Presents

A Webzine Created and Edited by

Number 12

Table of Contents

"Where dreams are the stuff reality is made of"

• Excuses, Excuses!, an editorial
• Letters To the Editor
• Melanie's Transition Diary continues
• Sarah's New Skates: a night out on the town, by Sarah
• Class Act: outing myself in my psych class, by Melanie
• Doctor Biber's discharge instructions
• "We": an original poem

Explorations

by , Editor

"Excuses, Excuses!"

When I was a child, I often got in trouble for trying to explain. It wasn't that I was denying I had done wrong, but I just wanted whichever authority figure that was on my case to realize it was an honest mistake: that I had not transgressed intentionally.

This never worked for me. I would be confronted with, "Did you...?" to which I would reply, "Yes, but...." I was never allowed to go beyond that. "No excuses!", I would be told with harsh and shameful voice, as if I was trying to get out of my impending punishment, or at least mitigate its severity. "But I just want to explain!", I would plead, only to be slapped back with an even harsher rendition of "I said, No Excuses!!", and, "Now go back to your [desk, or bed, or room or wherever I had been when the violation had been discovered]".

Depending on who it was and what I was blamed for I would sulk or cry or throw my mental hands up to thought heaven in frustration, exasperation, sadness. I knew I had done wrong. I was more than willing to accept whatever penalty lay in store. But explaining why the evil deed had happened was very important to me; essentially important. I wanted the person in charge to know that I meant them no ill will; that I was their friend. I wanted them to know that I was wholly unaware I had done them harm, and would have spared no effort to correct the problem or compensate for it on my own, had I discovered it. In fact, that is what I often did. I would fess up to things no one could EVER discover and do so with an offer to make amends.

But the authority figures did not want to hear any of that. Their focus was on the negative addition to their life of which I had been the instrument of perpetration. Knowingly or unknowingly made no difference to them.

I learned, over the years, just to accept the retribution silently. To simply admit to the deed and accept the consequences. Still, I always felt that the authority figure was losing out on this deal: that they were only getting part of the story - a half truth, and would suffer from misconceptions.

Naturally, when I became involved in developing Mental Relativity, this decades-old inequity would resurface, begging an explanation. Fortunately, there is one. The discrepancy between my desire to explain myself and the wronged party's desire to hear it stems (as a surprising number of things) from the essential differences between the way men and women think.

There are a plethora of aspects to that difference, so no one facet explains more than but a fraction of the effects. Nonetheless, for a given purpose, a specific facet can always be found that best explains it. In this case, the nature of the problem is the way men think vs. the way women think.

Men think primarily in a linear fashion. Linear is mistakenly equated with logic. This is not true. A random chain of thought is certainly linear, because it progresses in a sequence, but it is often far from logical, as one step is not inexorably bound to follow another. A non-causal linearity is not logical. However, assuming an unbroken chain, linear becomes the traditional concept of Deductive logic: the essence of "scientific" thinking.

In contrast, the primary manner of female thinking holism, which is held to be intuitive. This is how men think women think: that somehow all of the data is taken in at once, averaged out, and some cockamamie, unexpected summation pops out of the other end. If men give it any credence at all, it is to think of the process as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. This is the area women are trained to think in (or, to do their best to accommodate linear logic, male fashion). In Mental Relativity, we call this kind of logic Reduction since it reduces multiple considerations into a single conclusion based on probability.

In between linear Deduction and holistic Reduction we find Induction. Induction determines possibilities and is at the heart of the developing science of Chaos theory which employs non-linear equations that change their function over time. Male science holds non-linear logic to be its favorite child of the moment, imagining it to provide answers to any remaining mysteries of physics, perhaps even psychology.

The problem is there is a FOURTH kind of thinking that is open only to women with any clarity, just as true linearity is open only to men. However, the world has been so trained to perceive things through male eyes that this fourth option has become completely invisible to men. Even women, as a result of being educated in a male-image school system where only linear logic is rewarded, have difficulty in seeing this fourth kind of thinking. Still, this other perspective is at the heart of women's souls.

We call this fourth manner of logic Production (which determines potentialities) and the manner of thinking it engenders the Analogous mode. Unlike Holism, the Analogous mode examines or observes a situation, then seeks the best past experience that corresponds as a point by point analogy. It does not matter if the subject matter is the same, as long as the pattern of relationships is identical. That is to say, that if black and white are opposites, we might analogize that to apply to hot and cold. Certainly black and white have little or nothing intrinsically to do with hot and cold, yet the analogy works in comparing the relationship between the two.

When one employs the Analogous mode, one is trying to put things in context; trying to get a sense of the patterns at work so that pre-existing meaning might be applied to a new situation, clarifying what is really going on. That is about as far from causal linear logic as you can get. And that is why it is not taught, nor respected, nor even acknowledged.

"Women's intuition", they smile, and knowingly say, as if casting female thought patterns into the realm of magic denecessitates an effort to understand. What a bloody cop out! Rather than joining us in mapping out the fabric of our beings so that we too might seek greater fulfillment (as we have done for them for years) they either force us to accept their way, or cast ours into the ethereal plane.

Not intentionally, mind you. Its just because intrinsically, they cannot see it, so it has no value. But that's an excuse, isn't it? No, just like my feeble attempts to put things in context as a child, it is an explanation.

You see, only causal linearity can discover a breaking of the rules, mete out a punishment and leave it at that. But this kind of thinking is just what is responsible for overcrowded prisons, ghetto riots and eye for an eye wars.

Now, do you see what I did in that last paragraph? I took the concept of a linear vs. analogous approach in punishing children and JUMPED to the analogous mode of applying the same contextual relationships to crime, poverty, and military jihads. This is a clear example of how the analogous mode works, and why that argument would never be acceptable in a male-oriented culture.

We all have blind spots. At a biomental level, men have one, women have another. The problem is, men by nature are more externally motivated. As such, religion, education, science - the entire culture has been cast in their image incorporating their blind spot. We, as women, are brought up not only afflicted with our own built-in blind spot, but are fed flawed data that already incorporates theirs.

Obviously, if we are to see the world for what it is, thereby providing TWO points of view to the human species, we must build additions on the infrastructure of culture: additions of no value to men, but inherent value to women. Only then will our daughters be able to grow up with a fresh slate of information that doesn't hobble their minds like ancient cultures hobbled their bodies.

Which brings us back to THIS child and her attempts to explain. If I had been born anatomically female, rather than just mentally female, I would not have gotten any farther in communicating to the male-image authority figures. But, at least they would nave had more tolerance for my approach, viewing it as "just one of those girl things" that had to be trained out of me. But as a little boy who thought like a girl, all they saw was another linear thinking delinquent, who was trying to weasel out of atonement.

I thank God, that I was born a transsexual. Because rather than succumbing to years of brainwashing that would have worked if they treated me like a girl, I was able to hold on to an awareness of the injustice of it all because they treated me like a boy. They used the wrong brainwashing tools and left this lucky mind a little bit freer to see what was really going on.

Granted, it took me 36 years to understand the truth before I knew who I was and why. But it has taken women 36 millennia to do the same. Women have had the right to vote for three quarters of a century, but we still do not have the right to think. As the Roman Empire discovered, the best way to overcome an enemy is to absorb them. The Primary Culture alters its nature but a little, as it is so comparatively large. But the subculture is lost entirely as its identity is absorbed. That's what happened to the beatniks, the hippies, and the Native Americans. its what is happening now to the blacks, the Mexican Americans and the gays. It happened to women before recorded history, and now its time for a change.

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Melanie's Wise Words of the Month

"Speak up an be heard,
or , Shut up and be herd."
- Wilma Snakestare(aka map)

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May you never find occasion to say, "If only....."

The Subversive #12

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--signed,
, Editor

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