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#identity

8 posts8 participants0 posts today

I dont identify myself as a man, guy, straight, white or whatever the fuck. I am a human being with a lot of wishes, likes and dislikes, behaviors that are influenced by the environment. And so forth. I am me, unique.

How about we all see each other like that?! Everyone is a unique individual whose behavior comes from the environment and can/will change/adapt over time.

Seems more realistic to me and no more fights over trans this, gay that, straight, male, female, girl, boy, neutral, etc.. Just complex individual human beings.

Congratulations to Margaret McDonald and her editors Alice Swan and Ama Badu – winners of the 2025 Branford Boase Award for outstanding debut novel for young people with GLASGOW BOYS, a moving, beautifully written coming-of-age novel exploring the power of identity, community and masculinity.

@bookstodon

branfordboaseaward.org.uk/2025

branfordboaseaward.org.uk2025 BBA Winners – The Branford Boase Award and The Henrietta Branford Writing Competition

The #Trump admin has sued <California for allowing #transgender athletes to compete on #school sports teams that match their #gender #identity.

The suit alleges that California has violated federal civil rights law by discriminating against women [which doesn’t make any sense].

California officials have denied any wrongdoing & rejected federal demands to bar transgender #athletes from girls’ & women’s school #sports teams.

#law #LGBTQ #disinformation #bigotry
latimes.com/california/story/2

Former Trump campaign lawyer Harmeet Dhillon departs after testifying at a House Committee on House Administration hearing on "American Confidence in Elections: Protecting Political Speech" on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, May 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Los Angeles Times · Trump administration sues California over transgender athletesBy Howard Blume

The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke

This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity. 

On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 .  Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate. 

When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.

From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments.  How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.   

Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see. 

Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.

1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304

2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.

Just occurred to me: They™️ don't hate modifying yourself, up to & including surgically, to match your identity - they do that themselves.

What they hate is doing it to feel good about yourself, as opposed to doing it for status & dominance.

They don't want you out & feeling comfortable about it because they feel that their pettiness & insecurity is outed by it.

The emotional logic of a selfish asshole.

The truth is, I never really felt different, in the sense that I was in the wrong body, as a kid. By the time I hit my early twenties, I neither felt like a female nor a male. I just felt like a person. I enjoyed “female things” and “male things”.
medium.com/@charliejraymond/am

Prism & Pen · Am I Trans Enough? - Prism & Pen - MediumBy C.J. Ray