It seems that being a boy trapped in a girl’s body (or vice versa) just isn’t on the bleeding edge of ridiculousness any longer. Ever since being an annoying Hippie Lite in my youth, the art and science of provoking parental disgust and hopelessness has been steadily accelerating.
Often, I’ve wondered how far it can be taken. Will it finally run out of gas at goth, emo, massive tattooing, body piercing, gender-bending, or gender confusion? As each generation settles down to have kids, the outrageousness bar gets raised. If mom is covered in ink, what’s an offspring to do to shock her?
I’ll admit, I did think trans was the natural endpoint, and the only place to go was full Alex Keaton. How quaint, grasshopper.
I like to think I’m a creative guy, but I never would have come up with WAP lyrics becoming mainstream or Lizzo being a role model. She’s the best thing since anorexia.
Certainly, I thought, no Presidential administration would hire a cross-dressing, luggage-stealing, bald pervert in heels to manage the nation’s nuclear waste disposal. Again, laughably wrong.
Even Dylan Mulvaney isn’t far enough out there. You’d think there would be a Women’s March just to protest his insulting sexist shenanigans.
Alas, predictably, I have failed to keep an open mind, as in, open to anything more stupid than the last idiocy.
Well, they’ve done it again. They’ve brought back the completely debunked Multiple Personality Disorder. Or Dissociative Identity Disorder as they now call it. This disorder was described in a 1973 book in which a patient named Sybil claimed to have sixteen personalities, and described the psychiatric treatment employed to assist her in integrating them into one. Later Sybil admitted she made the whole thing up (see: making up shit, below).
In this post by Karlyn Borysenko, we meet Jacob Lester and Ayden Parish, co-presenters of a talk on Plurality, “the presence of more than one self-aware person or entity in one body.” Jacob and Ayden inhabit one corpus along with four others, who were not invited to participate in the presentation. I’d be pissed. I’d bet the other four were conspiring to fuck up the presentation by making Jacob and Ayden look like lunatic crackpots with Tourette’s who can’t form a coherent sentence. Maybe they did. It sounds pretty incoherent.
One of the six personas is a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As Karlyn points out, it is not clear who gets the diploma.
Jacob or Ayden (not sure which one) explains that there is significant overlap between plural and trans and that it would be best not to divulge your “plural system” to therapy professionals, lest, I’m guessing here, said therapists will think you’re fucking nuts and won’t allow you to proceed with the completely sane and normal process of disfiguring yourself because of a delusion. The full presentation by this imagined duo is behind a paywall, so from here on out I will resort to making up shit, which is my journalistic strong suit.
Hold on a sec. Before we depart into flights of cynical fancy, here’s a headline I ran across. To paraphrase: There is a discussion among professional trans ghouls whether or not one needs to get permission and buy-in from ALL the personalities within the “system” before proceeding with transgender mutilation care.
Which begs the question: What if one of the personalities objects to the transing process, and prefers to remain the imaginary gender with which it identifies? Do the other five personalities just have to “suck it up”? Not unlike the way the general public must do when a trans person is afoot.
Maybe the others can “cancel” the dissenting apparition, shouting it down with transphobic slurs and accusations of racism, which evidently can apply even if there is only one race involved.
If one entity wants to be a trans male, another a trans female, and yet another is gender nonconforming, who gets the puberty blockers?
Here’s another wrinkle: Will Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and DEI apply to the discussion? If one of the personalities is a black (sorry, Black), genderqueer, postmenopausal, differently-abled, neurodiverse, womxn who identifies as a cat, is there any discussion to be had? Who prevails?
I suppose the existing six self-aware entities could hire a seventh self-aware entity who has training in DEI human-resource administration. Sort of an in-house personnel department. Surely this professional could parse this confusion. Will there be an appeals process?
Imagine the chaos of internal pronoun usage. It would be possible to misgender oneself, become incensed, and then demand apologia from yourself for the offense.
I’m beginning to think this approach is untenable for rapid-onset surgical intervention (ROSI). It could take years to get those genitals chopped off, which will significantly cut into profits while patients have time to come to their senses.
Many trans people occupy their time trolling unsuspecting victims for “gotcha” moments where they record misgendering offenses made because they don’t “pass” for the opposite sex— and they damned well know it. These offenses are proudly displayed on social media to try to ruin the lives of ordinary people minding their own fucking business. Many trans people demand the affirmation of society, and if not forthcoming, claim to have their identity “erased.” I’m here to tell you, tranny, your spittle-flecked, screaming, green-haired, eye-bulging, vitriol-spewing visage two inches from my nose is far from “erased.”
I’m a child trapped in a geriatric’s body, but I don’t require people to pat me on the head and give me a cookie when I display a sad face.
I can’t help wondering if this is all an attempt to normalize “ordinary” gender dysphoria. Imagine the shrink: “The good news is that your child has only one personality, so deciding to commit suicide won’t involve the committee process, which usually bogs these things down— sometimes for years.”
East coast Lisa gives the ‘She’s Baaaack!’ piece a big thumbs up! Glad my thought gave you and Lisa a laugh. Not rushing demise, I’ll suffer on. Keep engaging and entertaining us with your writings. You probably wouldn’t cut it in real garbage anyway.
A dizzying ride through a very warped world. As a relatively simple, no preferred pronoun guy, who needed to Google the lyrics to WAP and the rapper Lizzo, and who watched a portion of the video combining the two, I am comforted in the knowledge that life is finite.