; though my family were understanding and remarkably patient; perfect strangers felt the need to publicly shame me.  I was ostracized even at gay bars, social spaces purportedly intended to cater to those who do not fulfill socially constructed gender norms, by cross-dressers dedicated to the perfect performance of femininity and masculinity that I found myself incapable of sustaining.  I learned that, if the cisgendered are privileged at the expense of the transgendered, those who conform to any gender role at all are privileged over those who conform to none.  One evening while walking home from a night at the club, literally a block from my own home, I was propositioned, then sexually and physically assaulted when I refused, by a cisgendered man who seemed to project his own sexual confusion on to me, conflating transgenderism, homosexuality and pedophelia, repeatedly screaming as he punched me in the face that he had a girlfriend and didn't want to fuck little boys.  The Goth clubs and parties which had once been the arena of my metamorphosis became my only refuge, the only place where I could be what I had come to think of as the person I truly was.  What had been a source of happiness and comfort became a further source of angst and depression.

Slowly, I have retreated back into the shell of cisgender privilege.  I rarely dress up anymore, and when I do I feel self-conscious and ugly.  My body shape has changed and my pretty skirts and dresses no longer fit me.  My wife loves her 'pretty gothy boi' and would like to see me like that again, but I have trouble summoning the courage to try.  I feel like a butterfly with broken wings.

But even if I never get back into that place of freedom and beauty that I had for so very brief a time (and I will not stop trying, but I need to be in a place where I'm not so beholden to others and find some of the old fire and rage I once had before I make the attempt again), the experience has permanently changed me.  I am no longer a 'male' in my own eyes.  My penis does not define who I am.  Social expectations of what is or is not masculine have no hold on me, except insofar as I would face direct consequences for failing to fulfill them, and even then I willfully defy them whenever I think I can get away with it.  I have lost most of my internalized gender expectations, masculine and feminine both; and any I realize that I still carry, I work hard to root out; they mean nothing but captivity and shame to me.

I'm not sure what my 'gender identity' is now, having not found a construction that really appeals to me; I tend to use the term 'androgynous', although it has some implications I'm not comfortable with.  I don't get hung up on pronouns that way a lot of people do, more out of lack of desire to get into a big hassle than anything else -- 'he' and 'she' are equally incorrect, 'zie/zer' is awkward, and getting into a fight with grammar nazis about singular 'they' just makes me tired.  (One major attraction of my wife's obsessive Finnophilia is that Finnish third person pronouns are intrinsically non-gendered; I like the idea of insisting on 'han/hanet/hanen'.)  There's a lot that's uncertain, but the one thing I am certain of is that no matter how I dress or what my body looks like, I'm out of the prison of my socially assigned sex and gender and I'm never going back.

Tips for Life in the Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape: Basic Survival Skills

• Always be ready to leave immediately.
• Always have a place to hide.
• Stockpile food and water.
• Always know where you can get food, water, and medical care.
• Never sit with your back to an entrance.
• Always have weapons ready to hand.
• Including both melee and ranged weapons.
• Learn how to use them.
• Learn how to do without them.
• Keep your mind and your body fit.
• Always lock your doors.
• If possible, always have someone on watch.
• Never fight back if you know you can't win.
• If you fight back and win, cripple them.
• Never pick a fight you don't absolutely need to have.
• Make friends with the biggest kid on the block.
• Find and join a pack.  Family and close friends tend to work well.
• Trust your pack.  If they're not trustworthy, find a new one.
• If anyone else is not trustworthy, get rid of them.
• Work out the pecking order right away.  Stick to it.
• If you're the leader, put down challengers hard and fast.
• Don't refuse to tolerate all dissent; listen to well-intended advice.
• Make it absolutely clear when unquestioned obedience is necessary, and why.
• Otherwise, explain yourself calmly and clearly.
• Change your mind when you're wrong.
• If you're not the leader, remain loyal until you no longer can.
• Learn new skills.  Those that fulfill the necessities of survival are best.
• Contribute to the overall welfare of the pack.
• Refuse to tolerate parasites.  Everyone must contribute.
• The following are not 'parasites': children, the sick, the disabled, or the elderly.  They are all capable of contributing.  Sacrifice them only if it is absolutely necessary.
• Be prepared to do whatever is necessary to survive.
• Don't treat this list as a joke.

Vengeance Shall Be Mine

My latest TV obsession is Revenge, a delightful little series just nearing the end of its first season.  As I am a big fan of revenge in general and revenge-plot stories, I had to give this a try when it hit my radar, and I was not disappointed.  It's a tale uniquely suited to our times, thoroughly enjoyable if a little over-plotted at times.

The premise: when the main character, "Emily Thorne", was a little girl her father was betrayed and ruined by his friends and business associates in the Hamptons jet set, framed for treason and money laundering.  Decades later, Emily has returned to her old beach house in the Hamptons under an assumed name and identity.  While working her way into the lives and affections of those who were closes to her father, she proceeds to destroy the lives of those responsible for the conspiracy one by one.

The series does its best, from the very first scene, to establish the theme that revenge is evil bad and wrong, that it destroys innocent lives and makes you into a terrible person, that we should forgive those who trespass against us instead of nursing grudges.  I can't help but feel, however, that it ends up subverting this theme more effectively than even most straight-played revenge fantasies.  For one thing, however much the writers strain to bring bad karma down on Emily, the fact is that this is entertainment and it works because people find revenge entertaining.  We all love to see people get their just deserts, and seeing Emily's plans come together and the guilty ripped apart in the ways that hurt them the most is an absolute delight.  It's kind of hard to convince people that something that feels so right is wrong, and it's a real tribute to our civilization that we ever managed it at all.

Second, it comes clearer and clearer that the fallout, emotional damage and unintended consequences of Emily's revenge plot have more to do with the elaborate double life she is forced to lead than from the act of revenge in and of itself.  "Amanda Clarke doesn't exist anymore." she says, speaking of her former life.  In attempting to evade not just her victims' radar but the social strictures we live under that prevent the pursuit of more direct and straightforward vengeance, she has made herself into an empty cipher.  Her gracious and friendly outward persona is like a velvet glove over an iron fist; the sharpness and hardness comes out during her dealings the few others who are in on the plan, but that is itself another layer of deception - self-deception, this time, as she believes she must leave all human empathy behind and dedicate her entire being to her revenge.  Obviously this is unhealthy and invites catastrophe.

But perhaps most importantly, it is made clear again and again that in the world of the 1%, where the justice of the state is bought and sold on a daily basis, revenge is the only way to restore the balance if your rights are violated.  It seems like almost every character has some sort of vendetta they're pursuing, for the most part, outside of the rule of law; and even when the law is involved, it's subverted and danced around as open enemies collude in pursuit of mutual advantages.  In contrast stand a few members of the 99%, salt-of-the-Earth types caught up unwilling and unwitting in the schemes of the untouchable elite.  Emily Thorne is able to pursue her vengeance only because of a bequest from her father which puts her on the same level as those she is stalking.  The clear implication is that not only are the rich above the law, but that there is simply no justice to be had when they abuse the common people, beyond the sharp and simple justice of the gun and be damned to the consequences.  The good folks at ABC may want to be careful what messages they're sending; for all their attempts at preachy morality, their viewers might just end up taking the real moral of the story to heart.

Alternative Econ 101: Modern Money Theory

I've been doing a good bit of reading lately about concepts of economics that run counter to the prevailing 'wisdom' on the subject.    I'm going to be posting some quick intros to these concepts along with links.  In my experience, lack of a deep understanding of economics and willingness to be intellectually bullied by people who think they know what they're talking about is a major reason so many people are happily standing by while the political centre gets shifted incrementally rightward.  (Quick side note: people who uses the phrase 'Econ 101' in a political argument rarely understand any econ beyond the 101 level and probably misunderstood half of that too.)  The ideas of modern money theory are a prime example of this.

The primary observations of MMT as it is commonly known relate to the nature of the money supply in a fiat-money economy.  For those who don't know, fiat money is money created by a central national bank like the Bank of Canada or the US Federal Reserve at the behest of the state central government.  Before 1971 the international monetary standard was at least nominally a 'gold standard' in which currency was theoretically exchangeable for a set quantity of gold on demand.  This meant that currency was in effect a form of commodity with a limited supply.  Since 1971 the countries of the world have been on a 'fiat money' standard in which the quantities of currency in circulation are determined directly by the central bank.  Instead of being a (theoretical) guarantee of exchange for a commodity, fiat currency is 'valuable' because it is 'legal tender' which can be used to pay taxes.

This leads to an interesting consequence.  For most people and organizations, you have to get money before you spend it.  Simple, right?  First you get the money, then you spend it.  When money is a commodity with limited supply, the government works the same way - first it has to get money, by imposing taxes or by borrowing it, then it gets to spend money from its 'treasury'.

However, according to MMT, once a government moves from commodity to fiat money, this is no longer the case -- in fact, the reverse is true.  The government is the only reason there is any money in circulation; in order to get spending money, the government simply prints it.  ('Printing' is a bit of a misnomer; in this day and age, most money does not have a literal physical existence, so the creation and destruction of money are both a matter of changes to balances in bank-account ledgers at the central bank.)  The money created by the government runs around the economy, passing from the recipient to companies to individuals to companies and so on, and eventually gets paid as taxes back to the government, at which point it is effectively destroyed.

Let's say that again because it might not have quite sunk in.  Under a fiat money system, the government does not need to finance its spending because it is the source of all money.  Taxes and government debt have become little more than tools for shaping macroeconomic policy.  The government does not need to tax before it can spend.  It does not need to borrow before it can spend, either.  The government creates all the money; therefore the government can spend all of the money it wants.

There's quite a bit more to MMT, but that one simple fact should be enough to wipe away a lot of the haze that surrounds our discourse on government spending.  There's a fashion for 'austerity' these days, based on the premise that government spending is 'out of control', that the governments of the world are too deeply in debt and can't afford all those lavish social programs; that, like spendthrift people who run up huge credit card bills buying stuff they can't afford, the governments of the world are going to have to cut back if they don't want, I guess, their infrastructure to be repossessed and their countries to be foreclosed?  The simple extension of the metaphor makes it clear how absurd this is.  We keep hearing about governments 'running out of money' or 'defaulting of their debt'.  This is a lie.  It is a lie used to bully people who don't understand economics by those who should know better.  'Wasteful' deficit spending is not going to make the government go broke.  The government creates all of the money.  Therefore, the government by definition has all of the money it could possibly need.

Further Reading:
Modern Money Mechanics
Bill Mitchell's blog
Kindergarten Guide to MMT (PDF)

May you not fail to accomplish your obligatory vapid pledge of self-improvement over the following 365 days

I failed.

As to my previously stated objectives for the past year, I accomplished not a one to my satisfaction. This is the first time since I started this blog that I have been unable to look back on my previous year's resolutions with a degree of pride. Some of the blame goes to chronic pain and depression, but the lion's share must rest with my own lack of motivation and discipline. I state this not as some sort of self-flagellation, but as a simple fact. I need to improve my performance if I am to remain worthy of my own self-esteem. To that end, I am tightening up my declaration of intentions this year to reflect increased discipline and realism. One consistent problem with my resolutions has been their vagueness, and the loosely worded 'x number out of' a series of commitments, which gave me too much latitude to ignore easily achievable objectives with the excuse of chasing the hazier and less realistic options. Thus, I am committing myself, in the eyes of myself (the only god I desire to please), to carry out all of the following concrete and achievable goals over the next year:

• Exercise for 20 minutes each and every day.
• Study the Finnish language with my wife for an hour every week.
• Continue to improve my knowledge and skill in food-gardening and produce a significantly expanded yield.
• Create writing intended for publication each and every day.

To expand on the last point: by 'intended for publication' I do not necessarily mean for paid publication, though I hope to maintain some degree of income generation from all of it, but rather that it will all be intended to be seen by the reading public, either in this blog or in a further venue. One of my greatest regrets in the past years is the extent to which I have allowed my blogging to lapse, particularly given the fascinating and in many ways heartening recent developments - the Arab Spring, Occupy Globally, and the increasing feeling that revolution is in the air - as well as less optimistic tides too numerous to list. Therefore, I am further committing to a renewed focus on blogging and to a minimum of twice-weekly blog posts to be submitted by 6 AM CST on Mondays and Thursdays. I'm going to be re-orienting my work away from the kind of current-events commentary that makes up the bulk of the blog so far and focus on more substantial posts on topics such as egoist/Satanic moral ideals, feminist and gender politics, alternative economics, permaculture/greenpunk lifestyles, transhumanist and mutualist political theory which I think have been some of my better pieces here. I'm going to be permanently ending the 'Signals of Impending Doom' series; anyone who can't see the signals for themself is blind, and I'm more interested right now in explicating how individuals and political progressive movements generally can maximize our opportunities in whatever form of collapse does happen to wash over us in the coming decades.

My thinking on these topics has matured considerably since I started this blog as a wild-eyed, somewhat panicked response to the alarming trends that I had failed to see developing around me during my youth. I've been thinking that the title and format of this blog are inappropriate for the range and scope of topics I've taken on and may be migrating to new platform, so stay tuned.

In encouraging news, this year has been a landmark for me in terms of achieving my lifelong dream of becoming a professional science fiction author. I published my first story for pay; I gave my first public reading, of said story; and I'm developing some good connections in the local writing scene and have several complete and pretty decent pieces floating around in search of publishers, with a good half-dozen more in varying stages of completion. (Yes, yes, I know; I could just post them on my blog. Call it a holdover of capitalist thinking, but I can't see calling myself a 'professional author' until I'm at least getting professional rates for my best work.) My wife and I are looking at practicable financial independence at some point in the next several months, and our 'five-year plan' finally looks to be back on track after a considerable hiatus. In any case, I wish anyone still following this rag good luck in the next planetary orbital period, and may all your actions be for your own greater good.