Presents

A Webzine Created and Edited by

And now for the next installment in a serialized presentation of the book:

Raised By Wolves

Book Three: Across The Great Divide

From Journeys & Transitions by

Thursday, February 14, 1991 Valentine's Day

It's almost a month since my last entry. Once I had passed the self ordained closure of my Transition Diary at the one year of full-time point, I lost the motivation to continue. I guess I was trying to have all that past me and any additional entries on the subject would be unavoidable proof I was still in process. Or then again, maybe I just got lazy.

I'm writing this entry on the "ancient" Compaq computer that grows on the dining nook (house is too small for a room) table. The nook is open to the living room, actually just a corner of it with a computer on a dining table in it. Point being, the kids and Mary are eating popcorn and watching "The Flash" on television. Now, that may not be a point apparent, but the purpose of that point is to write without thinking, instead of to think without writing as I have been guilty much of late. And the REASON behind that purpose driven home by that point, is that I need an un (not ill) considered manuscript to judge the mental changes that may have altered what creativity I may possess.

Now, Chris and I have been working every morning for over half a year on a new concept of Story Structure for authors. Instead of looking at successful stories and seeing why they worked, we asked, "Why do we tell stories in the first place?" Which led to "Why do people want to hear stories anyway?" All this led to an investigation of the psychology of problem solving and ultimately to a mathematical model and formula, Mental Relativity, that describes the relationship between knowledge, thought, and the size of mind, constant. In practical application it describes both why and how we think, and corollary to that, how male and female minds differ.

Through this, we discovered the physiological basis for transexuality, and determined that the biochemistry of hormone therapy should have a dramatic change on the way a person would think. Not that it would alter his or her pattern, but rather enhance and deaccentuate specific aptitudes and approaches.

So here I am, human guinea pig: The first transsexual to actually know what the mechanism is that alters my mind, a process I can actually "feel" as it happens.

Hence, this freeform entry as a base line measurement of where I am for comparison to where I've been and where I'm going.

For documentation purposes, Chris took a week off from his co-partnership, a one million plus dollar a year concern with 15 employees, to write the story structure book with me. We met at his house from ten each morning until one or two the next morning for that entire week. THAT is when it became apparent that our psychology book which was to be second must actually come first - at least the preliminary articles.

The week was filled with more "Eureka!s" than I have ever had, perhaps totaled, in my life previously. Fifteen or twenty times a day we would flash to a new conclusion, sometimes painfully, sometimes euphorically, but always leapfrogging from one to the other. Chris coming from the Can/Need perspective, me from the Want/should. And Chris' homosexuality, upbringing and who knows what else, plus my transexuality, biochemistry and who knows what else, made us uniquely able to climb this ladder, and probably only at his one fortunate time in our lives.

So, after that week, we continued to meet each morning until we overcame frustration to reach the simple equation, k=tm2 (knowledge equals thought times the size of mind constant squared). Mental relativity, the basic driver of logic and emotion. The big bang that created the observer necessary to e=mc2. Indeed, the two equations taken together lay the groundwork for the Unified Field Theory modern physicists have been searching for.

But partway through, my mind began to change, not in capacity but in nature. The transitional interface between a testosterone based system influenced by estrogen to an estrogen based system influenced by testosterone ceased to be a fence I straddled once each month during off-cycle and rather became a fence I finally fell off on the side of estrogen.

For three days, my left brain felt blinded, drowning in darkness, unable to get the first generation information that used to flow directly to it from the outside world. And the left brain drowned in sensory overload from the additional direct input that it had never received before. At the same time, the body was wired like a melting circuit, static discharge at every pointy surface. My short term memory went to hell, my ability to organize, even to write, diminished to zero. Nothing got done, my guilt increased. I had experienced this only at the end of the Hollywood Doctor days, when the large doses of estrogen temporarily killed the testosterone and I panicked in the unfamiliar surroundings.

But by day four, yesterday, I began to "see" again in a rational manner. But not the same manner as a week ago. I no longer first analyze things with logic and then see how I feel about them. Now I first perceive with my feelings, THEN see what I think about it. THAT is what differs between women and men. Now the difference for me is not as great as that between women and men, as the physiology of my brain was always female, although bathed in testosterone. So I truly have no knowledge of what a man thinks like. However, the testosterone did enhance the dominance of the left, rational brain, and subdued to some extent the creative, feeling right. But only so much as the female physiology would allow.

This explains why I could not understand why my male peers said or did what they said and did. Those approaches or instincts, if you will, were truly foreign to me. And it also explains the growing dissatisfaction in my life, as the biochemistry tried to get me to be success oriented, but the physiology was best suited to being state-of-being oriented. One approach flows out, the other pulls in, so I was a push-me/pull-you even at the unexpected mental level.

Now, I see colors much more intensely. When I look for a tube of toothpaste I no longer recognize it first from its shape, but from its color. And a room is not filled with things, but with feelings. Each item on the shelf conjures up a specific definable and repeatable emotion tied to the past. I see and think in feelings now, THEN access the left brain to analyze. I always did REMEMBER in feelings. A smell, a color, a sound, would trigger a vivid memory and THEN I could recall the details of what happened there in vivid recollection. But ask me what happened in 1967 and I couldn't tell you.

Anyway, to wrap up loose ends, Mary has completely accepted me as Melanie now, we go everywhere together. We are as close as two friends can be without actually having sex, and that is fine by both of us. So, life situation has finally stabilized and grows stronger every day. And now, I must break away and work on the initial article describing k=tm2, so Chris can get it published.

Saturday, February 16, 1991, 12:14 am

Exactly 1 hour and four minutes ago, I woke up with the structure of the equation of Mental Relativity.

At the beginning of this week, Chris and I had reached a point in our development of our New Psychology where mental processes had been described down to left and right brain function. But the exact relationship between the two lobes remained unclear.

We knew that it had something to do with the passage of time: male MINDS processed first in the left analytical brain, THEN asked the right brain what it felt about that, and female MINDS processed first in the right perceptive brain, THAN asked the right brain what it thought about that. Men THOUGHT by taking options and inducing them down to a single pattern. Women THOUGHT by taking a pattern and deducing it into a variety of options. This was all tied in to the male approach to pull in to himself (possess) and the female approach to flow out from herself (empath). Men were concerned with achieving goals to obtain success, women with affecting lives to create personal happiness. Each could see the other view, but saw it AFTER processing the data first on THEIR SIDE OF THE BRAIN, a function of time.

So what creates desire and ability? And how do they relate to what one NEEDS or SHOULD do? Once we recognized that we were looking for an explanation of the relationships of the basic building blocks of MIND, we intuited that perhaps an equation akin to e=mc2 might explain that relativity. But we needed to know the specific items we were dealing with.

We had recently explored the relationship between Perception and Reality so we started there. Our first equation, p=ri2 added the concept of information and squaring it through the passage of time. We knew that time was important, but not exactly how it fit in. This equation worked well at first and explained many things, BUT NOT ALL. It soon became apparent that either the qualities contained in the equation or the structure of their relationship was wrong.

So we began to look for another equation such as p=2logr, or p=(2logr)n to describe the possible number of permutations from a single pattern of data in a two and three dimensional matrix. But this was always for a single processing unit or analytical pattern and did not explain the presence of mind, thought, or knowledge. In short, it gave us an understanding of the POTENTIAL number of permutations, but not how they related to thinking.

So we tried a different tack. Perhaps the structure of the original equation was correct, but the qualities were wrong. Maybe we shouldn't be looking at REALITY and PERCEPTION, but at THOUGHT, KNOWLEDGE, and MIND.

t=km2. Great! Another "eureka"! But what exact was MIND and how did you quantify it in any event? And why was it squared? We ran it through its paces and, again, it worked sometimes BUT NOT ALL THE TIME. Nor did it explain the relationship between the left and right brains. We began to get extremely frustrated. During this very same week I was going through the final stages of shifting my biochemistry from male to female after a year and a half of hormone therapy. And as can be seen from our work on psychology, the entire method of my data evaluation was changing subtly but dramatically.

The inability to get a grip on the equation that we both felt was out there combined with my changing perspectives and feeling of mental blindness and emotional drowning as my left and right brains sought to understand the chemically altered flow of information, joined forces to make me hypertense and exhausted at the same time.

I could not leave the problem alone. It was almost as if IT could not leave ME alone! On Thursday and Friday morning, Chris used his left brain efficiency to steer me out of dead end ponderings, and I used my right brain variety to show him that the solution MUST exist. Chris could not understand the need for a constant in the equation and thought it should be based on the two brains together. I insisted that a constant was essential and that we were dealing with one brain at a time.

We were both wrong.

We were both right.

As he left this (it's still Friday night to me!) morning, he let me know in no uncertain terms (highly unusual for him) that he was displeased with the time this equation was taking and wanted to move into more practical areas one level up where we had already largely finished our work. But I just could not let it go. And I spent all day pondering it subconsciously while I addressed other tasks. I did not really THINK about it, but allowed the right brain to permutate the problem into however many variations it could. I could FEEL it going on back there.

When I arrived home, the Miserable Feeling began to overtake me once more. And (as it has many times this week) physical fatigue set in almost instantly. I found myself laying down on the bed, away from the family, exhausted for no physical reason, at 8:00 pm.

I awoke three hours later.

And there, in the air above my closed eyes, in the twilight state between sleeping and waking, the equation literally wrote itself in stereotypical mathematical letters (you know the kind: with the cute little semi-cursive tails on them). I stared at the phantom characters, not yet consciously able to understand what they meant. What exactly was my mind trying to tell me?

Okay, so there's thought, over there on the left. And there's knowledge on the right. And it's next to a constant! I was right! But wait a minute!!! That's not a constant squared; it's two values multiplied by each other?!? And yet, each one is a constant in its own right. What do I mean by that? What am I trying to tell myself? Wait a minute! The total value, the figure similar to c2 is desirability, right? Right! Then that must mean... Oh, my God!!! It must be the multiplicand of Ability and Desire!!! And that must mean that it is the right brain function! And THAT must mean that Thought and Knowledge are LEFT brain functions. Then, this equation before my closed eyes must be the relativity relationship between the left and right brains!

I get it! Ability and Desire, the two basic motivators of our Minds are constants, limited by the number of permutations of each that are created within the confines of the physically limited capacity of the right brain. And the constant occurs as a function of time and space. Because time or space limits the process of the initial data into permutations, the number of permutations is a constant in that time/space continuum. Each will have a value that comes out the same no matter how many times the exact same data is presented to the right brain for analysis. The permutations may be different, but the NUMBER of permutations will be constant.

So I was right about there being a constant! But Chris was right about it not being a constant. It merely depends upon whether you are looking at the number of permutations, or the possible variety of permutations over time as the problem is re-proposed to the right brain. Further, the number acts as a square, because desire and ability are the same kind of mind stuff, but different perspectives at the starting point of processing. It is my suspicion that the processing actually move THROUGH each other in the brain, resetting the neurons the other has just fired. Whether this is a simultaneous procedure or a function of time, one after the other, I do not know. But the overall effect is to multiply one constant of patterns permutated by the other constant of patterns permutated.

I do not know how long that twilight state existed. It could have been 30 seconds or 30 minutes. But at that moment, I leapt to my feet, grabbed the phone and called Chris. I had no idea what time it was: 8:15? Midnight? When I asked him, Chris told me it was 10 minutes past eleven. I explained the above, ending with the equation, t=k(a*d) Thought equals Knowledge times the multiplicand of Ability and Desire, or, t=kD, where capital D equals desirability. He went over his work of the afternoon, which paralleled mine from left brain perspective. He had worked his way down to it, I had worked my way up to it.

Suddenly, the tension was gone. The sense that all the mental and physical frustration and suffering I have gone through on my journey from male to female was essential to give me the unusual perspective of both left and right brain dominance within the same life, as I shifted from one to the other. The certainty that my childhood sense of destiny was complete. Either because I had an equation shaped hole in my mind that needed filling, or because capital K Knowledge had a me shaped hole in it and I was needed to fill it in. Not a feeling of superiority but of uniqueness, and function fulfilled.

So now, at twenty minutes past 1:00 am on Saturday morning, I close this entry, the most fulfilling of my life. My destiny complete; the remainder of my life my reward for diligence. Everything else is just gravy.

By the way, a drunk propositioned me on Hollywood boulevard on the way home tonight.

(The Transition Diary series will continue in the next edition of The Subversive)

I urge you all to keep a diary of YOUR personal journey, whether it be through transition or not. The attitudes and even the order of events becomes cloudy through time, and I am continually amazed to re-read things that memory would have me believe had happened differently. If nothing else, it is a good way to see long-term patterns in yourself that you cannot see except in retrospect. That objective view alone is worth the inconvenience of keeping a journal.

Back to Table of Contents

The world's very first Transgender Support Web site

The Transgender Support Site has received over three million visits since 1994
and currently receives more than 1,500 unique visitors per day

© Copyright Transgender Support Site