Self-Organizing Man

Time works in funny ways.  We are driven to be faster and cheaper. 

But then we wonder why things like governments and cultures don’t change as quickly as our jeans or shirts or diets or authors.

My conservative religious pals want to place my body choices in the realm of Fashion.  "It’s a lifestyle choice."  Insurance companies place my choices in the realm of Commerce. Feminists and queer theorists take these same choices and situate them in the realm of Culture.  "Biology is not destiny."  "Woman is made not born." Still other Feminists  (Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire) and still other conservative pals (or maybe the same ones) place my choices in the realm of Nature, accusing me of committing a crime against Nature.  (This response has been one used against all people seeking equal treatment, and fortunately shows how unimaginative our opponents are.)

I, too, place my choices in the realm of Nature.  But Nature for me also means disposition, as in human beings are disposed to manipulating and exploiting our environment for our own ends. 

My opponents always say my choices are my crime against Nature.  But they never accuse scientists of crimes against Nature for isolating testosterone and estrogen, hormones which make transsexual realities possible.  They never accuse plastic surgeons of crimes against Nature for advances in tissue grafting, scarring and suturing.  These advances might make their lives better.

People can’t have it both ways.  They can’t decide that  the science that benefits them is good but I am bad for using science to achieve ends with which they do not agree.  Janice Raymond and the American Family Association will go after MtFs but never endocrinology.

They delude themselves about human evolution, nature and speed.  The same impulse that drove Cro-Magnon man to make flint arrows is the same one that made me.  That impulse resides in Nature, but more than simply Nature as Body.  Attributing my transsexuality to biological destiny limits Nature to the Body only.

As we know, the human experience is more than Body. It is also about impulses and proclivities and mind and thoughts.  By expanding Nature to include the natural impulse to exploit our environment and study and use things and modify and change them, we can begin to transform our fashionable and commercial and governmental, even our cultural, understandings of what it means to be human.

We are human in totality.  We must resist the urge to find political relief through reducing ourselves to a set of human parts.

Freedom is always found in totality and in taking a 10,000 year view of human history.