[spacecat]

Oh, I don't think that's just you, but it is a very Western reductionist mode of thinking; one that's hard to escape in our society. We don't look at a human like a whole person, but as a sack of meat organized by electrical impulses.

Everything is broken down to component parts and compartmentalized, because we need neat little answers wrapped in bows: a + b must always equal c; they must not equal zebra sometimes.

But the world doesn't work that way. Reductionism is the opposite of holism... and it does not account for wholes being more than the sum of their parts (or emergent behavior). That's why we have this idea that boys who play with dolls need SRS: it's an easy answer, and it's monetizable.

I find that sexual preference and gender identity are intertwined -- not in the same way for everyone, mind you -- but they are not separable. They are parts of you like your eye color and your height and the shape of your jaw... you can't take one away and be the same whole person.

I believe that there needs to be a place similar to the native american 'two-spirit' that is available to white people and white cultures, without the race-based baggage and political correctness self-censorship. (as it is with the term 'two spirit' itself, which in spite of being rendered in english, has very heavy overtones of being necessarily of native american origin, and people who don't look the part, are going to be seen as cultural appropriators and other sorts of unsavory fakers.)

Unfortunately, the nearest acceptable/ tolerated rig-up available to white euro-americans is the lgb-T-I subcultures, which is forced to self-pathologize in order to get access to any medical care beyond what a 'normal' cis-person would need in any given situation.

I also believe that this core element of reductionism and otherwise necessary pathologization of any variant behaviors, marks white/american culture as distinctly incomplete, and not very functional unless operating within very very specific society parameters. This latter component, along with recorded (constant) historical conflicts and the need to dominate and colonise other more local (read; native) cultures, suggests to me that white anglo-euro-american culture is both artificial, and rigorously based and framed in militarism and authoritarianism.