Trans people aren't allowed to get angry; our gender identities are on the line

From three years ago. Still relevant:

"Policing trans rage seems to have become a major pastime. When trans people become angry, cisgender people use this to "prove" our gender identities are invalid, or as a way of discrediting us. If a transfeminine person gets mad, she's acting too much like a boy. If a transmasculine person gets mad, this apparently proves that his masculine identity is causing bad behavior. And everyone, including non-binary and gender-fluid people, is constantly forced to prove that we're not the unstable menace that transphobes often try to portray us as.

Imagine being addressed with the wrong name or pronoun all the time, and being told that you are a problem just because you want to live your own life. Imagine being aware that your very right to exist is being debated as part of a huge civil-rights battle. And to go with all of that pressure, your reactions are constantly scrutinized for any proof that you're unreasonable, and therefore unworthy to shape your own destiny. That's the awful conundrum facing trans kids right now."

— Charlie Jane Anders, On Transgender Day of Visibility, It's Time to Finally Stop Policing Trans Rage , Teen Vogue, March 31, 2021

Does that make you angry? "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "

If you're afraid of your own anger, it's hard to stand up to political bullies

"Dr. Mark Goulston on why Democrats keep losing: They're afraid of their own anger. Psychiatrist Mark Goulston says Democrats are traumatized and eager to hide their rage. To win, they will need it." Chauncey DeVega. Salon. July 11, 2022.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction to the interview:

"In a recent essay at Medium, Dr. Mark Goulston, a leading psychiatrist, former FBI hostage negotiation trainer and the author of the bestsellers "Just Listen" and "Talking to 'Crazy,'" offers a provocative explanation for the Democratic Party's weakness. He argues that Democrats are "highly conflict avoidant" and that such a temperament has made them "mincemeat to the vast majority of the GOP who is allegiant to Donald Trump."

In my recent conversation with Goulston, he expanded on this analysis, arguing that Democrats keep losing to the Republicans because they refuse to speak passionately, clearly and in declarative terms to the American people. He warns that Republicans, especially Trump loyalists, are bullies who embrace and welcome conflict, and that Democrats do not fight back effectively because they refuse to acknowledge the reality that bullies must be confronted and cannot be negotiated with or defeated with rational arguments. Goulston further explains that Trump's followers remain loyal to him precisely because of his antisocial and anti-human behavior, not despite it.

Goulston also explains that many members of America's political class and the news media are naive or in denial about the nature of human evil, and therefore continue to express shock and surprise at each new revelation about the obvious crimes of the Trump regime. At the end of this conversation Goulston shares the advice he would give to Biden and other Democratic leaders about how to break their pattern of self-defeating behavior and formulate a winning plan to defeat the Republicans and preserve American democracy."

You can check out the article at Salon.

Also:

Professor @esglaude warns that American society is mired in death and grieving from the covid pandemic and neofascism but is profoundly immature and unable to grapple with reality because of white racial innocence and other delusions.https://t.co/T5bYPL0f9E

— chauncey devega (@chaunceydevega) July 18, 2022

Also, telling extremist people that their ideas are within normal and acceptable bounds may just embolden them to become more extreme. It's as if you're giving them permission.

Sadness waking us up to real life (quotes)

Camille Pagán:

"It’s permanence that distinguishes grief from other emotional pain. The unfixable nature of never — that’s what makes it so terrible to bear."

Patrick Harpur:

"In the life of the body, it is loss that dismembers us. Our hearts are broken; we bleed, hurt, ache; we are gutted. Bereavement opens us up like a scalpel, we fall apart, we feel cut up into little pieces. Grief numbs us; our bodies feel odd and separate; we seem to be living in a dream, in another world."

Julie Reshe:

"Before my own descent, I’d been confused when my PhD mentor, the philosopher Alenka Zupančič at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, suggested that the common striving for happiness constitutes a repressive ideology. What in the world could be wrong or repressive about the desire to make the world a happier place?"
Yet, after observing myself, I came to agree with her. Look around and you’ll notice we demand a state of permanent happiness from ourselves and others. The tendency that goes together with overpromotion of happiness is stigmatisation of the opposite of happiness – emotional suffering, such as depression, anxiety, grief or disappointment. We label emotional suffering a deviation and a problem, a distortion to be eliminated – a pathology in need of treatment. The voice of sadness is censored as sick."

Oliver Burkeman:

“In case this needs saying, it isn’t that a diagnosis of terminal illness, or a bereavement, or any other encounter with death is somehow good, or desirable, or ‘worth it.’ But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonizing loss. Writers have struggled convey the particular quality that this mode of being infuses into life, because while ‘happier’ is wrong, ‘sadder’ doesn’t convey it, either. You might call it ‘bright sadness’ (as does the priest and author Richard Rohr), ‘stubborn gladness’ (the poet Jack Gilbert), or ‘sober joy’ (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard). Or you could just call it finally encountering real life, and the brute fact of our finite weeks.”

Sources

Camille Pagán. Life and Other Near-Death Experiences. Lake Union, 2015.

Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (2002). Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. p. 254.

“Depressive Realism.” Julie Reshe. Aeon. January 9, 2020.

Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021.

Image by Shlomaster from Pixabay

Leaving behind the 'reactive' self and being willing to feel something new

Bruce MacLennan, professor of computer science, identifies what he calls the "protophenomena" of microeffects in the body that bring emotion into being. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux similarly talks about emotions as "survival circuits." Even an amoeba, as Neil Savage explained LeDoux's position, "reacts to an environmental stimulus in a way that makes it more likely to survive and reproduce. The stimulus flip switches on survival circuits which prompt behaviors that enhance survival. Neurons firing in a particular pattern might trigger the brain to order the release of adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster, priming an animal to fight or flee from danger. That physical state, LeDoux says, is an emotion."

But stopping here, at the level of reaction, implies that we see other people only as aids or threats to our own survival and thus that we must objectify them. Thomas Brudholm wrote:

As Strawson put it, 'Being involved in inter-personal relationships as we normally understand them precisely is being exposed to the range of reactive attitudes and feelings [i.e. resentment, indignation, gratitude etc.]' (1974:11). He argues that it is possible to adopt what he calls an ‘objective attitude’ to the other human being; that is, to see the other person as an object of social policy, a subject for treatment, as something to be dealt with or cured. Relating to the other in such ‘objectivizing’ ways precludes reactive attitudes like resentment. However, doing so also means not relating to the other as a fellow human being: ‘If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with him’ (Strawson 1974:9). In other words, being susceptible to anger or resentment is inextricably tied to participation in ‘the general framework of human life.’ A social life bereft of resentment is an impossible and, insofar as it is imaginable, impoverished life.

Zat Rana explains that when we act (not just react) we leave behind the idea of the fixed self (which promotes suffering, since we try to satisfy it and it can't be satisfied) and instead we find power in our ability to feel new things and thus become a new being:

A reactive body feels the same thing, over and over again, in the name of acquiring some sort of representation in the world...An active body, however, feels its own power in the granularity of the sensations that flow in and out, and using those sensations and the emotions they bring out, it channels that power forward in everything that it does...The novelty of new representations fade, but the ability to feel every group of sensations in the body as distinct from the last ones is a novelty that never gets old. It gets us out of the cycle of suffering, where nothing seems to be enough. * * * When a body reacts to something or someone, it releases that energy, that strength, inward, to fuel an inner cycle of the patterns of emotion stored in the body’s memory. This hardens the self into a rigid form. When the body acts, however, by simply being in motion or responding actively to something or someone, it releases that energy, that strength, outward, and in doing so, it transforms the sensations that were felt when a stimulus hit the body into something entirely new — a new way of feeling, of being. Self-overcoming.

Sources

"Artificial emotions." Neil Savage. The Week, Dec. 31, 2013. p. 29. Excerpted from Nautilus at www.nautil.us.

Thomas Brudholm. Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive. Philadelphia: Temple, 2008. p. 11.

Zat Rana. “Letter; To Feel a New Emotion.” Sent to email list for Thinking Better, Together, July 21, 2020.

Quotes: Feeling a change in one's life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

”If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water increase your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure. But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle – so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.

These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand.”

J. B. MacKinnon:

"I have a rule of thumb for when a lifestyle change will be meaningful: When it feels like an adventure."

Robert A. Burton:

”Though not necessarily aware of when we feel purpose and meaning, we are nearly always aware of the sickening feeling when we don't possess them.”

Norman Boucher:

“‘If you lack empathy,’ President [Ruth] Simmons told the members of the [Brown University] class of 2011 assembled inside the First Baptist Church in America on Sunday morning, ‘you will find yourself lacking a fundamental necessity for leading a life of usefulness and reputation.’ Work every day, she urged the graduates, to strengthen the ability to empathize with others.”

Anthony Robbins:

"Often individuals do things that afterward they are unhappy with themselves about simply because they are not clear about what they unconsciously believe is right for them and others.”

Barbara J. King:

“...our ancient primate legacy is to be transformed moment by moment through the process of being social and emotional with others.”

Virginia Woolf:

"...one never knows how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel."

Glennon Doyle Melton:

"I’ll just say that my heart did that thing that happened to the Grinch – remember when his heart swelled so many sizes that it almost burst? That’s why I go to church – for the heart swelling. The heart swelling is the only buzz I have left. Luckily it’s the best one I’ve found: the kind of buzz that leaves me better and bigger instead of worse and smaller."

Sources

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. p. 89.

"In an Age of Eco-Uncertainty." J. B. MacKinnon. Reprinted from Explore (May 2010). UTNE Reader, Sept-Oct 2010, p. 73.

Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Grffin, 2008. p, 178.

“The Send-Off.” Norman Boucher. Brown Alumni Magazine, [date unrecorded] p. 10.

Anthony Robbins. Unlimited Power. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986.pp. 17-18.

Barbara J. King. Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 2007. p. 168.

Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

“The most honest, beautiful, important question I have ever heard anyone ask.” Glennon Doyle Melton. Momastery. April 1, 2015.

Quotes on masculinity and feeling and expressing emotion

"It is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them 'care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail."

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 129

"It is very much in style today to urge men to feel. However, this urging is partially reminiscent of taunting a crippled man to run."

Herb Goldberg, quoted by Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p. 108

"But a man who is emotionally paralyzed cannot be male, that is, he cannot be male in relation to female, for if he is to relate himself to a woman there must be something of the woman in his nature."

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p. 113

"Genetic men, it seems, are taught to deal with the onset of this chemical [testosterone] that makes our feelings so much harder to ignore by getting rigorous, brutal, almost crushing training that frequently forces them out of contact with all their feelings. This is akin to using a nuclear warhead to restrain a werewolf...surely there is a better way?"

Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. XLibris Press, 2001. p 177.

"Want to tell people about your problems? Get a sex change."

BusterB, http://themenscenter.com/busterb/mythsand.htm, Accessed Dec. 16, 2001.