Tag: Transgender

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BREAKING: Dear Donald: There already are transgender servicemembers

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Ex-Navy SEAL Kristin Beck: Was she any less lethal a Navy Seal?

This morning President Trump announced via twitter that no people who happen to be transgender will be allowed to serve in the military citing the need for our armed forces to be “…focused on decisive and overwhelming…..victory…and [therefore] cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender [sic] in the military would entail.”

This is a strange decision, and an interesting way of announcing a major military policy reversal, but that’s beside the point. The main point: there already ARE and have been transgender armed service members. They serve everywhere, including the Navy’s elite special warfare combat crew, which works along with Navy Seals. It should also be noted that a former Navy Seal also has come out as transgender. Our armed forces are lethal. Even with transgender service members in it.

It seems this action may be less about military lethality, and even less about being transgender. It may have far more to do with politics in our opinion. Or maybe race: The right has avowed to reverse all decisions the first black President of the United States made during his two-term presidency.

Before the transgender community gets up in arms, or worried, check your stories. Those who follow our content know this is a crucial moment in time-space reality. You must respond in a way that creates future realities you’re wanting to see, not the ones your fear-based stories will create. So create interpretations of this situation that give you positive feelings. Not feelings of worry, anger, frustration or powerlessness.

  • “This is ok. Things change.”
  • “There will be another president. This will not stand.”
  • “I’m happy to know that in the long line of time, justice always prevails.”

You can’t go from feeling despair, powerless or grief, to feeling happy, joyful and optimistic. That’s too far of an emotional jump. But you can make your way from that really negative story to one of “less negativity”:

  • If you’re feeling powerless, and you can get yourself to feelings of anger or desire for revenge, you have improved your story. A story generating feelings of powerlessness sounds like this, for example: “Transgender people will never be respected in this world” or, “Transgender people will always be denied their rights.” You can move from powerlessness to anger or revenge with this kind of story, for example: “That motherfucker Trump is a fucking DICK!!!!” or, “I’m glad I’m not in the military, because if I was, I would get medieval on those cis-het-white PRICKS!!!!!!”
  • If you can move from anger to worry or frustration, you have improved your story. For example, you can move from the anger-inducing stories above to these: “I’m concerned about what my friend, who is in the service and trans, will do. I guess I’ll call him and see how he’s doing.” Or: (if you’re in the military) “This sucks. I’ve just come out to my Guard command. Now I gotta wait and see how this is going to affect me. But I know I have friends here. So I’m good. Just frustrated. It’s all going to work out.”
  • If you can go from frustration to pessimism, you have improved your story. For example, you can relatively easily get from the above stories to the following: “I’m not sure this is going to turn out well, but we’ll see.” Or: “This means people in the military who are transgender are going to have to be discharged. That’s not good.”
  • And if you can go from pessimism to boredom, contentment or hopefulness, you have improved your story. For example: “Ok. I’m glad I’m not in the military so I don’t have to worry about this. Trump sucks, but at least this doesn’t effect me.” Or: “You know, hopefully in four years (or less, if he gets impeached), we won’t have to deal with this silliness.”

These kinds of things take time to unfold. Just because the Trump Administration made this decision today doesn’t mean it will remain in place forever. In the meantime, transgender people will still serve. They will, for the time being, have to do it the way they had before President Obama allowed them to serve openly. But they will do it nonetheless.

Remember this: if one president can decree it perfectly acceptable to serve in the military and be transgender, so can another. Just like with healthcare*, the cat is out of the bag. Transgender servicemen have tasted the sweet life of serving “out”. They won’t for long allow that sweet life to be denied. And neither will their allies, friends and families. Including those transgender community members who succeed in taking political office in the future.

Chin up. Life is great. All is going well.

 

*Today, while the right continues to “repeal and replace ‘Obamacare’”,  two-thirds of Americans believe healthcare is a right and that government should ensure healthcare coverage.

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Creating suffering by default

IMG_0987So last week I explained that a lot of people are suffering because they don’t know two critical components of what they are: (1) that they are eternal, and (2) that they are in control of their life experience and they exercise that control through the stories they tell.

As a result of this lack of knowledge, their life-experience-creation mechanism is operating on autopilot. Rather than deliberately telling stories about experiences people want to have in their life experience, they are telling stories by default, in obliviousness, unconsciously….however you want to put it, by looking at their life experience and then complaining about it.

A complaint is a story.

So people, generally, are looking at their life experience and selecting things to complain about, more than they are looking at and selecting things to praise. An even better option would be to ignore altogether the “now” reality and focus totally (or as much as possible) on the life experience one wants to have.

If you look at the transgender community, a lot of women are complaining about their life experience. They are telling stories about situations in their life experiences that they want to be different, instead of telling stories about situations they want, and situations they have which please them. They don’t know they are telling stories and that those stories are resulting in more of what they’re telling stories about, but it doesn’t matter that they don’t know, because awareness is not a prerequisite to the mechanism working!

Next time we’re going to bring this full circle back to you and that trans attracted man you keep calling a chaser.

 

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So why are so many people suffering?

belief or know

In my last post I posited an idea about how suffering is logical. In that post I suggested that perhaps there is a mechanism we are each empowered with, that allows us to have any experience we might want to experience. But lack of knowledge about that mechanism creates a bunch of mess in people’s lives.

Specifically, I wrote the following:

What if, you were totally free to choose your life experience and that this life experience was just one of an infinite number you have experienced and will experience. If you were totally free, you’d need some kind of mechanism through which you could exercise your freedom and design your experience right? Such a mechanism would need to preserve your total freedom, even when you’re in the midst of your chosen life-experience. What better mechanism than the ability to use “creativity” to create stories which, in time line up life experience with the content of a given story?

In the last post I also described how that mechanism includes a set of indicators – our emotions – which tell us whether we are using our stories to head towards what we’re wanting or away from it. We know when we’re heading in the wrong direction when we experience negative emotion. Negative emotion is suffering.

The logical question that follows such a proposition is: then why are so many people suffering?

My answer to that question is: How many people would read that quote above and agree with it? In the answer to that question, you find the reason why so many people today suffer. It’s because the vast majority of people don’t know two critical components of what it means to be human:

  1. That they are eternal
  2. That they are in control of their life experience

Now there’s a difference between “believing” something, and “knowing” it. Some people believe they are eternal. Their religion or philosophy they subscribe to may tell them so. And so they may “believe” it. But their life – i.e. their actual day-to-day behaviors – doesn’t reflect that belief. And, sometimes “belief” isn’t really belief, but more of a “ok, I get it” non-committal type position.

Knowing is born of life experience. You may believe you can fly a plane, but you don’t know it until you actually leave the runway in an actual airplane with you at the controls. The same is true for the two points above. And this is why so many people suffer: they don’t know these two critical components. As a result, they are not “at the controls” of the mechanism that is creating their life experience.

We take a deeper look at this mechanism’s autopilot next week.

 

 

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How suffering is eminently logical

FullSizeRender 2In my last post I suggested there is a logical reason why some transgender women (and some trans attracted men) suffer. The same is true for anyone who suffers. But to understand suffering, one has to understand the nature of stories and why they are so important.

Stories are the tales you tell yourself about everything you experience, including your self. Told often enough, they become beliefs. Stories told often, or shared by many, determine what the story-teller experiences in her life experience. In this way, each of us as individuals, shape our experiences. This is quite easy to prove to yourself with a bit of practice and guidance on what to look for while practicing.

Why would stories we tell ourselves create our life experience?

That is a splendid question. One quite logical reason why our stories might create our life experience is because each of us is a powerful, creative being, who, through life experience gains tremendous satisfaction and joy. Through such experiences, one becomes more aware of one’s identity, the identity that endures even after the physical body can no longer sustain us.

What if, you were totally free to choose your life experience and that this life experience was just one of an infinite number you have experienced and will experience. If you were totally free, you’d need some kind of mechanism through which you could exercise your freedom and design your experience right? Such a mechanism would need to preserve your total freedom, even when you’re in the midst of your chosen life-experience. What better mechanism than the ability to use “creativity” to create stories which, in time line up life experience with the content of a given story?

But how would you know if your stories are leading you to what you want, instead of what you don’t? That is where negative emotion comes from. Negative emotion is what suffering is. So suffering is an indicator telling a person the stories they’re entertaining aren’t creating the life experience they want.

Sounds crazy to say one’s stories are “reality-creators” and that negative emotion is an indicator that we’re using our creativity to create life experiences we don’t want. But diligent practice with this mechanism will reveal to anyone who tries that this is indeed the case.

So why then are so many people suffering? Why doesn’t everyone enjoy blissful lives? Another good question, which I tackle next time.

 

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Are transgender people meant to suffer?

sufferA speculation borne of personal experience, which is being verified as accurate in my own life experience.

As I wrote in the previous post about all those instances of mass suffering: is it random chance that people end up in these situations? If so, I could see how one could come to a conclusion like this:

“[the Universe is] a cold, uncaring place…[where our role is] to white knuckle my way through it, doing pointless things…until the day I die. At that point, if I’ve lived by my ideals, maybe God (or the universe) will give me some rest.”

Maybe this is the point transgender people (and others) come to shortly before committing suicide. I don’t know if transamorous men ever feel that level of despair, but we know many gay men have. And I would include them among us as “people born into potentially risky circumstances.”

But if the Universe is as nasty a place as that quote suggests, and there are many who believe it is, then the logical conclusion for some – the obviously rational and reasonable one – is to kill ones self. I mean if the person in question had no choice in the matter and  that choice was random and foisted upon them by some random-chance Universe, why can’t suicide be a logical response? I might consider the same option…

But that’s just shallow, lazy thinking.

Not the suicide part. I’m not here to judge such decisions. I’m talking about thoughts and conclusions which lead to beliefs that the universe is an uncaring, cold place.

I write that because there is literally overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including overwhelming evidence that every transgender person – and every transamorous one – came into the world clear of the decision to be such a person, with clear purposes for making that choice.

I explain how that could be, next week.

In short, transgender people and transamorous ones, aren’t meant to suffer. That they do is eminently logical when viewed from a particular perspective.