Not A Female

I opened up Tinder this morning to see they had updated a few settings options. Of course, they haven't changed the male or female choice. That would be ridiculous.

Every day online when I sign up for things I am confronted by that male or female choice, and i have to make a decision how I respond to it. And it's not an easy choice. Not because the question itself is difficult, but because I have to guess what they mean by it, and what difference that declaration will make to me.

You see, as far as I am concerned, I am male. That's basic biology. I mean, no matter what I do, I will never menstruate, I will never have period pains, or PMT, I will never be at risk of unwanted pregnancy, or be able to have a wanted one. There are undoubtedly things that should be on this list that I cannot think of, physical experiences I will never have, that are so far removed from my understanding I can't even think of what they are. Equally there are male experiences I have had that I cannot deny, though I wish I could forget.

Because I was proclaimed male at birth I have a path of expectations that I was pressured to go down, that puzzled and infuriated people, sometimes including myself, when I couldn't or wouldn't conform to them. But that failure to conform doesn't in itself make me female.It just makes me unusual.

So why do I call myself a woman? Well, because I am one, apparently. Woman has been defined by society as a descriptor as a certain type of person, it has a legal definition which apparently I meet. I didn't unilaterally declare myself a woman, I went to various doctors and psychologists who told me that was what I was, and accepted the descriptor.

I don't like the word, myself. I wish we used the terms the other way around, maybe, or used some other word again for it. Etymologically speaking, the root of woman is womb-man, man with a womb, and that's as far from an apt description as I can think of. And ironically enough, it's more that all males are females with a penis (really, look it up).[Edit: It has since been pointed out to me that this is wrong, it's actually more closely a corruption of wife-man, so it is a description of social status, which makes me a lot happer to adopt it]

I feel guilty for appropriating the description, and consciously think of myself as just a far outlier of maleness. But subconsciously I am probably the person that I am at least partly because I started to identify as and with the girls I played with as a child. If someone calls me he or him I get upset for days, but it's a very bland crime on the speakers part. It shouldn't carry any weight or meaning at all. Yet somehow, it does.

It matters because identity matters, because we have a human need to fit in with our peer group, and we see our interactions through a filter of how we think of ourselves. We take some of them so much for granted that we don't notice they are there. When people talk of privilege, this is what they really mean. If you say that it doesn't matter, it just means that you have so much privilege, you fit and are happy with that identity so much that it just isn't something you think about. That isn't an option open to many immigrants, or adopted parents, for instance.Yet they may well still identify as British, or mothers, and be legally and practically so.

When I see a man who identifies as a man but wears skirts and make-up, I am delighted that he is stretching the confines of the rigid gender-box they are assigned. But for me to fit in that box it would either break me or the box. My personal choice would be to break the box, to throw them away, and have everyone taken as an individual, but I don't have the power to impose that on the society I live in. So if I have to pick a box, I'll take the other one, and fit much more neatly into a category everyone understands.

When it's about medicine, or reproduction, I pick the M box. When it's about socialising or shopping (or safety) I pick the F one. I wish that companies would have a second set of boxes so that I could declare both at once, but they seem to have missed the memo.

Fractal Evolution

To  follow on from my earlier post and this blog from Richard Dawkins I just wanted to talk a little more about the fractal nature of evolution. Trust me, it is relevant.

First to summarise what we do know, for the non-biologists; we have genes, and somehow together they map out out how an organism will grow, and those genes have minor copying changes from one generation to the next. Our biology also adds in the feature of combining your genes in sexual reproduction to maximise the number of changes and mix it all up, and speed up the process. If a change is beneficial to the organism, it is more likely to get passed on than if it is detrimental, because the detrimental change is likely to get the organism killed, or at least unable to breed.

Now, there are a lot of genes. Like, really a lot. The X chromosome (above) alone, one I have a particular gripe with, has over two billion different combinations, and most changes in the organism are not brought about by a single flip of one gene, but of many working in combination, and there's another 45 like this, although this is probably the most complex. There's about as much potential for information storage in the human genome than about seven times the total internet traffic in the US for this year.

Anyone who says they understand your genetics, probably doesn't really even understand the question.

So the chances of any one human being exactly the same as another is pretty damn small. Even in twins, where they are literally copies of each other, it's possible to discern small differences, even if it's just that one appears to be slightly more embarrassed to be there.

That said, we can discern general trends, and because we are simple creatures, we treat them like they are so obviously different. Domestic dogs are all the same species, because they can all theoretically interbreed, though some would need to stand on a box. Now, some will protest that this is different, because they are breeds, they have been deliberately chosen to produce these kind of differences. But selective breeding is just another kind of exterior pressure, it's still a form of evolution. What thrives, survives, there is no moral or purist quality to it. There is no correct dog, there is just the dog suited to the environment; in this case, the owner's house.

What is driving the evolution of these creatures is an idea, a thought, or as Richard Dawkins coined, a meme. More precisely a set of memes, a meme being a single, very simple, alomst binary thought. Human beings are unique (so far) in having this second evolutionary attribute, that can exist completely independently of our biology.

Both of these has their parallels. As a gene is to a meme, a chromosome is to an idea, and a species is to a culture. The combined inherited beliefs and values of an individual will all be unique, but they can still equally be identified as belonging to a particular culture. Importantly, as in the difference between selective breeding and natural evolution, the reasoning behind a meme often doesn't really matter. If I should decide not to stick my finger into electrical outlets, it doesn't really matter whether I do it because an angel told me not to, or because I understand how electricity works.

Every moment, the state of your brain is an imperfect copy of the state of your brain in the previous moment, and the processing that goes on is the product of the ideas contained within that, which leads in turn to a new state of your brain. In effect, your brain is asexually reproducing a new you all the time. If all you did was sleep, that would be all that went on. But, equally, we are also taking in ideas from our environment and other people, so the brain has environmental pressure to change and a kind of sexual reproduction, where the gametes of other people's communicated ideas mate with the ovum of your own and form something new. This will always be something new, because it isn't yet possible to communicate precisely the idea as I have it in my head and place it fully formed in yours. You see it through the prism of your own mind, and I have no way of knowing how much of it you have understood until you communicate it back to me... And I'm sure you see the inherent problem there. Or do you? I have literally no way of knowing.

This doesn't mean, incidentally, that you have to entirely give up the idea of free will. But it does mean that free will is reduced to the point where it is indistinguishable from random chance, just as in "intelligent design" God has been reduced to the point where he is indistinguishable from random chance. Everything we are is the product of our genes, our environment, and the evolution of our minds.

Like a fractal pattern, evolution isn't simply one thing. When you start thinking of it as how attributes change, rather than organisms, you can see how it builds up, from the virus to the single celled organism, to the multi-celled organism, to sexual reproduction, to the creature with a working mind, to the creature that communicates, to the identifiable culture that creature lives in. All of these are just levels of complexity, but it's the same process going on. Concepts like gender and sexuality, even architecture and music, are all just evolutionary attributes of human evolution.

There are lots of parallels between observed phenomena in genetic and cultural evolution. A recessive gene is one that has no detrimental effect on the organism it is attached to, but gets passed along unnoticed along with the great swath of others. It doesn't stop you procreating, but like a club foot or excessive height, can be bloody annoying. A recessive meme would be one that won't actually do the culture it lives in any harm, or at least not enough to get it thrown out, like astrology, or golf as a spectator sport.

A good walk spoiled.

A religion is a good example of a culture, and the fact that by definition it has supernatural reasoning behind its many ideas doesn't really matter as to whether it lives or dies. It has a requirement for how people behave, and if that is detrimental to its followers then eventually it will either die out, or change into something else.

A culture will be detrimental to its followers if it cannot adapt to its environment, and thus the religions that have lasted longest tend to be ones that have the ability to change their original pronouncements. Christianity, in particular, has the Pope, or the Synod if you're Anglican and prefer your pronouncements from a committee, that can decide to change what they really meant all along when the outside pressure becomes too great.

So if these cultures have won out against others, we have to start asking ourselves, why? Their followers would, of course, just say that it's because they're right, but they can't all be right, because they contradict each other. So we need to start looking at them for the things they do, not the reasons they do them, and then examine what benefits their actions endow. Because if it's good for them, it might be good for us, and we shouldn't discard all of the actions that a culture prescribes just because the reason they say to do it is apparently absurd.

Perhaps, if you were going to start a religion, there are commandments you would like to be able to make everyone follow. Perhaps some of these already used by religions, with some new more relevant ones added in. Hey, in fact, I've got a great idea, why don't we elect people who are clever to come up with new ones? Yes, of course we already do this, and governments in their many forms are just another example of a culture, one that happens to have decreed that it's only valid within a certain geographical area. The fact that those elected are not always the best ones to do the job is just another example of evolotioary selection; it selects to get elected, not to do the role.

The central part of religions, though, is one idea, one commandment, variations of which is usually expressed as number one above all others, "This is true, take our word for it. You've got to have faith". Repeat it as a mantra until you actually believe it, because we've no way of proving it to you. This is part of the strength of religion, that it makes everyone into the nanny of their own mind, stopping you from doing certain things not because the logic of them has been explained to you, but because I say so.

This is both the best thing and the real danger of religion, the idea that you can just do something because someone tells you, not merely because you have reasoned it to be so. It means that you do things that are good for you, even if you aren't clever enough to understand the reasons they need to be done, But it also means that ideas that should have died out, that may have been suited to the time, but are no longer, can burrow into your mind like a virus and infect every second of your life. Often, they can literally kill you.

 

So why do they still succeed despite this danger? Simply because they are a group that favours their own. A large, but still smaller group that can unfairly favour those within it, whatever its criteria for membership, will always have an evolutionary advantage. They exploit the goodwill of those outside whilst giving each other all the benefit. It is simply a numbers game, and the purpose of so much of the religion is not simply to bring people in, but also to ensure that sufficiently large numbers are othered. If there is no-one to be exploited, the system falls. In the past it was cis women, and people of an obviously different ethnicity; now the battle lines are less clear, and they have a constant struggle between wanting to be liked, to keep their membership up, and wanting to define the others to exploit.

Again, though, it must be understood this battle isn't always, or even usually, conscious. It is an evolutionary battle that is happening whether or not the participants are aware. It is a mistake of conspiracy-theory proportions to assume that any given religious person is an understanding participant in an evil scheme. It doesn't work that way. We are all just a cog in an impossibly huge fractal dance of evolution, and all we can hope is that the religious ideas die out in favour of reason. But given that new absurdities, like homoeopathy, are showing up all the time, I don't advise you to hold your breath.

Dieting

As I keep being asked how I lost weight a couple of years ago (about 65 pounds, thank you for asking), I thought i'd record it here for easy reference. Depending on what you eat, my recipe for losing weight (whilst unemployed, which is much easier), was:

1) Eat breakfast. Some people find it increases their metbolism and makes you use calories quicker through the day, but that's debatable. What it will do for sure  is give you that boost in energy when you need it, to get you more active. Sugar, fats, carbs, all fine in moderation here. I used to have just a couple of slices of toast and jam.

2) Resist snacking. Don't eat anything more until your main meal. If you absolutely cannot manage your hunger until then, have an apple, which use up about as many calories in eating and digesting as you gain from them. Before allowing yourself anything other than planned, have a pint of water (or something else sugar free) a lot of the time when we think we're hungry we're actually just thirsty. Don't drink diet drinks containing aspartame, as that has been found to have the effect of actually making you more hungry.

3) Eat your main meal as lunch. Double the amount of protein you would normally eat (e.g. a slab of meat about the size of the end of your fist, x2), add vegetables, increase in size until you feel full after it, don't deprive yourself. Cut back on carbohydrates (potatoes, pasta,rice), especially if you have a sweet tooth. If you can cope, cut them out altogether of your main meal, and then you can still allow yourself some as dessert.

4) Do eat dessert if you want it, but again keep carbs to a minimum: I found chocolate to be more satisfying, and overall much less calorific than bread/cake/biscuit. One snack size mars bar is the calrie equivalent of just three biscuits: I know which I'd rather have.

5) If you get hungry again before the evening you can allow yourself a high protein soup.

6) Do not have another meal until supper. Try and avoid sugar, but have a large bowl of high-fibre cereal (bran flakes, special K, porridge) with low fat milk. You might also want to have a cocoa (not a drinking chocolate) or a decaffeinated coffee with it. The cereal will help you stop feeling hungry overnight, and the milk will help to flush fats from your body.

7) Exercise if you feel like it, certainly won't hurt (and it would make you healthier), but don't make it your focus. We lose calories just by existing, it's much easier to just not eat a slice of bread than exercise for an hour.

8) Drink lots of water. Your body needs water to work properly, and you're going to be making it work harder than normal in using fat for energy, instead of using carbs. Give it a hand or it'll lie to you and tell you you're just hungry.

9) Be prepared to be hungry, especially at first. Your body is probably used to more calories than it needs, so it will complain. Ignore hunger, it's a lie. Eat when you're tired, not when your stomach rumbles.

10) If you're weighing yourself, remember the work you're doing to lose weight (and gain it, when that's the case) takes a while to show. The weight change this week is down to what you ate last week. Anything else is meaningless. And don't try and lose weight too fast, aim for about 2lbs a week, much more than that and it won't stay off.

Hope that all helps, and good luck!

Random Writing: Raven's Edge, Chapter Four.

Later that evening Ann set out to end her period of celibacy. She called a friend and they went to nightclub on the front, like a pair of modern Moll Flanders, with a mercenary glint in their eyes. Her friend soon met up with a man she had softened up once before, and faced with the prospect of sitting and nodding at words she couldn’t hear all evening she set off on a prowl, to try and identify an acceptable mate. 

The more she prowled, however, the more depressed she became, and the more deeply ingrained became her prejudices against the inhabitants of the town. The men all seemed too fat, or too thin, or too tall, or too short, and over it all wafted a smell of stupidity that stifled the atmosphere, made the air sour and uncomfortable.

Eventually she collapsed on a stool and nursed a drink, and a man sat down beside her who was no better and no worse than any of the others, and proceeded to make a very direct and rather coarse sexual overture. Ann surprised herself by responding in kind and, feeling like an actress in a play, she left the club with him. She directed a taxi back to the hotel, asked him in for coffee, and with very little effort at all negotiated him into her bed.

She lay back and masochistically amused herself by observing his amateurish lovemaking, that pulled and prodded her in all the wrong places, accentuating the parts of her she preferred to ignore, ignoring those wished to be stimulated and caressed. This, she thought, is how a prostitute must feel, and for a while she enjoyed that fantasy far more than the reality. 

After what seemed like an age he finally heaved himself into a climax, and then, in what he probably considered to be his first romantic act of the evening, he kissed her deeply and passionately, his tongue exploring every corner of her mouth. For the first time she felt violated, and was disgusted, more at herself than him, and had to turn away to stop him seeing the bitter expression that she could not prevent from appearing on her face.

Ann tried to pretend she was asleep while he tried to get dressed without waking her up. She listened to him grunt for an eternity that saw her resort to playing show tunes in her head to pass the time. He even grunted putting on his socks. When at last the door snicked closed she let out a long breath and reached across for the clock, holding it high above her head to focus on it without her glasses. 3:37.

Although she was tired the bed felt hot and sticky, and an alien aroma filled the room, reminding her of the man just gone. She rolled over into the depression he had left, and the sensation briefly reminded her of Charlie. What time was it in New York? Would he be asleep right now?

Would he be making love to Jan, on her sheets, the ones she’d been so proud of, the ones that matched the curtains so well, such a bargain, everyone else seemed to have missed them...?

...Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!

She kicked off her blankets so that they fell in a heap at the end of the bed, jumped up and stamped to the double window and threw it open, letting the march winds blow full into her face straight from off the sea. It was a breezy night, and the sea was smashing up against the cliff and showering up a fountain that came crashing down on the lawn below the house. Ann made a mental note to tell their neighbour why his lawn fertilizer wasn't working. She was surprised to find that some drops of the spray were landing on her, and for the first time it occurred to her that the house really was quite worryingly close to the edge of the cliff. For all Doreen’s reassurances that the house had been the same distance from the sea for over a hundred years, when the far end of the quarry finally gave in to the sea, it made her feel a little uneasy.

She moved to stand by the window’s edge and looked out. If she looked down, over the cliff edge, she could just see odd flecks of white foam, and further out the sea was a deep black. To her left the lights of the town twinkled and lit up the cloudy sky a dull orange. Looking to her right she saw…

A man. On the very cliff edge, standing there in the moonlight, naked from the waist up, the wind blowing through his hair, arms outstretched, looking like a character from the cover of a cheap romance novel. The spray from the sea was splashing him and rocking him, and every plume threatened to pull him down with its fall.

Ann paused for a brief moment whilst she considered what to do. She felt she should ring someone, but didn't know which emergency service to call. She leaned over back to her bedside table and grabbed her mobile, pressing the emergency button as she did so. She would make up her mind whilst it was connecting her. Back at the window she looked back out at the cliff edge.

There was no one there.

She stood staring out at the cliff for a while, until a voice on the other end of the phone shook her out of her reverie.

‘Erm. Er. Well, coastguard, I guess’. Ann was uncertain. Were her eyes playing tricks on her? It was dark outside and she was very tired. Images of public ridicule flashed through her mind. ‘No, actually, scratch that. Erm…. I’ll call you back’. She put down the phone in a panic. What should she do?

She threw her ugly pink dressing gown on, the one her mother had given her after being described in painstaking detail the one she actually wanted, and the nearest pair of shoes, which happened to be the red high heels she had been wearing earlier, and then ran to the stairs. Then she ran back again, and quickly searched through her wardrobe ‘till she found her old trainers, which she could slip on without untying, and swapped them for her heels. After all, there was no point in rushing out to save someone if you fell down three flights of stairs and broke your neck in the process.

She got to the back door and shuffled cautiously over to the cliff edge. She looked left and right to check whoever she saw hadn't run some other way before cautiously getting on all fours and peering over the cliff edge. She soon had to rear back, however, as an arch of salt water rose up towards her, sending her sprawling out on the grass.

Quickly she got up again and ran back to the house. Hang public ridicule, she had to call someone.

Just under an hour later there was a knock at the door. The police wanted to check on the details. 

Did she recognise the person? 

No. 

Would she recognise them again from a photograph? 

No, it was too quick. 

Did she actually see the person jump? 

No, just somebody who was there and then not. 

Had she been drinking at all that evening?

Ah.

And what time had she arrived home? 

 Had she been having any emotional problems recently?

Hmmm.

Was there any chance someone could survive a fall like that? ‘Not on those rocks, and especially not at high tide. No, If there somebody’s jumped there they’ll wash up in Scarborough tomorrow. They always do.’

They would let her know if they heard anything.

They left, leaving Ann feeling like she might at any time receive a letter claiming expenses. She prepared to mount the stairs to bed, and then stopped. Her brother occasionally had some disturbed nights, he had said. Perhaps he had seen it?

Ann knocked very softly on the door before realising that was ridiculous. She then quietly turned the doorknob and peered into the room. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the light before she realised with some surprise that David wasn't there. The sheets from his bed were in a heap on the floor.

She turned round to find him just coming out of the bathroom behind her. He was wearing a towelling dressing gown and rubbing a pink flowery towel on his hair.

‘ Couldn't sleep. Too hot.’ He said, by way of an explanation.

‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

‘Took a quick shower to see if it would cool me down a little.’

‘Has it?’

‘A little.’

‘I don’t suppose you were looking out at the cliffs about an hour ago?’

‘The cliffs? No. Why?’

‘Oh, I just thought I saw something, that’s all.’

‘What?’

‘I just thought I saw somebody on the cliff edge.’

‘What, jumping, you mean? We've had that before. Usually daytime, though. One man jumped carrying his daughter. That was horrible. Did you see them jump?’

‘No. I'm... I'm  not really sure I saw anything. Neither are the police, by the sound of it.’

‘Oh. Don’t let it worry you, It was probably nothing then. I've thought I've seen lots of things out there at night.’

‘Right. Well, goodnight then.’

‘Goodnight.’ He went into his room and closed the door.

Ann sat on the stairs, staring at his closed door. Maybe it had been a vision, or just a trick of the light, but she knew now what the vision was.

It was David. Her supposedly weak, sickly, terminally ill brother.