The Productive Pessimist

  I want  to start this post with the common rebuff from the trans community (of which I am a part); "Everybody has a gender!"  I can't , however, because that isn't true. Gender  isn't just the "polite" substitute for "sex-as-adjective".  Gender  is a psycho-emotional sense  of something that is true about oneself.  Truth is not  subjective, which is where the complexity of "gender" comes in - because "psycho-emotional sense" sounds very  subjective - it's "just peoples' feelings!"   Except it's not. What gives psycho-emotional sense its claim to being objective  truth is that it is made manifest in the way a person interacts with their society, and invites that society to interact with them.   Psycho-emotional sense may go through a period of flux - which, after all, is what puberty is for most people, and what menopause and andropause are for many people - but, in the end, after between 3-7 years, it...

  TW: Discussion of systemic transphobia, Discussion of racism "How can a trans woman be CEO of an endometriosis charity?!"  Well, the head coach of the England Women's Rugby team is a male-identified, cisgender (assigned male at birth) man. The CEO of the RNIB isn't blind. CEOs of anti-poverty charities are certainly well-remunerated enough to not actually be in poverty. Most have never  experienced hardship, having danced from Executive post to Executive post, before eventually landing as a CEO. The upside of being a pessimist is you spend so long looking at problems that you gain an intuitive awareness that, very often, the thing being presented as "the problem" isn't, in fact, the real  issue that needs a solution. In endometriosis , the (very real, for those who suffer from the condition) issues of medical fact would be fairly straightforward to address. The problem  is medical disinterest, and, very particularly, the attitude of the medical profess...