I was on my way home on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, with my dinner in hand, and I swear I just wanted to sit down and eat but I knew the bus would show up the minute I did. I had intended to eat in the restaurant, but for some reason the counter person handed me my meal in a bag to go. Since my usual table was...
I do not often get comments on my blog; if I exclude the pingbacks, spam and my own replies, I’ve received twenty-two comments from ten different individuals since I started the eye of paradox two years ago. Four of those people have identified themselves as transgendered, and like every transgendered person I’ve...
On April 27, 2008 at 12:36 am, I began a post—this post, actually—but got no further than the title. I don’t know if that was because that title summed up my feelings so well that there was no point to writing any further about what was on my mind. Yesterday, those words came back to me at the conclusion of A Glimpse...
The response I received to my last post, Conundrum, prompted me to check out the recent posts of the people who commented or posted blogs in the transgender category yesterday. As a result, I became aware of the outcry against the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, Dr. Ray Blanchard, and J. Michael Bailey, by the...
Today I find myself puzzling over the weird fact of my existence. The Internet created an opportunity to show a side of myself that I had long kept hidden. I am, at least in the terms used by the medical community (and by extension, the LGBTQ community), transgendered; in spite of being born and raised male the core of...
We’re all human. None of us have a say in what circumstances we are born. Pretty much any other characteristic by which people can be defined produces some form of social stratification. Thinking about it boggles the mind. I’ve grown up with the ideas of caste and class, and tried to understand how anyone can willingly...
As true as it is that some people are incapable of valuing things they have not paid the price for, the fact is that free money is never free. There is terrible cost for being on the public dole, that is immediately evident when you walk into a welfare community. Being on public assistance or living on a reservation,...
Even with the best intentions no one has the right to impose a system of thought or action on anyone against their will. Ironically, that is exactly what has happened to all of us as we were born into this world. It is in some ways no different than being born into slavery, in the sense that we come into the world...
Grouping is an activity that comes instinctively and automatically to people. It is part of a filtering process that allows us to make sense of our universe. Anything can serve as criteria for grouping, but because this is a perceptual-interpretive process; differences and similarities in physical characteristics are...
I never imagined that I had a monopoly on being at odds with life. It is simply a state of being with which I am much too familiar. I have spent most of my life struggling with things that most people take for granted, stumbling and falling in places where most people stride with confidence and conviction. Strangely, I...
What is a society, what is it made up of and how does it work? The simple answer is, jobs. Society is all about jobs. Living in the wild, surviving on their own, human beings had no jobs. Their lives were defined by the tasks that needed to be done in order to be able to survive. A bunch of people living together and...