Monday 26 August 2002

Pic of the day: Inside every straight man is a pretty female wood elf waiting to get out. (And an old wizard, and a drunken dwarf, and a rampaging longsword-wielding barbarian, but that's outside the scope of this entry.) Screenshot Dark Age of Camelot.

Reflections on Venus envy

I came home from work, played a little bit on my computer, then I felt very tired and woke up six hours later. Oh, this is going to work wonders for my day rhythm! NOT. I'm not ecstatically happy about my fast approaching workday being spent in a haze of tiredness. Then again, I'm probably just spoiled. I understand this is what many people experience every day. Not to mention that MOST people spend their entire life in a haze, and only for a few brief moments (if at all) have anything near the clarity of mind that I've taken for granted since I became an adult. So I'm not even entitled to whine. As if that makes me feel any better ... -_-

***

There's a nifty comic called Venus Envy. Yes, it is a deliberate and subtle pun on a certain phrase by Sigmund Freud, which for a long while became enshrined as truth by people who for various reasons wanted a religion and wouldn't admit it so used psychoanalysis for this purpose instead. Today I think most of us are aware that there are a lot more men who want to be women than the other way around. And small wonder, since women can wear anything from miniskirts to business suit with matching tie. Anyway, the comic is about these kind of things. Men who are women, women who are men, women who aren't men but still lust for other women. And probably a few more permutations that escape me at the moment.

The comic is written with so much wisdom and sympathy that I find it hard to believe the author is not very familiar with these themes, from close up. I think reading it will help give people a better understanding of the people whose psychological gender does not match their body. They're not all a bunch of loonies, you know. Well, actually they are, but that doesn't mean they aren't normal in all other ways. Or at least as likely to be so as anyone else, whatever that says.

***

Let us face the facts here, people. When a man believes for real that he is a women, that's a delusion of psychiatric proportions. There is no fundamental difference between this and believing that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, or Jesus Christ, or a dolphin. He is not. But on the bright side he is not likely to try to swim off to the ocean, or walk on water, or conquer Europe. So it is fairly harmless.

Also not all psychiatric conditions are created equal. Transgender syndrome is pretty limited. It is not like schizophrenia, a massive breakdown of higher mental functions. Nor is it like bipolar disorder, a massive breakdown of mood regulation. Nor is it like autism, a massive breakdown of communication and interaction. If there is any structural damage in the brain, it must be very limited, for by and large these people think and feel like us. Except they think and feel like the opposite sex, which can be impractical at times.

If a white man believes that he is black, there is little chance for him to be accepted by the black community, and he probably won't be too popular among his fellow whites either. I am not sure the solution is to use pigment therapy to make him really really dark. Similarly, I am not too optimistic about hormone therapy to make men into women. (Or the other way around, though this seems less common.) The best they can hope for is a few people to understand them and sympathize with them despite knowing the truth. Trying to pretend they were born like that is unlikely to work in the long run. People may be superficial, but they do notice irrelevant details, and these do add up.

There are people who believe they are actually elves, or animals born in a human body by some cosmic mistake or karma or whatever. We simply cannot accomodate them all. But there is no reason to write them off as total wreckage just for that. The rest of their mental functions may still be intact, or what passes for intact about humans. There are few if any among us who don't have some kind of delusion or phobia or compulsion that impacts our life to some degree. We'll just have to live with it, and not give up on each other.