Some Arguments Against Free Market Capitalism in Some Cases

It was interesting how the viewers of Joe Rogan think we shouldn't force a baker to bake a cake for a gay customer because we need limited government, but when Alex Jones comes on the show, WE MUST REIGN IN THE BIG TECH COMPANIES CENSORING ELITE PHILOSOPHERS LIKE ALEX jOnEs and we require STRICTER REGULATION!!!!@@######

Apparently the line for government involvement is drawn somewhere between gay rights on one hand and Alex Jones on the other.

Wedding Cakes for Gay People

I think people who make free market capitalist arguments for letting the baker discriminate against gay people are very naive about how the world works. It's like Dave Rubin talking points, where it sounds like he's an edgy 15 year old who just stumbled on an Ayn Rand book and thinks they've figured out how to solve the world. Dave would have 2 arguments:

1. A baker who pisses off too many of their customers won't be in business, so they can't discriminate too much.

How much is 'too much'? I'd argue any amount is 'too much' because it just shouldn't happen. The reason we protect minorities is because they are a minority - as in, not the majority. They on their own cannot shape policy or render a business bankrupt via boycott (and boycotts just in general don't work for anything... see fast fashion and child labor, etc). What we'd end up with is a minority constantly getting bullied with nobody caring. The only other solution is to ratchet up social justice tenfold, but half the country thinks we are getting too politically correct and Donald Trump is literally the president. That's not happening.

2. It affects personal liberty too much.

What about the liberty of gay people not to feel like shit in day to day life? Applying basic standards of nondiscrimination in places of business (ie, not kicking your customers out) is very little to ask. This isn't about your personal life. The same arguments have been used in the past to discriminate against black or trans people in the past. In the case of rights of black people, we had the civil rights movement which in part involved forcing people to serve black people and it made the world a better place. We do that, but for gay and now trans people.

One might have a better argument about rejecting the gay cake job if the cake is supposed to have a giant penis and asshole printed on the top of the cake. For the most part though, wedding cakes are just normal (albeit fancy) cakes.

Building Codes 

The worst Dave Rubin meltdown for me was coincidentally also when he was on the Joe Rogan show, where he argued we don't need building codes because we have Yelp. It sounds like I'm exaggerating to make fun of him, but I'm not and that's the funny part. We need building codes because we don't want to live in a world where we have to be an expert on everything to know whether what we buy will kill or maim us. Buildings would be expensive to inspect and easy to scam with by cheapening out here and there and we'd be none-the-wiser. By the time a contractor is known to have a bad reputation, many people have lost their life savings in houses which are now worthless or even worse, died in fires or earthquakes like a third world country. We live in a world where people believe in homeopathy, religions, and vaccines cause autism. Do we really want to leave every important decision to individual research when people are this stupid? Do we also trust the contractors to be honest enough to think about their reputation long term, or will they fall into the human impulse of short term gain and go into another field to run another scam somewhere else? People are cheaters. They cheat first, cover it up second, and justify it later.

People like Dave Rubin generalize so much ("government NEVER does anything well") and push easy solutions (free market capitalism) when like many things in life, the devil is in the details. Theories painting a free market utopia are largely pointless if it doesn't work in reality. For people like Dave Rubin, one would be tempted to argue he is pushing feels over facts. For him specifically though I would call it 'Koch money over facts' instead.

Pollution/Global Warming

And finally, I have qualms with extreme free market capitalism when it comes to pollution or climate change. The idea that companies which pollute too much would be forced to pollute less for their own health or because people will boycott their company is ridiculous (the latter of which is already covered). This is especially true for climate change, which seems like an impossible to fix problem with negatives which come slowly and gradually, making it easy to deny or put off. When companies find out they can make more money by polluting more, they will pollute more. They care only about money, and if they don't do it, others will and have an advantage over them. This is a race to the bottom, but once we've trashed the entire planet at least we've generated good shareholder value! I'm sure when a mother's children died in the first earthquake their house encountered due to poor building codes and her husband died drinking poisoned water, she can sue for enough cash to resurrect all of them. /s

We can even try to fix this within a capitalist framework like cap and trade, which used to be championed by Republicans... except now apparently they don't even believe global warming is real now? What the hell is up with that?

Free Market Capitalism: When you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like nails.

Pondering on Sexual Harassment

I will talk about dynamics between men and women now. First story is about Twitch boob streamers. Second is about a sexual harassment complaint and prostitution. Third is about domestic violence. None of these sections feature very insightful or amazing analyses, but here we go.

---

Twitch boob streamers are female streamers who stream on a video game streaming site called Twitch. Usually people play games live while a the audience interacts with the streamer. Some enterprising young women started streaming themselves doing various activities while being scantily clad. Essentially they are women who try to turn guys on so they can give them money.

The problem this causes is mostly Twitch's fault in my opinion. Twitch's TOS doesn't allow for sexual content, but they poorly enforce their terms. They can't seem to decide if they want to allow boobie streamers. This creates confusion, and people who are angry that somebody is profiting from breaking the rules of Twitch. While the line between a woman removing a few buttons on her shirt to get some more viewers and a booby streamer is blurred, there are extremes which Twitch still turns a blind eye to.

This is a problem of expectations. Nobody gets mad a cam girl in a porn site gets money. That's because it's allowed on the site and the entire point of the site. People get what they expect. I might like Big Macs, but if I go to a 3 Michelin starred place and get a Big Mac, I'm going to be pretty upset. It's not because the Big Mac is all of a sudden disgusting. It's because I didn't get what I was advertised. What does Twitch want to be about? Is it a gaming only site, or will it allow "IRL", whatever that means?

But also, I think a good chunk of the blowback is really from a bunch of horny men who are jealous some beautiful women get to get paid and coveted for being who they are. (To be fair, being beautiful all the time is actually kind of time consuming. This isn't as simple as printing money.) Some people are disgusted by women who appear sexually promiscuous. Harassing women for that is total bullshit. That should go without saying.

As a trans person I can really identify with the jealousy part though. There are a lot of men who never find women who really adore them and covet them like they might covet many women. As a trans woman, I'm never getting that treatment. To some extent I think women who are ugly can relate. (In general though, women find it much easier to get sex if they want it than men... unless you're a trans woman. That, and the whole issue with envy of women from trans people, makes the experience a little different.)

Booby streamers don't often say they are booby streamers. They like to play it off like they are getting viewers for their amazing personality or skills at a game. This dishonesty is to some extent Twitch's fault due to their TOS which is oddly enforced, but I'm sure some women use their sexuality to make money but don't want to be confronted with the fact that it makes them a porn actor. Similarly, women who exchange sex for plane tickets, fancy dinners, and a rich husband, might be prostitutes or 'wife for hires' don't want to acknowledge that that is who they are.

But there's nothing really wrong with that. Women should be allowed to profit off of their sexuality. It's unfair that a lot of people can't do that, but life isn't fair. Personally I find the idea of 'paid love' kind of dishonest and distasteful because I have idealistic views about romance and love, but if an arrangement works out between two people, then good for them.

--

A man offers initially to pay for tickets for a woman's trip to GDQ, which is a charity event where people who try to play games are quickly as possible try to raise donations for a charity. She would be staying over for free with him in his hotel room.

It's not entirely clear if there were clear terms struck, but it seems the agreement was she would at least be his cuddle buddy in bed to make it up to her. Eventually their exchanges got extremely sexual, with the woman talking about all kinds of sexual stuff. She said she will be his sex toy for the week.

On the first night he cuddled her. The guy claims he put his arms over her breasts, and she lifted her shirt up, and things escalated from there. We only have his side of the story, and parts of it at that. On the second day she slept on the floor. Eventually he kicked her our of his room, though he did pay for her flight home. The woman complained about sexual harassment to GDQ.

The woman herself is a shady person who tried to get into GDQ with an expired pass, receiving a 2 year ban. She tried to come back yet again this year. The man's ex-girlfriend posted screenshots showing him saying he's trying to get her busted. It is his ex though.

When it comes to intimacy between men/women especially, it becomes weird. Some people are hell-bent on blaming men or women for everything and calling things rape or sexual assault when it was barely anything. Some other people have very weird, anti-women perspectives on things. Context matters when judging behavior. (What's okay off work at a bar is not okay at work.) Young people make stupid mistakes together and often it ends up being he-said she-said. People interpret things differently, human memory is unreliable, and people often lie. It's sad. Consent is tricky. But I for one would be okay with explicit consent the first time... literally asking if they'd be okay with sex. It's considered socially awkward and for many people it kills the mood but I think it simplifies things. If authorities keep attacking men by default over every sexual mishap, it will increase resentment in men. It's really a case by case basis kind of thing. It's possible to host a family-friendly event that looks out for LGBT people and women while not attacking men. GDQ has banned the man indefinitely, though it's unclear if the investigation is ongoing, and GDQ has better information than we do.

If a woman offers sex in exchange for the man paying for her accommodations and travel expenses to an event, she is literally a prostitute. Prostitution doesn't mean the prostitute is forced to have sex with her client. She gets to change her mind and walk out. But she doesn't get to take a guy's money and walk out without having sex with him. That's a scam. If the client refuses to let her go and insists on sex, that is sexual harassment.

The guy is stupid for thinking a girl's going to be willing to have sex over some plane tickets and not just hiring some cheap prostitute instead. The girl is stupid for agreeing to have sex with a man she's never met before, giving him all of her power in the situation knowingly, and not thinking to have an alternative ready in case the plane ticket deal falls through. I don't think it's fair to shit on the guy for being very lonely and wanting sex, just like I don't think it's really fair to shit on the girl for being willing to sell her body.

Do we believe the accuser by default? It's tricky. I don't know what the statistics are on false accusations, and maybe nobody knows. The crime of falsely accusing somebody of a crime on purpose ought to be as bad as the punishment for said crime, if not worse. But how do we know what happened if we weren't there? Having a long line of accusers certainly tips the scales, but in many cases it isn't like that. In the case of Kavanaugh, it was a job interview for which we had a very long line of competent judges. The Supreme Court justices serve for life. It's better to be safe than sorry in that case. His behavior during the hearings, from his lack of control of his emotions to his blatant dishonesty, demonstrate he was unfit for the office. (Lying under oath isn't just bad. It's illegal. He should be in jail right now.) In this case, I really don't know. I really depends on what happened in the hotel room on that day.

---

There was another man vs woman incident in gaming, when a Twitch streamer slapped his wife off camera after the woman was very upset that he wouldn't drop his stream to eat dinner with his family. She threw various objects, most of which didn't get shown on camera. She was very persistent and very annoying. The man was apprehended by police, and I believe charged.

I'm not sure that a man should lose his family for a single slap. It doesn't make the slap okay. Throwing objects at your husband also isn't okay. To be fair, none of the objects sounded like it was very dangerous. There were no sounds of glass shattering or metal objects crashing through.

I wouldn't be surprised if the justice system was biased against men. People kept talking about how he 'beat the shit out of her'. If one slap counts as 'beating the shit' out of someone, maybe you've never played a video game or watched a violent movie in your entire life. If you got the shit beat out of you and you stop crying 3 seconds later and have the vitality to continue throwing random objects at somebody, then you weren't hit that hard. Does it make slapping people okay? No. But we shouldn't be so loose with out language. It's like the people who call everything 'sexual assault', trivializing actual cases of sexual assault.

Men are on average stronger than women. Not all men are stronger than women. For many years of my life I lived as a guy and most girls could beat me up if they really wanted to. People look at domestic violence from the lens of gender, not power. Even when men are stronger than women, they are not so exponentially stronger to the point where they are incapable of inflicting violence that hurts but doesn't injure. It's not like men are so strong, they helplessly destroy a woman by flicking their fingers or accidentally bumping into them.

Women are not mentally retarded. They are adults just like men. They should be subjected to the same standards for better and for worse.

---

Does it really matter to me who was in the wrong in the specific cases I mentioned? No. I think it's useful to think about these situations and explore dynamics between men and women.

Anti-SJWs and Pushing Back Against Social Conservatives

Being a SJW has gotten a bad reputation in the past several years. Instead of a person who cares about making the world a better place, we now think of a blue-haired female feminist yelling about something benign being unacceptably racist. I think it's time to push back a little bit against the 'anti-SJWs'... These are people who spend all of their time railing against SJWs.

Social Justice is a Good Thing
What race or gender I am or where I was born were accidents of birth, purely up to chance. The best way for me to construct the rules of society is to construct it in a way such that I would feel okay being born with any race, gender, or at any location. That's what fairness and equality means. It's tough to achieve because people understand their own problems better than that of others, and give themselves excuses for their failures while refusing to give the same charity to others. We empathize with people like us.

I think the way to re-frame the situation of somebody lecturing you about how calling people fags is not nice is to think about Colin Kaepernick. He knelt at the US flag during a football game instead of standing at attention with hand over heart. Arguably it's more respectful to kneel than to stand. The conservatives who constantly attacked liberals for being politically correct snowflakes and were scared of being deplatformed by offended college students all of a sudden felt what it was like to be on the other end of that situation. While it's okay for a Mississippi senator to joke about watching a public lynching (of black folk) or how some liberals should be prevented from voting so they can get a more favorable result, it's not okay to kneel in front of a flag in solidarity for black men killed by police officers. Whether or not you agree Kaepernick's opinion on police brutality, it's obvious the aims were noble.

Why can't we just enjoy a football game without politics, some conservatives would ask. Well, the entire patriotic show during NFL games itself was and is a political game. We were scared of the godless commies, so we reacted by trying to be the exact opposite. The idea that people could just forget about politics when they don't feel like it is a perspective born out of privilege. If things are going okay for you, you don't have to worry about things all the time. If your life is a dumpster fire, any time is a good time to try to put the fire out. From the sofa in front of a TV, a white guy might feel annoyed or unreasonably triggered due to their constant hard-on for nationalism, but those people need to remember that it's hell of a lot better to be annoying in front of their big screen TV than to fear the police. There's a remarkable difference in what each side has to give up for this flag-kneeling situation to go their way: Some people have to spend 5 seconds watching a black man kneel, while many other people would be unable to voice their plight.

Anti-SJWs
Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin comes to mind. (What kind of weirdo names themselves after an old king, anyways?) When being a conservative or a Trumpist seems too shameful, I guess the trendy label now is 'classical liberal'. When all Carl does is praise Trump and ruthlessly attack SJWs and those who oppose Trump, it's not a surprise he attracts a conservative viewership. Oh, but I can't be responsible for my sexist audience! ...Or so he might say. Actually in a way, yes, you are Carl. His viewers have a strong conservative stance on things because Carl constantly makes fun of the other side, while never criticizing "his own side". How many times has Carl attacked Trump?

Yes, extreme political correctness is a problem. But political correctness itself isn't a problem. It exists because it's society way of shaming people with shitty opinions. When Carl told somebody he wouldn't even rape her, it wasn't politically correct. It was bad and he should've felt bad. But he didn't and stood by his statement. This is my point: Too many anti-SJWs aren't well-intentioned people who worry about a stifled public discourse. They're just conservative bullies.

A lot of conservatives put great emphasis on personal agency when in reality free will doesn't even exist. Personal agency is an illusion. We take responsibility for our successes and then give excuses for our failures. I'm rich because I studied hard in college. Oh wait, that ignores the fact that I can even afford college. Or that my personal life is stable enough to allow for that. Or that I was taught soft skills like showing up on time and getting along with people when I was young because my parents taught me those things. Or that I didn't grow up in a world of crime with no real role models.

There is where Carl would say that the solution for black poverty is to be married because married people are better off, as if causation is the same as correlation. Staying married is a sign of stability in life and wealth. Even if getting married is some sort of panacea for the problems which ails the black population, that's not how people make choices. Show me the law which says blacks aren't allowed to marry, he would say. Yeah, well, just because a law doesn't exist permitting racism or sexism that must mean it doesn't exist, right? These people have simple ideas to complex problems and people think they are 'telling it like it is'. No they're not.

Carl's not a centerist. When somebody agrees with almost every conservative position, they are conservative, even if they prefer to call themselves something else to come off as more objective and neutral. The extreme left aren't 'taking over' the left. Carl's a shitty contrarian man-child and a failure of a human being. He's a closet Republican who doesn't even live in America but cares about US politics because he's in a cult of Trump. Other anti-SJWs aren't as bad, but they still defend regressive people while constantly attacking SJWs over and over.

--

Dave Rubin also calls himself a classical liberal and probably feels better about himself for not aligning himself officially to any political party, yet he constantly defends or makes excuses for conservatives and grills liberals for everything. He keeps talking about 'having conversations', ie, talking about talking. But when it comes down to it, he only brings a certain type of person on his show. They're either conservative or people who have serious problems with PC culture.

The problem with people is they won't honestly tell you what they thing, who they align with, and what their motivations are. Dave Rubin is a careerist who had a sudden 180 on politics and went from TYT to PragerU. Carl Benjamin just likes to trigger SJWs (and said as much). Stefan Molyneux went from actual anarchist/libertarian to actual white supremacist who believes in the White Genocide conspiracy. The 'Race Realist' people who support a white ethnostate in America are actually just closet racists. A good example is Lauren Southern traveling to France to record a footage of her walking across an area with many brown people with ominous music in the background. Nothing actually happens in the video. What that means is the problem is there are brown people. Or maybe they don't speak French when talking to other brown people.

The 'free market of ideas' assumes everyone is well-read and open to having their opinions changed. That's rarely the case. When people allow shitty human beings like Nick Fuentes who think trans people should suffer electroshock therapy, gay people should be sterilized, or that white people are superior to non-whites without pushing back on their opinions, all that does is give those terrible ideas a new platform to spread. That's irresponsible.

And the Left is bad at their job. An older generation fought against the brunt of racism, and we just swept the rest under the rug. The election of Trump is a wake-up call because those bigots never left even after we shamed them into silence. They're still there, and they're voting. Oh look, now they're angry and they have Twitter and Youtube. We have to be able to destroy white supremacist talking points. It feels like we not longer know how to do that because we all figured the problem was gone, and now we've forgotten the relevant arguments.

And when idiots like Ben Shapiro repeats that 'facts don't care about your feelings', pundits have to call him out on his shtick: He talks at 100 miles per hour and lists many studies which we couldn't have possibly read ahead of time, but many of his 'facts' and studies aren't true or don't say what he wants them to say. It's actually pretty funny how quickly some of his studies fall apart because he obviously never read them, and he knows most people won't either. They'll just accept him at face value when he says 'this study shows...'.

The pundits also have to call him out on the idea that conservatives are the ones who take facts over feelings, because otherwise the image of a confident man who is good at debating is very attractive to many weak men who follow in kind. Being conservative is often about fear and not wanting change. That's how we get xenophobia, protectionism, and wanting strong national defense. Black people look different from us, so maybe they will give us diseases. Gay sex is disgusting and that feeling of disgust causes me to be against gay marriage. Trans people are different and defy what I am used to and maybe crazy people will exploit bathroom rights to rape others. Those are some pretty emotional ideas based on fear and disgust. It takes a lot of reason and evidence to suggest that the world is safer than ever or the fear of people abusing trans bathroom rights just never came to fruition despite all of the fear-mongering. It's far easier to fall back to our gut instincts which helped us survive a long time ago but cause us to reason miserably.

Blah Blah Blah
The only person I still give the benefit of the doubt to is Joe Rogan, because I've seen enough of his podcasts to know where he's coming from. He talks over and over about how SJWs ruin things or how trans movements are problematic for sports or for children as if it's a massive problem, when the biggest problem in the entire trans issue is the lack of basic human rights trans people have. He just won't have articulate trans people on his show to talk about this issue. If somebody puts 95% of their time talking about sports and children getting hormones too early instead of discrimination trans people face, then you know where their priorities lie.

This is why people get annoyed and say things like 'you're white, you don't get it'. Different people have different lived experiences. While it's possible to understand a situation from both sides through reason and evidence, that requires a lot of mental effort and people generally aren't up for the task. Over half of Americans think society has gone too far in accepting trans people or just right. This is a time where trans people have next to no protections federally and can be fired for being trans, and many attempt suicide due to discrimination and shame. Those people aren't all bigots. They're just ignorant and don't put themselves in other people's shoes. How many trans people are pro trans rights? How many non-trans people are pro trans rights? Lived experience still counts for something.

More Shit Conservatives Say
Rubin's talking about how we don't need building regulations and there's nothing the government does that is better than private enterprise (and backtracking each time he gets pummeled by Joe Rogan on his podcast). It's easy to build shoddy buildings which people won't find out until a major natural disaster, and by then you already earned so much money you might not even care if you get found out. Dave Rubin says that's fine because we have Yelp, and when pushed he said he just liked the idea philosophically of the free market doing everything. How many free market capitalists does it take to change a light bulb? None. The free market will take care of it. We don't live in Dave's free market utopia, but rather the real world where things get complicated and people do stupid things against their own interests thinking they can get away with it. That's why idiots go full autopilot in their Teslas and die and people steal money. Sometimes they do get away with it, because not everyone has the time or expertise to check all the reviews and understand what separates a good from a bad product. Even if Yelp for buildings works out in the long term, I sure as hell don't want to be an early buyer of a house, because those people get screwed.

Jordan Peterson said he didn't sleep for 25 days once after drinking apple cider, and that women wearing makeup is hypocritical because they don't want sexual harassment. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute. Yes, makeup or high heels could be conscious displays of sexuality, but they could very well be nonsexual or unconscious. Maybe I want to put on makeup because prettier people get an easier go at life. As a trans person the idea of looking good to feel good about myself is totally obvious from a female perspective, but is totally foreign to many males. He puts the burden on the women to fix sexual harassment in the workplace, as if men will helplessly harass women if women present a certain way. Because it's unclear exactly what behavior is or isn't allowed, he reasons, women should just not have sexual displays to make it easy. Maybe men should start shaving and stop wearing suits, being handsome, or being funny, or having nice things which demonstrate wealth.

Or you know, let people have personal autonomy. See, this is the problem with Peterson. He makes a bunch of claims about how the world is and never says how to fix it, but he heavily implies how it should be done. He's so slippery. He complains about Bill C16 which was supposed to limit free speech by making it a crime to misgender somebody, when nobody ever got locked up. He complains about the 'postmodern neo-Marxist left' who want to define gender in all sorts of ways, but then he claims all atheists believe in god and comes up with a crazy definition of what god is.

Conclusion

I'm done giving conservative thinkers the benefit of the doubt. Too many of them are dishonest or idiots. I unsubscribed from Dave Rubin and I didn't bother to listen to Rogan's latest podcast with Peterson. If all you do is complain about political correctness and you don't put any energy into attacking racists and homophobes, you're part of the problem.

I've been slowly having these thoughts over the past few years and Destiny on Youtube/Twitch really enunciated what I've been thinking but could not find the words to say.

Death, Consequence, and The Hill of Thoughts

Death PT I
Totalbiscuit died recently. While it's unfortunate he told somebody he hoped he got cancer and die and died to cancer himself, it by no means he deserved it. It's not eye for an eye at all, and even that makes the whole world blind. It's not the same to make an angry comment in the heat of the moment as it is to sincerely wish somebody has their life ended. It's one thing to know it's difficult to be on the receiving end of countless criticisms every day, and it's another to experience it. Our minds were evolved to handle input from our tribe, but while technology has given a voice to those who could not speak, it has allowed us to peer into a window into a never-ending cacophony of angry noises. Geography stops mattering in a way that must feel evolutionarily bizarre.

People see a sliver of somebody's life and personality and assume they know them. For sure he has changed his opinions as he came down with the illness, but on the internet people assume others never grow. This is literally death, and a painful one at that. It's years of painful fighting, knowing the whole time it could very well end all too soon. There's the dealing with the medical staff, but most of all there's his wife and disabled son that he left behind. To lose somebody that means the world to you is something nobody should have to go through. I don't know what I would do. Imagine watching people wither away, cachexia and all, hair lone gone. Totalbiscuit was an interesting video game critic/personality. The world is a little colder without him.

Death PT II
I've never seen him act this way. I thought he was the type that slept with different girls but never got attached to any of them. Turns out there was a girl he kind of liked. He told me how she was kind to people and gave to the homeless even when she had none for herself. But life was hard on her, and she had a drinking problem. When caught driving drunk, she couldn't drink anymore, so she turned to harder drugs: Cocaine. She admitted this when she came and visited him. 'Do you think what I'm doing is wrong?', she asked him. Being a counter-culture guy, he said no. Days later she died of an overdose.

'It's like nothing changed!', he remembered her saying. Her attention to detail impressed him. She remembers the way the house was, and the pets. It felt like she came back to him, and the world took her away. He feels guilty. He thought he should've put anti-overdose drugs in her purse, and told her not to take cocaine. I tried telling him that with things like this, it's usually very hard to stop or control. Other people in her life couldn't get through to her either, so his part was just one of many things that could have gone differently. We'll never know if anything he could've done would've made a difference... but he felt it was important for him to have at least tried.

Somebody once told me a story about my father decades ago, before I was born. He liked to ride his motorcycle, and it was legal to ride without a helmet. My aunt was annoyed that he didn't wear a helmet, and after many attempts at convincing him to get one, decided to buy one and gave it to him. He started wearing it since he got it for free without hassle. Later that week he got into an accident and got pushed off the motorcycle. He suffered a scar but came out okay. But if he landed poorly without a helmet that could've been it. It was a story told to say that sometimes one person can make all of the difference.

And that's life. Sometimes you never know. Sometimes bad things we can't predict happen and there's nothing we can do. Lack of control is scary, maybe even worse than guilt or what-ifs.

A pill to make you numb 

A pill to make you dumb 

A pill to make you anybody else 

But all the drugs in this world 

Won't save her from herself

Death PT III

Over time I've had different people confide in me their various life problems. If you have existential problems, you are not alone. Most people care a lot about what other people think of them, so they might bury their problems, thinking other people would think lesser of them if they ever come to light. Unless you really know a person you might not know how many skeletons are in their closet. This means most people can empathize with you on some level because they've got shit to deal with too.

You're not a loser because you have problems. Maybe the people you least expect are contemplating suicide right now. Life can be really hard sometimes with no easy way out. Sometimes it's flat out unfair. But whoever you are reading this, I hope you pull through. Even if I don't like you, stay safe.

Strong people show weakness and survive.

Weak people act tough yet perish anyways.

Death PT IV

The following is loosely adapted from Time magazine.

With the recent death of Bourdain and Spade, we are reminded of the uselessness of envy. It is a miscalculation in the relative worth of things. We don't have our own TV show or fashion line, and that makes us think we aren't as hardworking or intelligent as they are. They must be better people than us. But this comparison is made with flawed data. People's lives are not as they appear. Bourdain's line is the epitome of this: 'What do you do after your dreams come true?'

Life PT I

Transitioning has been unexpectedly difficult for me. Due to both hormones and life experience changing how I think, I've had to adjust to fluctuating emotions. It's not all bad. I don't take for granted showing who I really am instead of hiding, or not thinking testosterone ruined my body. Yet having a gender that aligns with sex is something over 99% of the population take for granted. It's like a diabetic. They don't take eating for granted because one careless day and it could be their last. So yes, it gives me joy sometimes when I feel feminine. Sometimes when I find something funny I laugh until there are literally tears in my eyes. Emotion flows more easily and I feel less pressured to act a certain way.

But sometimes things aren't so good. The realization that one is transgender is an opened Pandora's Box. Things will never be the same again no matter what you do. Sometimes I feel like nothing I do is ever enough. I will always be a fake, trying, wishing, to be female. Even with sex reassignment surgery, which itself comes with a whole host of potential problems, I would still be a shade of a natal female. There are things I can never take back because of when I started hormones. There are times when I see a normal female and get jealous. The flip side to unabashed joy is neuroticism and depression. At first I was surprised at how upset I was at various events, until it happened again, and again, and I realized how I processed emotions changed. Maybe it's a second puberty and it brings along with it some of the teenage angst, except when present as an adult others are less understanding.

This too shall pass.

It's a Persian adage about the temporary nature of the human condition. If you are happy, it will fade. On the flip side if you are sad, that too, will pass. Well, life itself will pass. Change is the constant. Things don't stay the same. One could claw away and yearn for the past, but while it is a good place to visit, it's not a good place to stay.

Some very bad things happened very recently to me. Thankfully when suicidal thoughts enter my mind I know it's an empty threat. I still have much I want to do and experience. Self-transcending love. Sex. Friendship. The future of my transition. Cute outfits. The future of computer technology. The completion of my Skyrim work. Lazy day of hot chocolate and cuddling. Making lemonade. Skyrim while it rains outside. The smell of her hair.

I will pull through. I always have. This is not enough to stop me. Times like this, I rely on my close friends to lean on. These are people who I can say anything to without a filter and confide potentially life-destroying secrets without fear. People who actually care. That's rare. And when I find them, I don't want them to go.

Sometimes though, life wants to borrow them for a while. Full time job. School. Just stuff. Have you ever, in a hangout with friends, ever stop to think that this memory here, yes, this one, will be one which you look back on with fondness? Maybe it'll help people cherish what time they have. Because it will pass. It always does.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, 

But I have promises to keep,

Miles to go before I sleep.

Life PT II

The following is a quote from Sam Harris during a speech.

Most of us try our best not to think about death. But all of us knows that we're just a doctor's visit away from being starkly reminded of our own mortality. I'm sure many of you know somebody who has experienced this. You must know how uncanny it is to be thrown out of the normal course of your life, and just be given the full time job of not dying. The one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal. It's not just they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It's that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up by petty concerns... year after year when life was normal.

And this is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll ask, what was I thinking? You know this, and if you're like most people, you'll spend most of the time in your life, tacitly presuming you will live forever. It's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we're going waste our time like this. There are ways to really live in the present moment. What is the alternative? It is always now. However much you may feel the need to plan for the future or mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound tripe, but it's the truth. And we spend most of our life repudiating it, overlooking it. The horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. We're always anticipating what is coming next. We're always trying to solve a problem. It's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.

Consequence PT I

Being transgender is confusing and many people don't immediately know what it all means. I was young, pushed to act a certain way, and didn't find good sources of information. I was a kid living in a time where LGBT support was still in the minority. It took me a long time of self-debate before I decided to call myself transgender and pursue hormone replacement therapy. So when I saw two people I thought might be transgender but did not know it, I asked them a few questions and gave a few of my thoughts. In both cases they realized they were transgender and decided to pursue or seriously consider pursuing HRT.

It is crazy how I can drastically affect of some people I talk to. Because I debated myself for so long, I knew what to say and how to think about the issue. A person recently thanked me for helping them discover themselves. I just wished somebody was there for me when I was young, because I would've started hormones earlier and hit puberty. At least I made a difference. That's special.

Would those people have found themselves without me eventually? Maybe. It's surprisingly hard to do so, even in this internet age. People harbor too many misconceptions about what it means to be transgender. And when they figure it out, they might be 40 and married with kids. Or they could figure it all out next year somehow.

Consequence PT II

A long time ago in middle school, I wore the same clothes every day and got bullied by mean-spirited people that enjoyed the suffering of others. My self esteem was at an all time low in my entire life. Then I met a girl on Maplestory. We got along really well. She once confided in me that she got along with me better than her online 'boyfriend'. I went to visit my father in Taiwan for a month and forgot to tell her. I tried to contact her on Maplestory in Taiwan, but due to the IP block, I couldn't log on. By the time I got back to America, she was gone. Sometimes people enter our lives for a relatively brief period of time and leave footprints on our heart that stay forever. She taught me that I wasn't an undesirable bag of shit nobody could ever love. She probably don't remember me anymore. But I remember her and the impact she made on me, and that is enough.

Hill of Thoughts

On the Joe Rogan podcast a guest brought up something interesting. He said to think of your mind as a hill. Your thoughts are sleds going down that hill. After a while after a lot of thoughts have gone down that hill, there will be these grooves, which get deeper and deeper... Until you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves. That's who we are in middle age. And what psychedelics do is flatten the snow. Lots of fresh powder. I found it a beautiful metaphor. And when people come out of a psychedelic experience and repeat these platitudes like 'love is what matters', it really is true. Platitudes are truths with all emotion sucked out of it. Sometimes we are looking so hard for novel ideas that we forget that some of the most basic ones are the most important.

Musings of the Past Half Year (Part 2 of 2): Rebuttal Edition

The second part of this two part series is about rebutting various ideas I've encountered. So... yeah. You know what you're getting into, so don't blame me.

Validity
For many trans people, acceptance from others is difficult. But something less often talked about is acceptance of oneself. There can be shame that they're a freak, that this is a fetish, or embarrassment because they think they look ridiculous. People don't want to be who they are because they are worried. I can see why I got the backlash I got on r/AskTransgender when I said I thought trans women are men sexually but women socially, and the latter is all that matters. A sense of validity goes to the core of one's being. If being trans is not valid, the truth is all of the suffering and effort transitioning were the efforts of a crazy person. The stakes are high when so much rests on one question: Am I valid?

This is why cavalier comparisons between transgenderism and transracialism are very offensive. Such charged and old topics need to be treated with reverence. Don't be a child that blurts out whatever their latest train of thought takes them.

We should respect people's boundaries and not assume that a trans person who refuses to debate is purely insecure. People have their own shit to deal with. The world's not going to run out of trans people for you to debate. Find another one.

'Gay people forgot they were gay.'
Somebody said gay people 'forgot their sexual orientations' in volleyball because in their experience, gay people can get vicious in volleyball. It could depend on the situation, but I can see most people playing volleyball seriously be vicious in volleyball. People are not one dimensional creatures, where a 'nice girl' is always nice and passive for example. We've all heard about tribalism and how it affects groups of people, and we know how some people can be when it comes to sports teams, for example.

Stereotyping large groups of people with little hesitation is a problem because it makes it acceptable to assume things about somebody without actually knowing them. Prejudice has led to terrible things in history. Beliefs about how gay people should act don't often lead to genocide but it can lead to problems with the norms of a society. People are not one-dimensional, but perhaps even more importantly, individuals vary more than the groups they belong in. This is why we judge people as individuals and not as groups. Failing that, our beliefs about how people are shapes how we treat others subconsciously, which itself can lead to a negative interaction between societal norms and individual behavior.

Our norms govern many things and I see how it has negatively impacted trans people for example. A lot of it can be remedied if we just think that people are people, and that is that. No point expecting a particular behavior from people you don't know.

'Transgenderism is bad for our species if everyone becomes trans.'
If everyone were women, we'd have an even bigger problem. That ends our species. If everyone were artists, we'd all starve. It doesn't mean artists are bad, it just means that not everybody can or should be artists.

WTF even is this argument?

'*Insert incoherent noises here*'
The most common misconception about trans people is that trans people share a similar story: They found out they were trans early on in life, and suffer serious depression... And they often get genital surgery. Somebody disputed me on this, saying that people who think this way are dumb and they're not that common. Wording matters; here I was talking about the most common misconception. That might or might not mean a majority of people. If 99% of people understand a concept and 1% have errors in understanding, the most common misconception is actually very rare.

A lot of people believe in stereotypes. Even if only 1% of the US population believes something, that's 3 million people. Often people don't have the mental capacity left from their day-to-day activities to learn about the nuances of some minority group and that's understandable. What's less understandable is discussing and debating the topic as if one is informed when they are not.

Stereotypes are also why I often hear people respond to people coming out as trans with 'but you never showed any signs'. Part of it is said out of surprise, but part of it is the expectation and stereotype that trans people exhibit different behavior from a relatively early age. This makes sense because my experience with the media about trans stories is they are all about people who knew they were trans from an early age. A significant portion of trans people realize much later for a plethora of reasons, and quite a good percentage had a lot of doubts about their gender. This is why r/AskTransgender contains countless threads of people asking if they are trans, 'trans enough', or if it's all just a fetish.

You don't need crushing dysphoria to be trans. To simplify, being trans means you think you should be the other sex. Dysphoria means you're upset that it's not working out perfectly. Some people don't get surgery or even hormone therapy, but those are complicated decisions each person needs to make based on their own financial, health, environmental, and mental health reasons.

The trans issue is not intuitively obvious to people. With homosexuality is pretty easy: For example, imagine how a girl is attracted to a man, and put that mindset into a man and voila, you have a homosexual. It's not a hard concept. But how many cisgender people experience gender dysphoria? I've seen various attempts by trans people to explain gender dysphoria but they are all clumsy. Imagine if you had to use your left hand from now on instead of your right. Imagine if everybody treated you like a boy when you were a girl, and calls you a he. None of these thought experiments work and language mostly fails.

The point is, people often have a poor understanding of trans people, and media narrative about the trans experience is accepted as the default. This leads to stereotypes.

I actually know somebody who thought I might've become trans because the daughter of some movie director came out as trans... As if I jumped onto the trans bandwagon. Somebody else I know once thought that trans people were gay but didn't want to admit it. Yeah.

'y golddigers keep chasing me tho'
Maybe you've met one of those rich boy frat kids who didn't earn a dime, gets drunk all day, and flashes their wealth. There's something insidious about flashing money and pretending like you're not because that amount was no big deal. Maybe if people wanted a relationship based on love and all things nice, don't make your net worth be a big factor in how you woo people.

Or maybe some kids live in such a bubble, they're sense of what's normal is totally twisted, even by first world standards. That's Mitt Romney levels of out-of-touch. These people who worry so much about how they're perceived by their peers think money talks everywhere. It doesn't. A rich asshole is still an asshole.

There's something uniquely abrasive about a thankless rich kid who sees interactions in terms of money all of the time.

'2008 recession wasn't that bad.'
It's called the Great Recession for a reason. Some people put so much stock in personal experience and anecdote, they make very inappropriate judgement when faced with good data. The median household income, personal savings rate, or employment rate are all statistics that track how people are doing financially. I don't know what else to say here. It's just so many levels of dumb to not realize this.

Yes, while some people lost their life savings, some other people elsewhere had none. But it's not like the recession only hit rich countries. If the implication is that because people who had savings were lucky, then there's a questionable lack of empathy with human suffering. If I lost my life savings and somebody shrugs it off, saying others have it worse, I would be incensed.

'I don't want to visit America because of gun violence.'
The most common cause of gun death is suicide. Do you intend to commit suicide on your vacation? Do you intend to visit downtown Detroit in the middle of the night? Do you intend to join a gang? It turns out crime rates differ from city to state to country. If we're going to be objective about it, you should fear a Big Mac more than a Glock 19.

Do you know what the leading causes of death in America are? In the year 2015, 633,842 people died to heart disease. 595,930 to cancer, 155,041 to chronic respiratory disease. 146,571 died to accidents, 140,323 to stroke, 110,561 to Alzheimer's, 79,535 to diabetes, 57,062 to influenza and pneumonia, 49,959 to kidney diseases, and 44,193 to suicide. Deaths to gun homicides? Less than 18,000. To maximize your chances of dying to gun deaths you have to live in America for the rest of your life, not just visit.

Modulate your behavior according to statistical probabilities. I know somebody who was apprehensive about visit America due to guns. Then I told her, you do realize that the homicide per 100,000 people is x3 higher in your country than where I live, right? If the homicide rate of your destination is lower than whence you came, then it's an upgrade, not a downgrade. The fact that people die by knives or bullets doesn't change that calculation. We make choices all the time that increases our chances of death, but we feel the benefits outweigh the harms.

'I have little capital so I'm going to go risky on my investments.'
Penny stocks are super volatile and the company may not exist in a year or two. Some people think having little capital means it makes sense to be super risky with it. I don't understand that logic. Either a way to do is the best use of money or it isn't, that doesn't change because you don't have billions to play with. If anything, having more capital gives you more room to be go risky some of the time, because you can actually survive if it comes crashing down.

If you can't scrape together $300 to buy a share of something decent, you probably shouldn't be investing in the first place.

'Why are trans people so damn sensitive about being outed?'
For one, it's just not cool to share secrets without consent. It takes a certain lack of empathy or integrity to violate that trust. In some places it is physically unsafe to be outed, and emotional trauma can be very real as well. It's still possible for some trans people to lose financial support from family, or for interpersonal relationships to deteriorate. Coming out is a very personal thing - somebody has trusted you, so please respect that.

Musings of the Past Half Year (Part 1 of 2)

If you're expecting a post like the last one, you're going to be disappointed.

Birthdays
I guess it struck me how differently some people get treated on their birthday. For a birthday, my friend and I traveled to a friend all the way in Las Vegas and stayed over for a bit. For my 18th birthday I ate food and played Fallout: New Vegas. For my 21st birthday, I braved San Francisco traffic to get my friend to a hotel to meet his girlfriend. I mean, my friend's mother usually takes me out to Dennys, but that's about it. Part of it is due to how my parents are, especially with them being so far away from me physically. Part of it is just the number of friends I have, and how I normally treat other people's birthdays. I can't expect others to give more than I give. Although, last time I bought Overwatch for a friend and wiped off $100 from another person's debt to me. So... as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing okay for now.

Photography
My philosophy with photography is its main goal is to document reality. This means trying to get a picture that is in focus for as much of the frame as possible, with as much detail as possible. I want to be able to zoom in on a picture of my entire body and outfit and look at the texture of the fabric of my dress in good detail. I currently own a Sony a5100 with kit lens, and the camera I'd like is the Sony a7r III. These are all mirrorless, so it gets rid of some bulk and weight. I am physically very weak. I can't and don't want to carry a lot of heavy camera gear in my purse. Perhaps I will get the a7r IV when it comes out. At maybe $1500 cost in depreciation when a new a7r comes out in 3-4 years, the cost per year of ownership isn't that high since glass doesn't not depreciate at that rate. There were good improvements in a7r III vs II, so I am hopeful the IV will be what I need.

The drawback with a wait-and-see strategy is I cannot go back in time and take pictures of things that already happened, like a birthday. I can't document my skin tone before I started taking medication. It is what it is. When I do take pictures outside, it might be in dark restaurants where I can only do a few takes. I'm still not satisfied with what cameras can do today.

Bokeh or image editing to make pictures pop are obviously not what I look for because... that's not documenting reality.

Alcohol
Isn't it interesting that a decade ago, people thought marijuana was more dangerous than alcohol? Some people can handle alcohol, and many people can't. It's just an inconvenient drug. People like to take alcohol during a meal out, but somebody has to drive the car back home. I suspect more often than not, people risk their own and other people's lives to drive home. Some people don't care at all, and some people think they are still sober enough to drive.

Alcohol is a very strange thing to me. It's a drug that most people seem to enjoy taking. It could be for its effects. My brother calls it 'liquid courage'. If the effects are what one is after, getting drunk on less alcohol is probably the best way to go, because it makes it cheaper to obtain the mental state they're looking for.

There's a certain drinking culture that is foreign to me, where people stereotype others based on how they hold their alcohol. At the very least, many people like to talk about how much alcohol it takes to get them drunk or passed out. To me, this is a stupid and pointless thing to do - except for the purpose of avoiding intoxication. No, I'm not stupid. I can trace the steps and see why people might like the things they do, but there's a difference between knowing why somebody likes to get drunk and understanding on a gut and emotional level.

As with photography, I want to see the world as it is. If I don't like the way the world looks, I change it. I don't take drugs to alter my brain to perceive the world differently. I might as an experiment, but I wouldn't as a habit.

Or maybe somebody takes alcohol because they like the taste. This makes even less sense because pretty much every alcoholic beverage I've had the displeasure of sipping tasted like garbage. I hear people talk about their favorite beer  has this and this flavor, and while it sounds nice on paper I know on an actual tasting it would be a disappointment.

I've watched normal people take alcohol and then act like morons. They might be inappropriately intimate, say stupid things, walk into a tree, or start yelling for no reason. It's fucking stupid.

Uncommon Interests
I suppose one way to look at my interests throughout my life is to pick the interests that took up most of my time. That would be Runescape and Maplestory, and those are not fringe interests. But I'm not about that life anymore. Let's look at the hobbies I've been into over the past several years: Debating about religion (arguably not *that* niche), CPU overclocking threads (fringe enough for my thread to be the largest on the internet for the chips I covered), arguing about audio (and how the mainstream is wrong about amps and dacs), sorting Mugen (a vastly moddable 2D fighting game) characters by strength in AI vs AI matches (nobody, NOBODY cares), and Skyrim modding. For Skyrim I deal with picture comparisons of every half-decent texture mod, texture by texture, mod by mod. The reason why nobody has done it so far despite Skyrim modding being so mainstream is because it's a crazy task to attempt, and the large majority of people don't go texture by texture when deciding on mods. I've decided to assemble my own texture pack from the data.

It's normal for people to think the things I care about are abnormal because my interests occupy a niche inside of a niche. It's like nicheception and I'm lost in limbo.

Social Frustrations

Sometimes I really don't understand what people are saying, or I can't follow their logic. Sometimes it baffles me how so much talking occurred but so little was said. Sometimes it annoys me when everyone else don't care about anything I care about, but they all care about something I see as tripe. For example, I might be on an imaginary soapbox talking into the abyss about gender dysphoria or bullying and get no response. Yet somebody talks about how tall their brother is and people come running out to chat about height. Who cares?! In what situation would the normal height of a person's sibling matter to people who will never encounter said sibling?

It's not just about the topic. It's also about how a topic is covered. I could talk about my height and somehow keep talking about it, but I could also talk about what height I'd like to be at, and what height I'd prefer in a mate. Would my preference change if I was taller or shorter?

Why do people use words that aren't in the English language and expect other people to know them? Why do people post stupid Jesus memes? Why do people think it's funny to troll people and tell them to kill themselves? Why do people keep changing their usernames? What is the point of posting the same sex joke over and over again? It wasn't funny the first time, and it just goes downhill from there. People can act silly, but they don't act silly in a way that I'm compatible with. This goes for online and at work. I never say anything to my coworkers because lame attempts at small talk don't get us anywhere conversationally. When somebody asks me what I'm up to or how I'm feeling while I'm doing work, what am I supposed to say? Hey, let me tell you about how gender dysphoria works so you can better understand my situation, friend! Just let me drop my podcast and my job so I can stand here and chat with you.

I almost want to put my hands up in the air and say that nobody cares about me and I don't care about what anybody else has to say, but I know neither of those things are true. It's really weird.

That, and other arguments and bullshit I've managed to get myself into lately just makes socializing all the harder. It pushes me more to be antisocial and dislike other people.

Social Frustrations Pt II

In my experience people often turn a blind eye when their friend treats somebody else poorly. Part of it is selfishness and apathy - out of sight, out of mind. The other part is the context which may be missing, but if if a wrong is perceived then it's probably a good idea to seek clarification. Deliberately not knowing things about the conduct of your friend out of fear of what you'll find is well... not okay.

Some people are degenerates, with a damaged sense empathy and morality. It's one thing to do wrong to others, but it's another not to care. We all want to tell ourselves that we're a good person. Many bad people don't look in the mirror after waking up and tell themselves how bad they are. The people do and don't care are psycopaths, and the ones that do and do care live in pain. More commonly, people do bad things and justify it to themselves.

Checking messages in chatrooms for me is like how a lot of people talk about their phones or Twitter: You know you probably shouldn't do it so often, and it's being a net negative on your psyche but you keep doing it anyways. Yet, do you necessarily want to toss your phone away or nuke your Twitter account from orbit? Not really. Getting bored and checking messages is distracting, and too often now I see the outlines of a person I've blocked in a particular chatroom - and it upsets me. It upsets me that the person exists and is present, makes conversations seem one-sided and even harder to follow, and still manages to befriend people. Yes, it upsets me that other people don't see in him what I see.

Hormones

I am at a point now where if I stopped taking hormones I probably could not fully revert back to my original state. It doesn't bother me much though. I am lucky that I am a relatively feminine frame. While I can spot many flaws with my body all over, for the most part it is okayish as a mold to shape. My hips will not widen, my feet and hands are too large, my shoulders are too broad, and my Adam's Apple is just ridiculous. It is what it is. But the softer skin, the more feminine face, the slower growing body hair, the breasts, they are all something I like. It's nice to not doubt my gender constantly.

But the one thing that's a mixed bag are the emotional changes. In addition to the changes in intimacy noted last time, my sex drive decreased. I've cried more easily, whether from being upset or a sad story. I've grown lonelier, but that's not always a bad thing because it helps me appreciate aspects of life more. But I've also become more moody. Maybe this is due to the current transitioning process being somewhat like Puberty 2.0. I wonder if the swings in estradiol is causing low-key 24/7 PMS or something. I often feel upset and I'm not exactly sure why. It's not a major and common side effect of transitioning hormonally as far as I can tell, but I seem to have it. Objectively a teenager's life might be good, but subjectively it's hell because their brains are doing things to them. You're not just being put in a tougher position, your capacity for handling it is in question as your brain changes. When emotions stray too far from logic and reason it becomes hard to get them back into alignment.

My father is more or less okay with me being transgender, but my mom has troubles accepting it. If I like the body of a woman and women's clothing, why can't I just admire it from afar? Right, and if I like chocolate cake, why can't I just watch instead of eating it? Being a worrier at heart, she is also very worried about breast cancer and possible regret. The chance of a trans woman to get breast cancer is relatively low compared to cis women. When we think of cancer from hormones, we often think about post-menopausal women, possibly taking non-bioidentical estradiol. If you're old and you've been exposed to estrogen all of your life, yes, your chance of breast cancer is higher. But would my mother have been upset if I was born a cis female because I might get breast cancer?

On the matter of regret, I thankfully report none at this time. I am 24, not some 13 year old who is confused and ever-changing. I've had some transgender thoughts for a very long time. The decision to do nothing with regards to hormones is itself a decision, and it has risks and benefits just like taking hormones. I might regret taking hormones, but I also might regret not taking hormones. Imagine being locked in a marriage in middle age but feeling more and more that medical transition must happen. Would I be ready to lose my wife? By then transition outcomes are far inferior. I've already debated with myself about what to do. I have never given my parents reason to think I would recklessly go for medical transition.

Misc Trans Stuff

I still remember when I came out and how self conscious I was. I remember crossdressing in college and being even more self concious, and quite nervous at the time. I feel like my friends have an easier time accepting me than I do accepting myself. It's not that I hated trans people... It's just that it's different when I'm the one that's trans. There was a lot of internalized shame and guilt which I won't go into at this time. Trans people were people you hear about on TV or read about on the newspaper. ME being one?! That's crazy. Yet I could retrace my steps to reach to my logical conclusion... And you know where that leads.

Here's a story I've retold too many times: I used to think a good percentage of guys were either jealous of girls or wanted to be them, and the reason why I never hear about it is because people were too scared about discussing it because it was taboo and embarrassing. I felt it said something about public discourse. Then... I realized eventually that most guys really don't think that way, and the entire thing said more about me than society. Those thoughts just felt intuitive - so I guess I assumed other people must've felt similar things.

It must seem weird to normal people that trans people care so much about being seen as a particular gender. While I feel what the people on r/AskTransgender feel, I don't want my beliefs about sex/gender to be totally self-serving. After the last stocks meltdown the other day, I went to the store to get groceries. Being dressed and going outside lifted my a mood a little bit. Being called a lady during a mix-up in the checkout isle was nice. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, I could try harder to explain it, but today I'll just say: It is what it is. It just is.

Speaking of that subreddit, somebody made a good post: Contrary to popular belief, most trans people are not deep philosophers about the nature of sex and gender or nature vs nurture. They're born  a particular way and just want to feel normal. It's interesting being part of a group which people often bring up in political debates and discussions.

Boundaries of Comedy

Should we really allow anybody to say anything they want if it's supposed to be comedy? If so, then who gets to classify something as comedy or not? Based whether the person telling the joke claims it's a joke? It's laborious and an easy fallback for any racist or sexist. Or maybe we should base it on whether the joke is funny or not. But still, who decides if something is funny? Are comedians for niche audiences not comedians? It makes me uncomfortable to think what types of behaviors are okay is based in large part on how it is perceived (whether a joke is funny and therefore deserves protection, or whether a romantic advance is harassment or not based on the desirability of the person, etc). The answer? I don't fucking know. I don't have all the answers.

Yes, I think people should be able to joke about transgender people. However, I think people should understand how they can be perceived. Otherwise it's like making Holocaust jokes without really understanding what some Jews went through. One should understand something before mocking it.

The New Generation

A chip that has been on my shoulder for many years is how I was supposed to be smart and achieve all these great things, none of which materialized. Then I see how some younger people know so much at their age, and it makes me feel like I'm the old and obsolete generation/person, who has to make way for the better new generation to come in.

While I have more money than a lot of people my age, my net worth is tied to the volatile stock market and it puts a lot of stress on me. My earnings from work are low, and many people struggling to make ends meet and stocking up on Cup Noodles in college will one day be far more successful than I am. I'm watching this happen and I already see it happening, so there's really nobody else to blame when it happens.

Does any of this seem cringe to you? That's because sometimes I am cringe and I fail and struggle. At least I'm honest about it.

Stocks
For now I have many times more money than my friends, but I don't expect that to last forever. I had a good head start, but cutting expenses and relying on dishwashing and compound interest to make gains is not going to beat somebody working full time in a good job.

I know long term investing is the way to go, but it's hard to refrain from looking at the day to day. I've gotten really unlucky the first year, and I made a mistake or two as well, costing me a good $10,000. January came with hype gains, followed by a February crash, a March recovery back to January, and a fall in April. Trump's big mouth, personal distaste for Jeff Bezos, and tariffs caused a lot of problems for me. It's one thing to be a bullshitter, cheater, and all-around vain individual, but it's another to directly impact my net worth negatively. My assets are disproportionate to my income... And while my calculations show I have a good chance of living a decent life by compounding interest for 10 years, there's a lot that can go wrong in 10 years.

I wonder which has a larger impact on my mood... stocks or hormones. It might actually be the stocks, because I remember a period of calm in January. Stocks going into the toilet is a pernicious threat because it bleeds into other parts of my life without me being aware of it.

It's one thing to know that things will *probably* be okay long term, and it's another to internalize it. Maybe that's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

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Maybe a while back I said I was losing interest in tech because I had other things to deal with. It's still true, but you know what? It takes my mind off. So... yeah.

Recent Thoughts on Love, Intimacy, Sex, and... Personality Tests?

Personality tests:

On the Myers-Briggs test (MTBI) I often get placed as an INTJ, and after reading all of the categories I consider myself an INTJ with some INTP traits. If you aren't familiar with this personality test, it's a test developed by Myers based on Carl Jung's ideas. INTJs are often described as 'architects' or 'masterminds'. Sites like to list examples of people such as Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, and even Newton. It's important to remember two things though: Personality tests test personality and not intelligence, and what the purpose of personality tests are.

Think of it this way: An INTP that likes to develop new theories looking at the world just means that person likes to develop new theories. The theories might be good, but they might also be garbage. Just because the people best at this are people like Einstein in no way means an INTP is anything like Einstein. I find it funny how 16Personalities keeps talking about how some personality is rare. If you split the population into 16 categories, guess what? In all likelihood each group will be "rare", at less than 10% of the population. Big freakin' deal. I guess we all want to feel special, just like everybody else.

Personality tests like MTBI allow me to quickly describe my personality using four letters. It's convenient. Actually getting to know me requires you to interact with me in various situations. The people that watched me on my Maplestory streams back in the day saw one limited aspect of me, where I knew I was being watched and my moves scrutinized, trying to entertain an audience. The people that I interacted with in my guild knew me as I talked about random stuff and complained about being bored. The people on Discord see me type about my thoughts on some issues, or even hear me speak, recognizing my figures of speech and the qualities of my speech. But none of that lets you know how I do things in my house, or how I walk, act at work, or random mannerisms I make with my body. We are much more complicated than four letters.

MTBI can be misused. If I hired people based on a personality test, I might get a uniformity in thought that ends up being counterproductive. Personality tests are here for our convenience and to get us to think about ourselves. And even in the latter part of its function it can be misused. It is the job of the test to describe us, not for us to conform to the categories laid out by the test. Otherwise, we end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy where we end up as slaves to the test. And finally, be aware that humans in general have a lot of similarities since we are all the same species. It's possible to come up with a vague set of characteristics that fit most people (eg, I am social sometimes, but I have periods of introversion. In other words, every person ever.)

How does this relate to love?

It makes sense that I would strive to obtain characteristics I want, meaning it makes sense I would be an INTJ since I value the strengths of INTJs. But for a while I internalized its weaknesses. I felt I didn't need anyone. I am the cold, rational INTJ! I let a test affect how I acted and that was a mistake.

I have never been really close to anyone, ever. My relationship with my father faded as I moved to America and my father stayed behind in Taiwan to hold the fort financially. My mother and I argued a lot about video games when I was younger. Part of it is just how I am. Maybe something's missing in my brain and I can't have very strong familial bonds. But I have been upset for quite a while over unrequited love. And in the case of that unrequited love, we weren't THAT close anyways. I think I am capable of deeply loving a romantic partner.

But I just didn't think about it that much. I wasn't suffering being alone, and while my mother and brother were worriers, I was more relaxed. I chucked it up to my emotional resilience. Maybe I am more emotionally resilient than the average person, but maybe not. Maybe I simply wasn't tested enough, having never lost somebody that meant everything to me. I felt it was good to be very independent, but after 6 months of not speaking to anyone, I ended up at a friend's house and the act of speaking started to feel strange. I would speak really quickly and end up with a word vomit. That's when I knew I had gone overboard.

Not feeling like I am missing out on that much means I feel like there isn't much of a problem. However, that itself is the problem. Not wanting intimacy a lot means I won't go out searching for a mate and reach these peak human experiences. It's very possible to not know what one is missing. I know physical intimacy will cause a rush of hormones to my brain that makes me feel the best I have ever felt in my entire life. Perhaps once I get a taste, I would not settle for less. Being okay with the okay dooms one to mediocrity.

But deeply loving somebody means opening myself up and being far more vulnerable to anyone than I have ever been in my life. Real vulnerability only comes with great highs, because if I had a terrible relationship I probably couldn't wait to get out of it instead. Pursuing intimacy and a love of my life means opening myself up to extreme highs and extreme lows.

We are all human. No matter your beliefs in the afterlife, the only life we can be sure of is this one. We're on this earth for several decades, and then we are gone. If only we could use this knowledge to stop our everyday neurosis about petty things that don't matter, and to truly love, laugh, and enjoy this life... We are born, we grow, we reach adulthood, and from there we slowly head towards death as the sun sets. Either I die or my wife dies first. There will be loss and extreme pain, but hopefully by then the love and happiness would've been worth it.

Sex

I used to think post-orgasm, with prolactin spiking and dopamine crashing, that evolution has won again; here it has caused me to act in a way I otherwise would not. That's the wrong way to think about sexual appetite. I don't apply that train of thought to eating, for example. Evolution gave us these desires - to eat, sleep, drink, or fuck. It boils down to dopamine hits - so in a way, we are all drug addicts.

I think casual sex or prostitution is fine, but it has to be treated with caution. Physical intimacy can cause emotional intimacy. I worry in a friends-with-benefits situation that one of us will end up attached to the other, causing an awkward situation.

Recent changes in opinion

After going on estrogen for a while, I was lying on my bed one day when all of a sudden I thought to myself, 'You know what would be nice right now? If there was somebody next to me in bed I could cuddle with.' This was interesting because I've never had that type of thought in my life before. Since then I've grown to crave physical intimacy, with sex just being a subset of that. I have a recurring fantasy recently where a girlfriend holds my waist from behind and kisses me on my neck. I could feel the warmth of her body as I turned around to smile.

While I was never only interested in sex, I feel that many men, and even myself to some extent, are/were too myopic when they just think about sex. Sex can also be about emotional bonding, as our brains swim in oxytocin. I would make sure my partner is enjoying it as much as I am, because not only is it important to me on a relationship level, it makes me very happy to make my partner happy. I am flexible in giving or receiving in foreplay, or to be the little or the big spoon.

This newfound craving for cuddling and to be held can be difficult because horniness can be fixed with porn. Human touch... not so much. This led to an increase in loneliness. And you know what? I'm not ashamed to say that. Sometimes people make lonely guys the butt of jokes. I'm a bit more sensitive to that now. Loneliness is a valid human emotion. We are social animals. We want to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering, and loneliness is a negative emotion. It almost feels more taboo to admit one is lonely than to admit one is depressed, when loneliness can cause depression.

Maybe the changes in my mental state weren't due to estrogen, and simply the act of going through with my transition caused me to evolve as a person. Probably both are contributing causes. Surely if estrogen therapy can shrink the volume of the brain, something is going on in there.

Finding a mate

There are problems with reaching my objective. I am a trans woman that is still developing physically. I don't want to date today because it's not fair to my partner for changing on them a few years in. I would also be less desirable the more masculine I look. Even if transition goes well, lesbians are still nowhere near as common as straight women even when talking about women instead of men. Of the lesbians, even less are into transgender people. I might not even be into transgender people. A friend of mine recently responded well by saying that connecting with somebody else emotionally can often fill in the gaps and cause relationships to work.

We have this hypothetical girl in our minds that we would date, with numerous criteria, when in fact in life there is no one perfect soul mate, and we just find somebody we love and we stay with them. Of course, there are exceptions. I vaguely recalling somebody from OKCupid claiming that from crunching their numbers, despite people saying religion matters in their mate selection, it actually doesn't matter much. But if I go to Christian Mingle, I'm sure that would not be the case. I do not want a religious girlfriend for example, not just because it would drive me crazy due to that alone, but also because it is a symptom of a larger problem; it is an incompatible way of looking at the world.

How does one find a mate? Some people are lucky and the right person drops into their lap. Sometimes one has to go out and date constantly. Some people are just really unlucky. There are millions and millions of women in America alone, so there are probably multiple people I would totally be willing to spend the rest of my life with. But finding one...? It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I'd be swimming in a sea of possibilities, lost and washed ashore.

Emotionally I feel that the odds are very bad. Often we only like 1 or 2 people, and probably less than 10 in our lives. What are the chances that A likes B but B also likes A and it ends up working out long term? What are the odds?!

I don't meet new people anymore. I don't go to college. I'm just here at home in front of my computer, and I don't even play online video games much. I think a dating site would be the way to go, that way I can pre-screen out non-lesbians. This is one problem among many that transgender people face: Lifetime of loneliness because nobody wants them. It is what it is.

Misc & Closing

A conversation on a stock trading Discord server ended up talking about how somebody doesn't want a partner because they are too expensive. I've always felt a relationship should be a 50/50 affair unless one side is far richer than the other. In that case the key is open, honest, and direct communication. But more importantly, my goal in life isn't to accumulate as much wealth as humanly possible. My goal is to be happy and live a fulfilling life. If we remove housing cost benefits of living together, remember that you can be happier and poorer or richer and miserable. I can't take my money with me when I die.

It's hard to say just how good of a girlfriend I would be, or how depressed I would be if I was dumped. Not only would I be trying to figure out how I would feel in a situation I've never been in, I would be doing so for a future version of me that's different than me today, because the experience of finding and being with somebody would surely change me as a person. It would probably give me plenty of new things to say about life at the very least.

Speaking of change, some guy on a pickup artist forum once said that high school relationships are not a waste of time even though most of them don't work out in the long run. That's because it is an experience which we learn, grow, and evolve from, just like any other major life experience.

I for one, agree.



Who will I be and how would I feel 5 years from now as I re-read this post from the future? I intend to find out.