My Authentic Self

One of the notions that has taken prominence over the last few years is that somewhere, lurking inside each one of us, is some kind of authentic self. You might have shoulders as wide as a barn door, be able to crush walnuts with your bare hands (not to mention being able to open jars), sport the most magnificent beard, and possess a rather impressive trouser salami, but really, inside, the real you, the authentic you, is actually a woman.

It’s a seductive notion - that we are not defined by how others see us, but how we see ourselves.

We’re probably all familiar with the “masks” we put on - no, not those masks - but the various characteristics we adopt in differing situations. If we’re in a work meeting we might act all professional and sober, when really we’d much rather be sitting in a corner somewhere and flicking our boogers at some target like a three-year old.

So, who are we?

Even asking the question assumes there’s some ‘real’ you to be found.

In some respects the picture of ourselves that we generate, our self-perception, is not all that reliable. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve entered into what I thought was an impressive rant, with biting humour, and worthy of a least a supporting act at the next Billy Connolly show, only to be met with . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . crickets.

I am not, despite my self-perception, destined for an illustrious career as a stand-up comedian.

But, assuming such a ‘real’ you exists, what happens when you start thinking about who you ‘really’ are and you don’t like what you find?

The whole notion of Trans is that you’re making some kind of journey towards a more authentic version of yourself.

But what if you’re just running away from who you really are?

We are good, as humans, at quite a lot of things, amongst them being the art of self-delusion. I used to enjoy shows like The X-Factor as much for the awful auditions as for the one or two hidden gems that were found. I wondered whether some of these ‘acts’ ever recorded themselves. Yup - I’ve taped myself singing and I sound just like Whitney.

Of course, you can never be sure whether something like The X-Factor was a faithful representation of reality, either. It’s entertainment, and watching the awful auditions and the horrified looks on the judges’ faces was funny. But my suspicion is that everyone was “in on the gag” - people were paid, knowingly, to make fools of themselves on national TV.

How much of Trans is about transing away the person you’d rather not be?

And you do this by believing you truly are something different. Are you just like the contestant on The X-Factor thinking you’re really Whitney?

We’d probably all like to change some aspects of ourselves - I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not been born this devastatingly handsome¹, for example - but few of us feel the need to undergo radical surgery, or take a powerful cocktail of drugs for the rest of our lives, to achieve our dreams of being someone else.

Is Trans more about running away from something, rather than running towards something?

These are awkward and woefully “politically incorrect” questions to ask and, I’ll be honest, I don’t have any answers to them.

Back in the days when I was somewhat more “spiritual”, I dabbled a bit with Buddhism. If there was an Olympic event for “the world’s worst Buddhist” I’d have won the gold.

I never quite got the hang of mindfulness, for example, principally because my mind was full of all sorts of random shit - the wrong sort of mindfulness, I guess. A few more crickets would have been nice when I tried to, erm, “meditate” - but it was like Times Square on a busy night.

But I was attracted to much of the philosophy, even if I didn’t understand, or practice, it very well.

Words like acceptance and compassion are bandied about quite a lot these days, but in Buddhist thinking these are much more sophisticated and difficult concepts. Acceptance is not some state of agreement or acquiescence. Compassion is not some warm fuzzy feeling that is largely indistinguishable from sympathy². Acceptance and compassion in Buddhist thought, at least as far as I ever understood them, are more active rather than passive states of being. They are not merely “attitudes” we try to cultivate.

But how many times, particularly with the Trans issue, have we heard that not agreeing with the ideology is the same as lacking compassion?

They don’t make this formal equivalence outright, of course, but if you question the ideology, you are said to “lack” compassion. If you disagree with the statement that a “transwoman is a woman”, then this is said to be evidence you are not a compassionate person.

But as any Buddhist knows, even one as bloody useless as I was, compassion is not the same thing as agreement; not at all.

Let me offer a difficult and hypothetical example. Most of us would wish to paint a suicide bomber as being a vile and evil human being, twisted beyond all goodness into an almost demonic figure. But what if we subsequently learned that the suicide bomber had had his entire family wiped out in a single drone strike? Just collateral damage, as we horribly describe?

Does this change things, even a little? We can still be utterly repulsed by the act, still think it was evil, but wouldn’t we have just a smidgeon more compassion for the bomber now? He still did something truly evil and despicable, but he’s, perhaps, not quite such a monster now is he?

His act, his response, of course, remains entirely unjustified.

We might, if we’re honest, recognise our part in leading him down such an evil pathway. We might even reflect upon the difference between the bomber and ‘ourselves’ (in a collective sense) - after all, both have taken innocent lives. Perhaps the only real difference is in the justification made for the separate acts.

Bad man in village? Blow up village. Not much of a “justification” really, is it?

We might make noises about how careful we are to minimize collateral damage, as if this somehow makes it all alright. But when you really dig down into the issues and “justifications” on both sides, nobody comes up smelling entirely of roses.

Buddhism would have compassion for the suicide bomber and for those who ordered and implemented the drone strike. Compassion, in Buddhism, is not selective or dependent on the particular beliefs of the person to whom it is directed. Compassion, in Buddhism, is not given only to those who share your beliefs, but to all.

Compassion is not the same as agreement.

There are people for whom collateral damage is a very real thing; their loved ones have been slain in the name of making “the West” safer. Would they not have every right to feel aggrieved and might we not expect some (warped) perception to arise that “the West” is to blame for this? None of this excuses any subsequent revenge taken on the citizens of the West, but people often confuse an attempt to understand the why with “making excuses”.

Here’s a clearer case of revenge - and we don’t feel nearly as appalled by it because the target was more focused and more clearly responsible. It’s the case of Marianne Bachmeier who, in 1981, calmly walked into a German court and gunned down the killer of her 7-year old daughter.

I’m not sure whether this clip is taken from a movie or not - many people seem to think it’s a video of the actual shooting, and so maybe it is. But few in the comments seem to condemn this action. I find it hard to condemn it too.

But would we be OK with the mother of a daughter lost as “collateral damage” gunning down the drone operator and those who ordered it? I suspect not.

Compassion, which literally means “to suffer with”, is an active thing that, for a Buddhist, is about alleviating suffering. To do that properly one must first understand the origin of that suffering - one must “suffer with” someone in more than just some airy-fairy intellectual sense of “poor you, this must be really bad for you”.

How much do we really understand about what causes the suffering when it comes to Trans? Is it, as the activists claim, there’s a mismatch between inner and outer - the ‘real’ inner you is at odds with your body and the expectations society places upon you because of it? Or is it that you don’t want to be what you were born to be and you’re running away from the person you actually are?

If you have a strong desire to be a different sex, then it would be easy to convince yourself that this arises because you actually are, inside, that opposite sex - particularly if you’ve bought into an ideology that claims this is the case. Would you still feel the same way in the absence of that ideological “possibility”? If someone had never told you that it was possible to be “born into the wrong body” would you still conflate a desire with some inner reality in this way?

You may feel that you are ‘really’ a different sex (or gender, whatever that is), but can you be certain this is not just the outward manifestation of some deep and unconscious desire? How can we tell the difference?

These are not just some theoretical questions, but strike at the heart of what ‘identity’ actually is. How much of our ‘identities’ are innate, and how much can we shape by our desires and motivations?

Does anyone actually have the answers to these kinds of questions?

It’s kind of obvious that I certainly don’t, but maybe someone does.

I feel that I’m quite good at asking awkward and uncomfortable questions, but about as effective as I was as a Buddhist, in coming up with any answers.

But one thing I learned in my career as a physicist is that asking the right question in the first place is essential.

When it comes to the whole issue of Trans and our “authentic selves”, I don’t think we’re asking the right questions at all.

1. And why am I hearing those crickets again?

2. Or the much misused “empathy” we also hear so much about today