This is very rich conversation. Thank you Rachel.It is also a conversation that can be a very tricky (specially in written form) but knowing you,Rachel, and having had a couple of calls together and deeply connecting with you I trust that the chances of misunderstanding are slimmer. ;-) but please let me know how this lands for you and I am happy to clarify any points (on a one on one or here :-)).Preframe: I am aware that I lack the UTOK terminology ( and deep understanding of it) so please forgive me while I try to explain some of my thoughts.As far as I can see, where my deep interests and Rachel’s seem to weave and this seems also to be one of the things that Bonnita Roy speaks about is the disconnection with our animal self and the impact it has on us/culture/all.. (I usually use the animal self as the instinctual self, the part of us that not only is deeply connected to the survival instinct in a more “simplistic way” but also the part of us and that knows, from embodied experience (not transpersonal) the interconnectivity of all, the illusion of the separate self in a pre-mental way, that part that moves through life from this sensing space (not naming and separating) - what Gebser (in my understanding) would refer to as the magic structure of development)In your e-mail you are also speaking about the mental, Rachel, and I’d love to hear more about that and how you see it in the transgender conversation.To me, there is a very important issue that influences gender views/felt experience that often gets left out of the discussion and it is exactly this modern person’s disconnection from the body.What I mean by that is that for example, with our current (very pathological) constructs on the menstrual cycle (the whole period(pun intended) from menarch - first bleed - till menopause) is not only overlooked, poorly understood by culture (and all the systems that are a part of that culture) but also internalised by (most) women as a side note (and a negative side note, which is worse) to the experience of inhabiting a female body.By Culture reinforcing this idea that we are minds without bodies (the whole education system seems to be created from that place) what happens to most women is that they live life from a place of abstracted relationship with what it is to inhabit a female body. Basically. we make that part of being a female shadow. We don’t see it. Men don’t see it. Systems don’t see it. It is not there.From a place of not being there ( and the only bit that does seem to get some attention is the “hard/inconvenient” bit - PMS/hot flushes/pain in labour/grumpiness/etc - ) what is created in our collective psyches is a construct that has become extremely distorted/dissociated.I am sharing this because it feels very important in this conversation. It is a conversation that requires space/time/compassion/curiosity/openness. If it is done from a place of trigger, it would obviously not bring any new insights. So I attempt tot tread gently…The questions/topics that I haven’t seen explored in the gender conversations and I’d love to explore with care are:- the different reasons/drives for transitioning. (Some young women - 14-16, for example, have shared wanting to not have their periods and they decided to transition to stop what they saw as a pathology (and our culture does a great job into turning the cycle into a pathology). Would this be different if culture/women/men/systems understood, embraced, celebrated this cyclical way of being? (This is where we would have benefitted from the older generations teaching the younger ones - but the older generations “lost the wisdom” - Zak stein talks about this if I am not mistaken in regards to other contexts)- the existential crisis of being an adolescent is extremely powerful and can be very intense. When living in a culture that values the “alleviation of pain at all costs” it is understandable that people would attempt to “get out of it”. What is the percentage of people transitioning that are “running away” from something as opposed to running towards something else?- this last question/topic I’ll have to pre-frame a bit. We have spoken in person about it Rachel, so I feel more at ease writing. :-).When a man ( born in a male body and without the neurological aspects mentioned by, you, Rachel) goes about his life he has simpler cocktail of hormones infusing his system, therefore his mental/emotional/psychological landscape has a certain “flavour” to it. Of course everyone is different but I am here just trying to paint a picture. ;-) (so please forgive the generalisations).A woman, however, will, whether she likes it or not be shaped in some way by the cycles. So there is an ebb and flow to her experience of life (guided by the cycles) that is deeply intwined with her physiology. Of course, as already touched on earlier in this e-mail, we (humans) have an incredible capacity to live our lives from a place of abstraction and what I mean by that is a lot of us women live with this ebb and flow and project (imagine) that we are linear (more similar to a male physiology). So we can live our lives basically in resistance to what is happening in our bodies. We have period pain but need to go to work? No problem. We take a pill. We feel angry towards something (but are constantly expected to live/pretend to be linear) no problem we hide from the collective and occasionally lash out in more intimate circles. We have endometriosis, are pregnant and/or breastfeeding and have “baby brain” (which is such powerful intelligence in the world of a new mother or mother-to-be) and we need to “function in the same way as always” no problem, we “excuse ourselves and apologise for having baby brain” and feel quietly more insecure about our capacities as we struggle to fill an excel sheet. (Poor use of that intelligence required by new mother and baby).So here is my tricky (and true curiosity) question:When someone that doesn’t have a cycle has an insight, an aspiration a knowing “ I’m in the wrong gender” the person is in some way projecting what it is to be that (other) gender. For example, I have no experiential idea of what it feels like to not have a cycle. I have heard from a friend that transitioned into male that being pumped with testosterone felt like an anti-depressant to her system. More confidence, more certainty, less wavering, less oscillation, less caring about what others thought. To me, when I heard that, it made a lot of sense as I see/feel many men (again generalising for the sake of the bigger picture) acting in a way that seems to have that type of confidence, but this is less familiar to me and many women.So, the transition can only be made on a level of projection of what the other is. In some cases because “what I am is too painful” and I imagine the other gender (in this case) to be less painful than mine.In other cases, (I imagine this to be more rare) and this is what I felt in your presence Rachel, there seems to be a deep connection with the feminine principle of existence, the Yin principle. This transcends biology but also includes it in a sense of the neurological aspect you mentioned, The desire comes almost as an aspiration. This is a much wider conversation and it wouldn’t be possible here in written form. To me the sliding scale of yin-yang (feminine-masculine) energies within and without vary and create different form/experience (in reality).So someone that senses/feels relates to the “mother principle” of life, to the interconnectivity of all, to the beauty of the relational field, they might be in a male or female body but express different “ratios” of yingness/yangness.What struck me about you Rachel, which felt very beautiful and I’d say even a transpersonal relationship with gender in some way, is that your love and appreciation of the feminine principle was so deep and strong that you literally gave yourself to it. You died to one construct of yourself and birthed another. Your path to gender transition - to my eyes - felt deeply spiritual. (I don’t mean to put words in your mouth here, just sharing what I felt).So, in your presence I did feel like I was in the presence of a woman. This feels important to say as there is a qualitative difference for me of sitting with men and sitting with women and I was sitting with a woman. It was even tangible to me how you, potentially because of your love of the feminine and the effort you had to go through to embody/live it in your physiology, that you held more love and more pride in being a woman than many women I have sat with in women’s spaces.I shared with you that I believed that not having had the initial rite of passage into womanhood (which to me causes deep insecurity and trauma in women in relationship to the feminine principle) and having had your formative years as a men (testosterone/more linear/less wavering) might have shaped your psyche in a way in which you could bring this with you when you transitioned. At times when we spoke I noticed myself feeling emotional by your love of the feminine and wishing that other women would feel this way about the feminine in them.So what I am saying here is…probably multiple things.1 - our cultural pathological initiation of girls into women shapes their psyches in a way that is not helpful and this creates distortions/disociation from the feminine)2 - many women would, therefore, not be able to see/notice/experience the fullness of the yin aspect in themselves (in relation to the physiology/ebb and flow) and therefore only see it through the lenses of pathology3 - in this context it could be easier for someone from the outside (that inhabits a different psyche) to see the beauty that goes unnoticed when “you are IN it”.4 - there are probably various reasons for transitioning (or not) and some might be very empowering/in alignment and others might be “another way to run away from the experience of pain”.5 - Bringing awareness into these various lenses that one could be seeing gender through and therefore their desire to transition could help guide people into working towards “more of themselves “ (whether this involves gender transition or not)6 - generating culture that values and celebrates the cycles, the wavering, the tears, the connection, the ebb and flow (of life and everything) would - in my view - diminish the numbers of girls wanting to become boys to run away from their periods. This means that a smaller percentage of people would transition and they would do it “for the right reasons”. (I hope I don’t come across as judgmental as this is not at all where I am coming from).I am here speaking from the perspective I often hold of being "an investigator of life/experience" and I see how much energy we put in “running away” from what is perceived as negative.Often transgender (women and men) are put in the same category and to me this lacks nuance and it does a disservice to the conversation.A while ago I started a research on the “developmental stages of sex and gender”. I didn’t do it for long enough to have a lot of data but I could start seeing patterns of thoughts. Some thoughts from some participants came from a black and white places(in regards to gender and also other stuff) and other thoughts came from a more nuanced and open space in their consciousness. It was rare to find people transitioning coming from a very open space in themselves in regards to this concept. It is also true that many (maybe most??) people that don’t transition (or want to) also have black and white thoughts around it. What was really interesting for me was seeing some (few) people that had very open, broad, expansive, transpersonal thoughts around gender. It is all still a living inquiry for me…Some of my thoughts on the menstrual cycle can be found here: https://medium.com/@adriana_53421/invisible-power-lessons-our-culture-could-learn-from-jazz-the-four-seasons-and-the-menstrual-5cd76751671f or here https://medium.com/@adriana_53421/casting-a-new-spell-moving-from-pms-to-pmp-23245aac0b8fTed Talk with a transgender woman that I found fun, playful and touches on also deep concepts. https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_stone_williams_i_ve_lived_as_a_man_and_as_a_woman_here_s_what_i_ve_learned/transcript?language=enAlso, honouring that all these conversations require time and care Rachel Hayden and I have recorded a conversation together - which I deeply loved! (and I hope to have more in the future) and it will be shared in a couple of months. This is part of a project that I am now doing with UTOK member Nick Jankel and hope to have Gregg on and some others as well at some point when we “birth it” :-)Sorry for the super long e-mail. I obviously care a lot about this topic.Warm regards to all,AdrianaOn 13 Jan 2022, at 05:51, Rachel Hayden <[log in to unmask]> wrote:CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
Nicholas and Gregg ~
Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.
I actually think I'd be terrible at writing a book about transgender science. This is because 1) I'm not trained as a scientist or clinician, and 2) I learned just enough about this issue to recognize that, while the specifics of the research may turn out to be wrong, there was enough convergent evidence to make a naturalistic case for some kind of neurobiological factor, and that I should proceed with transition on that basis. Having learned that, I also realized that this type of empirical knowledge couldn't tell me much about how to transition, a much more of an aspirational, developmental process which must include the Culture-Person plane of the ToK - finding a sort of "line of best fit" between biology, mind, culture, and the transcendent, similar I think to Gregg's wisdom stack. So I turned to John Vervaeke, who also pointed me toward L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard's work on transformation, which helped immensely in actualizing the real potential of becoming someone with a different set of values and salience landscape. Finding Gregg's work later helped to put all of my thoughts around this complex issue into a more organized format (go figure), which has become useful in guiding others toward greater reflectiveness.
I would like to write some sort of book around this topic, however, perhaps in conjunction with someone with a science background. What I would want to do is create a better model for gender transition than the "decadent Romantic" projections of some kind of hypersubjective self, currently in vogue in the trans community, and related to general confusion, anger, and mental distress in the trans population, not to mention this "trans-trender" issue. I'm envisioning something like a Hitchhiker's Guide to Your Gender. I think that concepts like opponent processing machinery between the selective constraints of culture and the enabling constraints of individual neurobiology/mental idiosyncrasy could be very useful for some, as they have been for me, if they were explained in accessible ways. Hopefully this would help people avoid simplistic ideological dead-ends, for example, the tedious binary debate around whether clothing has gender or not. Of course, UToK has a lot to offer in terms of structuring one's understanding (Tree of Knowledge, Experiential/Private/Public Selves, etc.).
Best,R
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############################I got way more than I thought I would response-wise here.
Lee and Gregg,
Lee, too your point, there are brute facts that are still not clearly understood and distinctions unmade with clashing social constructs (e.g., Columbus statues being taken down being fought over because two sides are asserting competing narratives as if they are brute facts). So for me personally Gregg, I agree with JUST and the ToK metamodernism but I can only accept it as a theory of ontology until it actually happens, and to me it's pretty clear we aren't there yet culturally if we have this much apperceive baggage attached to all our narratives. To me its literally that we have not yet lost our ego on the culture plane, and non have truly transcended it until we all do.
How we actually get there is a different discussion, and I like what Lee's doing and what Brandon N is doing. We are seeing the relative value of various theoretical systems with values and competing forces through that work (and I didn't mean to call you out in my OP Lee! I was moreso referencing undertones I've seen).
Rachel,I hope you're doing some writing cuz you got some serious knowledge and being fortunate enough to possess information literacy, I appreciate the degree of brute facts you just dropped on us. That's the kind of stuff I want to know that helps me clinically work with my transgender clients. I need to know what's biological and what isn't because if anything is going to define any of my beliefs it's that, I can't hold someone responsible for their genes, after all. So please publish a book or something the market is raw and ready for a book like that! Or just write and send me info I can use, either is fine.😅
TR,
I'll have to read your response through a couple of times to better respond because you also pack a ton of knowledge into what you say. I'm just too disorganized of a thinker to really understand your writing style after just one pass.
Regards,
Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
Thanks so much for this, Rachel.############################
Brilliantly stated.
Best,Gregg
Sent from my iPad
On Jan 11, 2022, at 6:31 PM, Rachel Hayden <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
I agree with Lee that the transgender issue often takes one side of the "brute facts" biology vs. social constructivist argument. This corresponds to the ToK's biological and culture/person planes of existence, and sort of a modernist vs. postmodernist cultural war. So you have binary biology (albeit with quirks), pitted against an understanding that various cultures across the world have exhibited what would be described as "transgender" by our culture, combined with a sort of critique of patriarchy, etc.
What often gets left out in this is the animal/mental. I'm not a scientist, but in the interest of trying to understand how my own transgender nature came to be, I followed scientists like biopsychologist Dana Bevins, Alexandra Hall, Robert Sapolsky, and others. What I learned is that for transgender people, there are factors like genetic gender behavioral predispositions and non-interference of epigenetics which translate to changes in the brains of transgender people. Evidence for this includes genetic analyses, identical vs. fraternal twin studies, links between handedness and trans people, 2nd to 4th digit ratios, differences in sense of smell (prior to hormone treatment), and MRI studies. While there has been debate about MRI studies on the hypothalamic basal nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), due to possible interference from hormone therapy (not sure where this debate ended up), differences in transgender brains have been noted in other areas, such as the putamen, corpus callosum, the insula, and the corticospinal tract.
I would hope that the inclusion of the mental plane would correspond to revised, somewhat metamodernist-linked understanding which could create some space around this and many issues.
Best,R
########################################################Love this conversation and I will not add much, but let me just make a note that is very relevant to UTOK:
JUST and the ToK System complete change this debate. That is, from a UTOK perspective, the modern versus postmodern debate about knowledge is woefully inadequate and poorly framed and unresolvable precisely because we were missing the necessary pieces.
JUST gives an ontology, a metatheory of how knowledge is socially constructed. That is completely novel, and if you do not have that, everything is confused. So JUST is a game changer when it comes to the social construction of knowledge, because it is an ontological theory of that knowledge construction.
Then, you get the ToK System advance, and that is a game changer also.
So, UTOK clearly gives a metamodern sensibility that includes and transcends via fundamentally new theoretical advances that allow us to clean up, clear up and grow up from the modern versus postmodern confusions regarding the nature of human knowledge. That is, if you aren’t looking at the modern versus postmodern issues via JUST and the ToK, you are not looking at them clearly.
Best,
Gregg
From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of lee simplyquality.org
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2022 2:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Postmodernism Is Not Inherently Anti-science
CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
Nik,
Thanks for this.
Here is my simplistic explanation of how I see postmodernism. (And yes, I am aware I included column “A” in the spreadsheet, and shared my ontology on this list).
When I was in grade school we learned that: 1) Christopher Columbus discovered America, 2) He was a hero for doing so, and 3) The world is a much better place as a result of his discovery. This is a (coherent) narrative that is comfortable for European Americans to hear. A valuable postmodern contribution is to recognize that this is only one of many possible narratives emerging from the interpretation of events, and this particular narrative is advanced by those in power as a way of maintaining power. All of this is true. I am critical of postmodernism whenever it suggests that “all we have is stories, these are all made up, go make up your own story, they all have equal veracity and value.” This is not true.
A key skill in navigating this territory is to keep in mind the distinction between “brut facts” and “Social Constructs”.
With respect to Columbus, the brute facts are: 1) A person know as Christopher Columbus existed at the time. 2) He was on one of three ships that travelled from Europe to Hispaniola in the year 1492. 3) This was a big deal to his European sponsors. 4) Colonization began soon after, 5) Perhaps millions of indigenous people died, 6) Many people in North America claim to own land, 7) Various history books tell selected portions of this story using various narrative themes.
Both brute facts (as described above) and a variety of social constructs (celebrating Columbus Day, various celebrations (and protests), many stories, books, and text books, …) exist.
This distinction between brute fact and social construct is in play now in transgender discussions.
Gregg was very helpful in reminding us that (the brute facts of sex) sex (at birth) is bi-modal, not binary.
Transgender advocates are correct in observing that many customs and traditions we associate with gender (e.g. pink is for girls, …) are social constructs, likely advanced by those in power to stay in power. The discussion gets heated when either the brute facts or the social constructs are denied or distorted.
The birther theories (and now the “big lie”) are other examples of how narratives can be advanced by powerful people to gain power, test loyalty, or for some other personal gain. (And I hope it goes without saying that I don’t consider Trump to be a postmodern theorist.)
I hope this is clear, accurate, useful, and respectful.
Thanks,
Lee Beaumont
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