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Minority report

  • Posted on January 17, 2016 at 9:28 pm

2016 turned around with reviews of what a good year it had been for trans awareness. Films, soaps, celebrities, parliamentary inquiries, public debates all made it seem like a breakthrough in awareness. Most of us would say that hatred and exclusion are the result of ignorance, sometimes wilful. As more is said and seen about what it means to have (what is currently termed) gender dysphoria, surely ignorance will decline?

One can understand that when someone prominent transitions, they are snapped up by the media and made a spokesperson. That gives rise to backlash from more ordinary and struggling trans people, who don’t feel represented by someone more privileged and earlier on in the issues to be faced. So we accept that the celebrities make very public mistakes, which can damage as much as help the rest of us. But when the UK parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee presented its formal report on transgender services and equality to the UK Parliament, informed by 260 witnesses, it was criticised in just the same way as being a waste of resources for responding to such a minority interest.

It seems most people still prefer to regard being transgender as a curable psychological disorder, and that because only one per cent of the population experience it, it should be ignored rather than understood. Certainly, treatment on the NHS should be excluded, because it’s just pandering to a lifestyle choice. Fix my leg, broken by skiiing, but don’t fix this person’s hormones or body. Well, to that I say: you too are in a minority because you can afford to have ski holidays, whereas we are called a ‘lobby group’ with an agenda, though we cannot choose. You are free to join a minority, we just happen to share a minority condition, however non-minority the rest of our lives are. And we can choose to go skiing too, so we can be in the same minority together … so long as only our legs get fixed.

Where ignorance and closed minds lead

I don’t think we are a lot nearer social acceptance just because there is greater awareness. It isn’t about minorities really, it’s about a particular kind of minority. In all this growing awareness, there remains a lot of fear and intolerance. This week, I am as equally sickened by Richard Littlejohn writing in the Daily Mail (whose 2013 writing contributed to the suicide of Lucy Meadows), as by The Archbishop of Canturbury’s crocodile tears over LGBT attitudes among his African prelates. It was Christian missionary colonialism that imported homophobia into Africa in the first place, and protecting those who support or condone imprisonment or execution of people on grounds of sexuality, on the self-defined assertion that it is a sinful lifestyle choice, diminishes this powerful presence in the world to a weak and self-serving institution. I am as sickened by The Channel 4 interview (hardly a debate) between Jack Monroe and Dr Julia Long. It was like placing one scientist representing consensus over anthropogenic climate change against a single prominent denialist, as if the argument were balanced. The view by Dr Julia Long, that every transgender person represents a rape threat to ‘real’ women wherever they go, espoused and promoted repeatedly by Germaine Greer, is also rehearsed in The Conservative Woman (TCW) by Emily Watson, who writes: ‘it opens the door to potential sex offences. By opening single sex facilities up to the opposite sex, women are put at risk. Women have a real fear of being sexually assaulted or raped by men, and the sensible ones avoid places or occasions where they could be in danger. Women feel able to let their guard down with other women.’ She supports her case by a single criminal case of a rapist and an incident in a novel. (TCW is a right-wing conservative, Christian fundamentalist ‘family’ group.)

It is the classic statement: being transgender does not exist; some men like to dress up and pretend, and all of them are predatory. Trans women aren’t women; they are men, because god makes only men and women. We are dangerous. I am dangerous. We threaten civilisation and its norms. We challenge ideas of gender, but by identifying as male or as female, we support the patriarchy. And even acceptance of gender dysphoria is dangerous to children, so stop it!

Are we a million miles from anti-gay laws and condoned homophobia? I sometimes don’t think we’ve moved anywhere at all except in circles, the central anchor-point of which is Judeo-Christian religious.

It’s all about sex

Those of us disadvantaged by a birth condition have become regarded as a dangerous lobby of rapists. It’s all about sex. Innit? Just because a man could, if he wished, put women’s clothes and make-up on, with the sole intent of invading ‘women’s spaces in order to molest or rape, transgender women are all placed under suspicion of being sexual predators. So every woman in a burkha or niqab could similarly be a male rapist in disguise. This all echoes the idiocy in the USA of all those who would almost insist on examining the genitals of anyone ambiguous (child or adult) before entering gendered lavatory facilities. Cis women have been thrown out of female facilities for looking too male, and it escapes attention that bearded and testosterone-fuelled trans men having to enter female facilities would be absurd. (Testosterone-fuelled does not mean potential rapist any more than oestrogen-fuelled trans women, but it does highlight the absurdity.) Especially when everyone goes home to share a common toilet with all genders of their family and friends. And because more sexual violence occurs in familiar domestic circumstances than in public faciltities and venues. And because rape by transgender women is almost unknown.

Being transgender has nothing to do with sex, let alone coercive sex.

Becoming undangerous

There are many things about me that are minority. I play the trumpet. I write poetry. I own a flat. I have three university degrees. None of these places me in the category of lobby group or having an agenda, though each confers certain rights and marks me out as different. But these things are safe. (Well, the decibel rating of a trumpet may not be, and should I be writing politically sensitive poetry in China, that would not be.) They are also personal choices based on innate abilities. None causes me distress, and I am sensitive about the trumpet in the flat. Life is peaceful, you are safe, I am safe.

But any day I can read people online who go out of their way to make untrue assertions against my condition, that may lead others to fear me, disadvantage me or attack me. Living in Brighton, I am lucky. I can choose not to read hate, and I know it will always exist, and I live inconspicuously in a tolerant place. But many others are not so safe. How do we become undangerous, when we are treated as we are, so obviously, in social and broadcast media? When we transition and return from that traumatic passage in life back to ordinariness, we don’t all want to be labelled forever as trans. Only this week one person I know through social media said ‘Now that I am a year post-surgery, I am no longer trans’. Another said ‘I’m fed up with this; I don’t want any labels.’ A government minister came out as gay this week, and the point was raised: ’why does anyone need to come out any more?’ Being trans makes coming out unavoidable, but after that, many of us are done with it. We become able simply to live as we feel right. I have struggled with ‘being out’ in order to be an encouragement, when I feel I’ve said all there is to say, and just want to live inconspicuously. But then I feel hurt to read another person deny my experience, and add a reply to another Guardian comment trail …

One per cent of the population is quite a lot of people, and if we were all completely visible and getting on with our lives, perhaps we would seem less dangerous. But why should we be visible? It isn’t our lives’ mission to educate the world. Against us, is the propensity to cite the extreme, the singular. Whether quoting a celebrity transitioner, or a long-discredited piece of research, a criminal case, or a prominent ‘detransitioner’, the negative (like consumer dissatisfaction) is re-quoted many times more than the positive. I would like to see a headline like this instead:

NHS spends £17m per annum on gender care, including £4.5m on surgery, and saves £80m in social costs of mental health, impact on emergency services, loss of employment productivity and welfare benefits!

(I’m not sure about the £80m, because no-one has measured it, but if half of young people and a third of older trans people are suicidal, the on-costs for all of us must be surely in this order.) But I don’t think one is coming any time soon.

What really will make a difference, is when everyone who knows someone like me actively stands up for us, and refuses to accept the misguided hatred, the subtle discrimination, the careful sidelining, the nudge and the ‘understanding’ wink. If there really are about 650,000 of us in the UK, and we each have fifteen people willing to actively diffuse ignorant comments and jokes, that’s nearly ten million people making our lives safer.

So, dear Anglican Church, dear Pope, dear politicians, academics and experts. Dear journalists, panellists, and public debaters. Dear comedians, writers and critics. Dear family, friends and colleagues. When you hear or read someone declaiming people like me as potential sexual predator, rapist, subversive and moral disaster, speak up, speak out – not to me in my safe spaces, but where it may also cost you that cocked eyebrow, mild shock and surprise. Because every time you play safe and self-protective, you make it harder for us to lively safely and normally.

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It’s not what you remember, but how

  • Posted on December 1, 2015 at 10:35 pm

A friend of mine has been writing what we hope to be a book, with some contributions from me, interleaving experience and reflection with research. It’s not about being anything, but the meaning there is in it, as it is. In some ways it’s a challenge. ‘How about a chapter on your experience of gender dysphoria?’ Sounds innocent enough; we both know that it isn’t a generalisation but a personal experience, just my narrative and my interpretation of it.

I had a go. By the end of a day of hard writing and thinking, I wasn’t particularly satisfied. How many different ways could I have told the story as a chapter (not a whole big boring book)? Rather a lot of trans people have written their own books, and some are really good, and helped me. I have also seen some that are not so good, and are a reflection that many of us want just to tell our story, though we are not all writers. I guess if I were asked to tell my story to several people with very different backgrounds, I would tell it differently each time. So what matters most to me?

The more I think back, the more my story connects up, as I remember little things, the circumstances of the times, the pressures not to speak of certain things, the need to conform, and even the lack of sufficient understanding to think that I might not have been what everyone told me I was. On one level my story is a happy life. On another it is life characterised by a constant fear. On one reading it is very singularly my own, on another terribly familiar. But the reason that I have this story at all has an absolutely common thread, understood by every transgender person.

I am looking forward to seeing the file ‘The Danish Girl’, and have seen the trailer, and a few interviews with the key actor playing Lili Elbe, Eddie Redmayne. If the trailer made me cry, I’m sure I won’t make it through the film. The big trigger, I expect, will be that first unavoidable confession of knowing your gender is different. The way I phrased the feeling of falling into that realisation, was ‘it just feels perfect’.

The trouble with revisiting the story after several years, is that having settled very perfectly, you can still remember that there was real happiness in your life before too. I don’t want to lose that, but neither is it easy to embrace. If I look at photos of my daughter’s wedding a few months ago, or of my ex-wife looking really happy, giving the wedding speech, her being there and not me … or remember too vividly past Christmases … or holidays, or at pictures of happy homes we made and shared … and … and … Then I remember that but for one thing about me, everything was good.

The story of Lili Elbe, and of many other people who have transitioned, is one of devotion. Love somehow survives the hurt and carries on. Here, there will be pain and loss too, but something mattered too much to let it go. And this is where too much reflection and retelling the story doesn’t help. I was one of the majority who lost their marriage and family, and my deepest regret is that it was for no other reason than my gender. I still recall saying: ‘I can’t walk away from this. You can. Please don’t.’

Rage spoils memories

I was trying to remember something I said when writing the chapter, and from searching around, came across a few pages I wrote at the beginning of transition, when I knew it was all over with my wife and family. It was rage in black and white. Rage that I was not allowed to be angry, that I had to be the one who must understand how difficult this all was for everyone else. It was rage that this one thing that made me feel perfect at last made everything else fall apart. That I could come to a clear understanding, and that in doing so I was no longer wanted as a partner, companion, parent, even though I was still me, crawling out from under a blanket of fear where I had stayed for the sake of everyone else.

And behind that rage was a whole lifetime of tender loving memories that felt completely betrayed. Yes, I had to understand how difficult this was, how impossible for those closest to me to sustain. So every time I hear of love enduring through transition, I remember. Memories of rage? Memories of betrayal? Memories of happiness? Memories of love?

Just as I could think after writing my chapter, of all the ways I could have told the story, so there are many ways of remembering. And it is hard to remember how I had to walk away, not from my own love but from a door closed by others. I think it takes a lot longer than I had thought, to wipe the soot and dust off good memories, so that they don’t simply hurt, but become treasures. I struggle sometimes with talking about a good life that I had, as if by confessing their goodness I want them back. I don’t, because they are long past, and they were all a shared possession, not just mine. And I don’t ever want to live with fear again, least of all fear of my authentic self being a reason not to be loved or wanted. So somehow I need to become able to see photographs, read things and remember, in a different way, where the ending isn’t part of every moment. I will get there, but it has been a reminder to me that just as you can tell your story to other people in many ways, so you can to yourself. Mine is not a sad story, just a brilliant chapter with a very sad ending.

I really don’t want to live with any resentment or anger, and largely it has gone. I simply want to feel gratitude for everything good that has happened in my life. Right now it is good, I am grateful for the love that I share, for the life my partner and I are building together, and for all the new experiences we bring to each other. Life is all about learning, all the way, beginning to end, and after so much telling over the past few years, now I still need to learn how to remember well and safely, because the story continues.

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It’s not about religion

  • Posted on November 14, 2015 at 11:38 pm

It’s not about religion.

The world is shrieking this weekend as so much news of violence suddenly found a focus in the atrocities in Paris. No-one can ignore it, and so many of us want to say something, anything, to make sense of it, to make a difference, to feel something can change to stop it. And so much has been said that is horribly wrong. We all want to blame, maybe to excuse ourselves. It is not Muslims, it is not Islam. In the name of Christ our ancestors pillaged Palestine. They too killed, destroyed and exhibited massive cruelty. Behind many of the world’s conflicts for the whole of recorded time, the excuse has been religion.

A week ago I was in the British Museum, and two things always strike me there. The first is the massive stones, statues and artefacts that came to be there, that belong elsewhere, and arrived in the context of conquest, of European superiority and dominance. That too was in part excused and justified by Europe being the Christian part of the world, with the God-given right to impose one brand of civilisation on the world as they saw fit. And to impose doctrines, rules, values and laws, a way of life, that was held to be the one true way to be, live and organise. Some of that will forever bounce back at us. One that is close personally, is that we exported homophobia, transphobia and similar beliefs, including to the USA, often in religion, where it still results in legalised hatred, social destruction, and all the way to lazy bigotry.

In the British Museum, we might say: ‘thank goodness; these things at least have been saved from the destruction seen under the Taliban (Bamiyan and Afghanistan National Museum), or ISIS (Palmiyra) where such images are seen as idolatrous under a different religious regime.’ But we would be wrong.

The second thought I have, is that when you admire the tiny, meticulous, cuneiform inscriptions on the stelae, and the intricate bas-relief depictions and hieroglyphs, and wonder at civilisations so old, you are staring as much in the face of violent triumphalism, under power endowed by deities, as you are at simply people living a long time ago. Here, in every stone, is domination in the name of some divine power. For many thousands of years, land has been claimed as given by gods to chosen peoples. Leaders, priests, chiefs, pharoahs, kings, emperors all, have claimed their right to rule from supreme, unseen beings, singular and independent, or multiple but ‘beyond’. Some have claimed deity for themselves. Deity cannot be argued with, or debated.

And the other most obvious observation I make, is how few women are among those who drive violence. Yes, we have queens and empresses, the occasional female tyrants, and some female suicide bombers. But they are not just in the minority because we have a mostly patriarchal world.

Put all this together. Humanity has created its divine justifications in many ways, because to claim this gives power. Power to stabilise societies, authority to reduce dissent, ideologies to create cohesion. Identities to distinguish one tribe or nation from another and claim superiority or precedence. There isn’t much of civilisation that has no dependence or back-story in religious thought. Many western philosophers who have helped us to think rationally and logically, spent a deal of time proving the existence of god. Some did not, but few made any effort to address equality in a way that countered current patriarchy. Society in some ways was the way it was because it was ‘meant to be’ that way, which is another way of saying that it wasn’t for humans to design or decide, but was an (unspoken divine) given. So even if there wasn’t a god to intervene, some things were established by nature as if they had been designed.

And so today we have seen people fleeing the same violence, being blamed. We have had quotes from the Qur’an showing how peace is preached, not violence (the word Islam itself comes from the word for peace). We have had calls to pray for various parts of the world. We have had cultures, nations, faiths, bundled together as roots of evil. We have self-defence and violence preached.

And a man at a piano outside the Baclava concert hall where so many died and three ISIS (Daesh) suicide bombers blew themselves up, playing ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon.

It’s not about religion. It is about a patriarchy, that derives self-endowed power by legitimising itself through creating an authority, that then is said to have elected it to power. Religion does not create itself. Not does it explain anything. Rather, it describes us. Yes, by creating a socially good and supportive ethic, an agreed understanding of what works to the well-being and happiness of all, religion can be a vehicle. But tell me of a religion, a faith, that is based on a mother god, that places women in a position of authority to impose their power violently, that tells men how to live and what they can and cannot do, and that invades any culture that does not share its faith, to destroy it triumphantly.

So is all this global violence about religion?

No. Nor am I saying that women are better, or all good. Clearly they are not. They can be criminals, murderers, frauds, even despots. They can be violent. But rather fewer are. How many wars are fought in the name of a female god? (And historically not all female deities have been good either!) My point is that we must not confuse the actions of men with any objective statement about any god at all. If they act out of a personal belief arising from an interpretation of a particular tradition, that is one thing, but it is not the ‘fault of a religion’, rather a confirmation of why religions have been devised in the first place.

Is the state of the world more about testosterone?

I have to say, from experience, that the removal of testosterone from your body, or the injection of it, changes you powerfully. It gives a particular drive, that can, and sometimes cannot, be contained. It makes men behave the way they do, it gives them their less co-operative characteristics, be that arrogance, strength, sexual drive, a way of thinking, a sense of dominance and right. All of these things can be self-understood, but often they are self-justifying, as if the world should be to their way of thinking. So it is that for some men, an essentialist or a fundamentalist, or an extremist outlook leads to a self-justifiable behaviour, whilst for others a self-critique and self-knowledge tempers that behaviour into a context of alternative views that are more moderate.

So as humans, we do have choices, to be and do what is right and fair. And clearly religion does not always produce what is right and fair to everyone; so should we blame a particular god for that? Or if someone through their faith acts badly, should we blame their religion? No. My argument is quite simply that people seek to gain power, to justify themselves, by creating an authority for their way of thinking. In all our shared thinking, we also know what is good and fair for all. We can work out an ethic that benefits shared living, society and common well-being without recourse to a divine being. It really is within us, and we know that. But to overcome the drives and innate violence, the insistence on being externally justified has to be faced and removed. There is no external justification; there is ourselves and a need to face that and deal with it.

You may think from this that I hate men and blame the state of the world on them. Partly I do. You may think that I am blaming created religions as the vehicle for war and violence. Partly I am. What I really want to say is that whilst it doesn’t give us a quick answer, honest understanding of why we have all our different religions, and then get absolutist about each and every one, should help us drag ourselves out of self-destruction. I do wonder if, left to ourselves, women would have created the same kinds of religions, or whether a protective mother earth leading us to be caring and mutually supportive might have become the norm. Maybe our various goddesses would have looked more alike, or maybe they would end up sisters. This is a male world, captured by the impulses of testosterone, to create religions that justify their dominance, their drive to compete, create and overcome rivals, and to use violence as necessary to do so. That much is ‘natural’ in the sense that it is not deliberate. But since the first inscriptions lying now in the British or Kabul or Syrian museums, we should have learned to see ourselves as we truly are, and how the world just does not need to be this way, to such a degree that extremist views find no nourishment or value, but rather produce infertile seeds that spread and grow nowhere.

So do not pray for Paris, or Beirut, or any place being bombed by extremists or air forces, or drones on any side. There is no-one to hear, no deity to make any side win the day, because we are all wrong in our own ways.

It’s not about religion. It’s not just about testosterone either. It’s about all of us, and being time to wake up to what it means to be fully human.

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Finding; being found

  • Posted on October 25, 2015 at 7:57 pm

I have a ring. Like many things I reflect on much, it quickly gained symbolic significance. It is stainless steel, not precious metal, and not a complete circle. But in that point of apparent weakness it grasps an amethyst. It has always meant for me strength that does not corrode, with an element of seemingly naked vulnerable beauty and colour. I remember the day I bought it, and where, the circumstances, the tentative permission-seeking to buy a ring that was feminine, and the feelings running through me on that day, the pub lunch that followed, the dawning fear and awareness that my life was about to change and that there was nothing I could do to alter that.

The ring has been with me, long worn now on my left hand, third finger. At times I wondered whether that might be seen as relevant to others, whether anyone held back, wondered if I was in a relationship, or if indeed it had become a replacement for the wedding ring now worn by a small rabbit sitting by my bed. The ring is between me and myself, and still is a reminder of what acceptance and love are, and that both begin in oneself.

Dealing with loss

After a year, maybe less, I was careless enough to not remove it when doing some DIY task. The gem was lost and I could not find it anywhere. The empty stainless ring looked truly broken, and it seemed also relevant that I knew my marriage was well and truly over. In a back road in town, I found a craft jeweller able to find a matching stone, and it felt that any price would have been acceptable. I think maybe the stone cost more to replace than the original ring. The ring stays on my finger night and day, and I do rather less DIY than I did, mainly for living in a flat, not a house. I do sometimes take it off for safety, but not much.

Some time later, I was clearing things from the loft in the house that was going to have to be sold. I was moving out, and being the only one who dared to take the awkward jump into the loft, it was down to me to sort everything out for who would keep what. Schoolbooks, boxes of cuddly toys and past affection, a spare bed, cases, Christmas decorations, stuff; all sorts of stuff. Part-boarded by me, deep in rockwool by me, wired by me, and a place only I had actually been into, among our family … It was an awkward space that I should probably have spend money on fully boarding, which meant stepping on rafters some of the time. There I lifted an awkward heavy box, caught my finger, and realised I had again sprung the ring and the gem was gone. Casting around, I realised that surrounded by loose rockwool insulation and gappy boards, I was even less likely to find it than the last one. I stopped after a few minutes, because short of a truly time-losing forensic and meticulous search, I was unlikely to find this tiny purple dot. Instead I did what I had done before and spoke to it. ‘If you want to be found, you will be.’

I picked up one suitcase and carefully set it aside, and there it was. Immediately I set to resetting the stone – a lot more difficult than it was knocking it out. I have done this with other things. Maybe I forget the things that don’t turn up, maybe I just need to calm down, maybe a dowsing instinct takes over (and I can do this, though somewhat untrained). Either way, I felt that whatever weakness had lain in the original ring, my determination since, to add something precious to strength, had been reinforced. The symbolism felt stronger.

That’s all it is. No superstition; just a reminder to self, which is important. Where I wear it is a reminder too, that I am a committing person in love and relationships. I can read all sorts into it, but I am left with a feeling that it also wants to stay with me. I am strong. There is something held in me, incomplete as I am, that is precious and sparkles. Together those two attributes give me a better sense of self than ever I had when I was just supposed to be plain, complete and strong.

Change

We are all embedded in constant change. We can try to sit still while it washes over, like a rock in a river, and become beautiful and worn, or we can become the river and be just that – wherever we flow, whatever the change, whatever the pace. Sometimes we try too hard and miss things that want to be found. A year ago this week I walked into a room and met my partner for the first time. I was the more noticeable, just three months after surgery, and had decided that if I stayed out of the flow, I was going to get nowhere and neither meet nor be met, nor change anything. Our eyes did not ‘meet across a crowded room’, and I was immediately something different, rather than a future friend, let alone more. It took time (not much), but we both jumped into the same river in the end and started swimming it together.

I maintain that many things require more letting go than sheer effort, skill or knowledge. In fact, gaining skills and knowledge can be helped by letting go of ‘I can’t’.

This week I again read a poem by Mary Oliver in her latest volume of poetry, Felicity, which says how I feel in a short and lovely poem:

Not anyone who says

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
    careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

Loss, change, letting go, finding

We are all trans. Transient, that is. Everyone of us and everything is temporarily what we are. You have nothing to lose other than what you have had the privilege of having or being. Loss is gaining space for something else. Change is moving from one space to another, where hanging on to anything may become a barrier to another possibility. Many things want to be found. Maybe it’s the future you.*

I have real regrets about a young girl’s life never lived, about a daughter’s life detached, about a love set aside … but also a gratitude for insights I could never otherwise have gained. In a very real sense I have been given a second life; maybe two half-lives that can be equally complete. I have had a very tangible sense of being led through these past years of transition from one place of transience into another, and of being found rather than lost.

I have understood what it is to be strong and resilient, to complete the circle, and to hold onto something precious.

 

* The workshop where my partner and I met was called ‘Future you’.

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Identity IV: identity and the new colonialism

  • Posted on October 11, 2015 at 3:52 pm

A wander through the wonder of what we are

Recent blogs queried the boundaries of things, where one thing really ends and another begins, which is fine for rivers and stones and air, but what about ‘me’? I don’t just mean my body, I mean ‘me’. Am I just one thing? A thing comprising more living cells than there are stars in our galaxy? What makes those cells together just one thing called me? And when I cut my toenails, is there a bit of me in the bin? I remember after microsurgery on my spine, the surgeon came by to visit, and picked up a small bottle of fluid containing fragments of intervertebral disc that had been nudging motor nerves to my leg. ‘Do you want this?’, he asked. I know some people like to keep their gallstones, but no … very no! And yet I realised I was looking at something that had been part of me. Not nail trimmings that are obviously dead, but something from inside of me that used to matter.

No – don’t ask me about my last surgery. Some things are never to be seen again!

Losing bits of your body doesn’t mean losing parts of your self. This is an innate sense most of us have, that the ‘me’, the real identity, is not the body. And yet here we are in a world that looks at the body and gives you an identity, that struggles when the physiology is indeterminate, and feels the need to do something. Just to give you a name, just to separate you out from everything else, to make you individual, even in a sense to isolate you and insulate you. This runs absolutely counter to my own developing philosophy and understanding of belonging as part of the whole.

And yet I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). So surely I am separate, boundaried and finite?

Maybe not one thing

There is an idea, with good basis and not new, that our cells are themselves a symbiotic evolution, resulting from a process called endosymbiosis, where one simple cell comes to live inside another. Complexity arises when it adds advantage to more simple forms. Set aside your personal ideas on evolution for a moment, because we all know that things change and happen quite by chance in nature, and that sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t, and I don’t want any ideas of a god or gods, or intelligent design, to get in the way of simply thinking freely.

It happens. And endosymbiosis can be induced, and can be seen to be advantageous, simply by putting the right prokaryotes (simple single-cellular organisms) together and watching them form self-reproducing eukaryotes (complex cells with identifiable internal structures) such as we are made of in galactic quantities.

Let’s now slip sideways to slime moulds. Yes, slip, slide … because they are fascinating and challenging. Basically, these are colonies of unicellular (eukaryotic) organisms that live together, co-operate, specialise, move together like complex organisms, split, divide, co-operate and seem to make sense of the world – but especially together. Does each have a mind? Do they have a mind together? Does one cell have intelligence? Do they have a kind of intelligence when together? And then – why are we so different from them? Are we also, in a sense, colonial? We all began as a single cell, meeting another single cell in a particular context of pure chemistry. Both cells were complex eukaryotes, but nonetheless, just cells. They didn’t know what to do, they simply behaved together according to chemical instruction sets within a specific environment.

Here, stem cells are interesting. Most of our cells have lost the bits that would allow them to diversify, probably because there is no advantage left. A differentiated cell stays differentiated whereas a stem cell does not. And when we lose a finger, unlike a fingernail, a new one does not regrow. Lucky salamander: lose a leg or a tail, and another one will grow back. Regenerative biology is a dream yet to be realised, and so hard to achieve, even in getting a severed spinal cord to reconnect. Probably there are enough of us around to reproduce sufficiently for this not to hold unique evolutionary advantage. But at some point in our early development, cells always specialise because of where they are in the embryo, and stay that way. Intelligence?

Singularity and self

Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. What we call success and failure, or normal and abnormal, is this combination of instruction set (genes) and environment (largely chemical). The end result is unique, since even genetically identical twins have their unique sense of self, however alike their DNA. But how singular is each body, if we are a colony of co-operating cells, and each cell itself originates in symbiosis? Is there intelligence, not just in ‘me’, but in my arm, or in an organ, or in a cell? Is ‘mind’ just brain-neurological activity, or is it acting elsewhere in this colony as well? Perhaps the brain just the only place where linguistic memory is held. What about cell memory, muscle memory, even organ memory – these too are information storage. It seems to be well-attested, and has some support in the accounts of a few transplant recipients gaining ‘memory’ or traits not their own. Further, memory (cell information) appears to be epigenetically transferred between generations: trauma among Holocaust survivors altered their gene expression in such a way that it became inherited through that single cell that starts life over. If our cells remember, and together hold any kind of shared or combined memory, where is memory in relation to mind? I can’t answer these questions, but the fact that they remain valid questions shows how unclear we are about what we do know.

And what about the singularity of our bodies? Sometimes the zygote (fertilised ovum) splits to create two embryos, identical twins. Identical? Each has a sense of self and there can be big differences, including sense of gender. Sometimes twin embryos recombine to form one person, with a chimeric twin, or even a parasitic twin. And many or most of us have a degree of mosaicism, such that the DNA is our cells is not the same everywhere. So does DNA create identity? A singular identity? Can we have more than one mind or intelligence? Or is self-awareness simply a complex colonial identity? My body seems to be driven by more than ‘I’ or what I call self. And biologists would certainly say anyway that our bodies as organisms are the result of self-organisation.

There is a distinction to be made between identity, intelligence and biology, in which I think we should be careful. My sense of self, my identity, includes my personal awareness of my biology, and uses my intelligence. Your idea of what I am includes your perception of your and my biology, and uses your intelligence (not mine). Perhaps the important message is: do we use these ideas to bring us closer, or to separate ourselves?

Self-organising systems

Self-organising systems are not necessarily doing anything intelligent. You can see them in schools of fish and murmurations of flocking birds, as well as create them in computer components, inter-communicating electronic modules, and technological development (from basic ape toolmaking up to modern human communications systems). More simply, we see the emergence of complex patterns in the simplest of things, such as crystalline structures, magnetisation, or sound patterns (cymantics). Self-organisation happens, and especially in complex systems, leading to emergent structures and behaviours. We might think that an ant colony is much more sophisticated than the slime mould, but is there actually more intelligence? Here is where I believe intelligent design (some external ‘greater’, if not different, intelligence has ‘made’ or created us and everything there ‘is’ – which itself is a semantic nightmare) comes unstuck. Please do explore self-organisation and complexity theory, because they are a key reminder that we are too often simply linear thinkers. A leads to B; C causes A to lead to B. There is only A, B, C and maybe D. If D exists, then there must be an A and a B for it to be so. Sometimes this is true, valid and useful, but sometimes it is dysfunctional.

How did we get here?

It may be a fun little journey to start with a question like ‘what is identity’ and travel through endosymbiosis to complexity and chaos, but I think it does serve a purpose. Gods and intelligent design, creation and order, linearity and binary division of things, naming and defining – do all give us props to create and maintain a world view that seems to work. But they can get in the way if they are given a status of knowledge, as if that were something finite and attainable. Rather, our thinking, our philosophies, our conceptualisations can only ever be working models, and getting stuck with them is far worse for us all than being able to adapt, relearn, throw it all away and start again when they don’t fit.

I don’t know if it even makes sense to ask who ‘I’ am, but what I do get a feeling of, is that being aware, observing, staying open to new ideas, constantly learning, is a whole lot better than sticking with (or inventing) easy answers. Our whole existence is unbelievably complex, and becoming more so all the time. That means we are not in control of much at all, certainly not our living environment, our planet, or even our society, and to say we understand it is very premature. We may never do so, but most of all we should never stop half way and plant a god in the ground to worship instead. That god need not be a divine intelligence, it could just be one way of seeing the world to create a local sense of order, through a scientific method, a philosophy, a culture, or a religion. Extrapolating any of these to create higher or lower orders of existence, intelligence or levels of heaven simply will not do. The observation of ‘order’ or of ‘beauty’ proves nothing but a synergy between the way we are and the way other things are.

And so it is that this week I read about intersex people (that’s 1 to 2 per cent of us) who may identify with one binary gender or another simply because that is only what has ever been offered. I think I shall always return to the open question of my self-identification, had all alternatives been available right from birth. My natural development is a frequent outcome, as are intersex identities. In the light of the above, are we all ‘mistakes’, or the kind of diversity that give complex self-organising systems their resilience?

How we got here, whether in this little conversation, or in a more ontological sense, doesn’t actually matter that much, unless that idea invalidates the existence of another person in order to elevate us as superior or better. And that, as world events continue to remind us, is where our real problems lie.

Continue reading Identity IV: identity and the new colonialism »

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