Burn this motherfugger down

So here's a thing I learned today: the well respected medical institution John Hopkins closed down it's gender reassignment clinic because they didn't believe people who had had the surgery were any happier afterwards than they had been before. Apparently all the issues these people thought would be relieved by finally being in the 'right' body, remained and John Hopkins (in their infinite wisdom) figured that 'meh, what's the point of going through all that faff when it doesn't do any good?'


I may have condensed the actual decision making process that went into that quite considerably but that is, for the most part, for realz.

If we ignore the whole chunk of stuff about how our heterocentric society disregards any break from 'the norm' with, at best, suspicion and, at worst, outright hostility which may in fact maybe perhaps possibly still make life difficult after the op in similar ways to before due to secondary sex characteristics that aren't changed such as hand size ( I would be fine as a female-to-male transsexual thanks to my giant man hands, which is a small comfort should I ever realise this is an issue for me) then I think we can get to the core of something that is a universal problem. Not a problem in the literal sense of millions of people being born as the wrong gender (though there could be - I don't know, and am too lazy to look up, the statistics) but more the metaphorical idea that we all have to go on a journey to accept ourselves as we truly are - and do we do this to be 'happy' or do we do this because there is no other option?

Firstly, what is 'happy'? I would be interested to see how the John Hopkins crowd define it. Having done a psychology degree I know that a great many people interested in the human brain and behaviour have developed tests and score cards and the like in order to measure happiness. Nothing I ever saw in this regard ever struck me as defining happy in the way I understood it. For a start, 'happy' is a transitory emotion that we shouldn't expect to last any longer than any other emotion. Happy is me sitting in an audience watching Richard Herring tell jokes about wanking, but, for better or worse, I don't sit in an audience watching Richard Herring tell jokes about wanking on a permanent basis. Happy exists but somewhere along the line we've skewed the interpretation of it to mean something different. Just as sad is now a synonym for depression (one is healthy, one is not. One is transitory, one is not), happy has become a synonym for content. It's important we make the distinction because one state of being is achievable and the other isn't. If the John Hopkins people are looking for 'happy' post-op transsexuals they are going to find as many of them as they would find 'happy' non-transsexuals; not a lot. That has nothing to do with whether you cut their bits off or not.

Which, in turn, leads us to another point. Is it worth doing something if you don't experience pure positivity from doing it? And should that matter if, as in the case of transsexuals, it's surely not about a happy/sad dichotomy but is just people going on a very literal journey to become more of themselves than they were before? Is it not just an outward manifestation of what we all go through if we're to live our lives the way we want to. It's a painful, horrible, heart wrenching process but, in the end, you find out what and who you are. This isn't about 'happy' it's about living life the best way you can.

I've always been interested in this type of thing - the journey we take to become human. Physically we may be born as human but mentally it takes a lot of effort to get to where we need to go. Girls who were born boys (and vice versa) just have to deal with the physical and the mental journey to become human. The first step in all these journeys is destruction as a form of creation. We have to break apart ourselves and the world we've been led to believe exists if we want to put it all back together again in a way that suits us.

If John Hopkins think this is (or should be) a process ending in unwavering joy it would appear they've fallen into the trap that seduces a lot of us: the journey to become human doesn't stop, it's a continuing adventure with continuing pitfalls and indeed, continuing wonderment. It's only by taking step after step that we can approach anywhere we need to go. I am still learning this now but it's becoming more and more apparent the things I need to do to find contentment. In times past, having gone through the things I have gone through in the last few months , I would have allowed myself a wallow, a time-out from dealing with life.

I now know how useless that is.

What I have to do is engage, and keep engaging, with life. Whether that means writing every day, going to see a play, reading books, spending quality time with friends, painting a picture, doesn't matter. I know how to give myself a shot at contentment and it's not by doing nothing. It might not be easy engaging and doing these things that I do when I don't want to, or I'm too tired, or I'm feeling a bit poorly, but it's not meant to be easy all the time - you just have to keep doing it anyway. It's the only chance you've got.

I have been in love with both an alcoholic and a gay man. Although very different issues, both these things deal with the person in question facing up to truths that they would have ideally liked to ignore, or not to exist in the first place. They both continuously make allusions to this; one talks about how he will never have kids because he would feel bad when it's so hard growing up anyway to lumber him/her with homosexual parents (I think this is bullshit for all the reasons just stated - life isn't easy whatever and as long as you can give a child a safe and loving home then they're about ten steps of everyone else who haven't been given that luxury. There's a lot more in the latter category than we would like to admit), the other gave up completely because he just found it all too fucking hard. I have no time for that way of thinking anymore. It is hard being truthful, it is hard becoming human, but guess what; it's meant to be, and it doesn't suddenly become easy because of one event (whether that be having your gender reassigned to what it should be, admitting to yourself that your sexuality is one that doesn't comply with the norm, or very suddenly finding yourself coming to terms with the fact that your reliance on alcohol has got out of control). Life carries on after these events and it's your responsibility to keep living as truthfully as you did in that moment after your moment of clarity has passed. In fact, you now owe it to yourself even more - that is hard to keep up. But you fucking do it because taking the blue pill when you've already taken the red pill isn't an option.

So, basically what I'm saying is, fuck the John Hopkins psychology department. Burn this motherfucker down.