The topic is gender identity. It’s not as obvious as people think and it has nothing to do with sexual preference directly, but everything with our living experience and our sense of how we function. Mostly, we have limited to no sense for how to function.

Ones sense of self? Yes basically, but where do we get that sense of self from?

Our subconscious? Ideally, but that’s tainted with a lot of twisted overlay. Ideas take natural feelings and do things like make us feel ashamed of having a feeling that just comes naturally from our being.

Social values and upbringing will sometimes cause feelings of wrongness, conflict? Conditioning can be a big damaging force, but can heal too if you own it.

Ok, some biology facts. We all, and I do mean all, start out the same gender. Can anyone guess what that is?

• Both male and female? Spiritually we are both male and female, yes. Biologically we start female.
• Female. Just like in Second Life, we are ‘Ruthed’. So Second Life had to follow suit and voila Ruth. Yes, it is even the basic avatar form.

Then hormones are applied as a part of the natural gender selection process, but nature doesn’t select things like we do. Thank goodness it does not, because honestly, what would we make of ourselves? There is an old Arab curse; May your every wish be immediately fulfilled.

The best part is that men tend to (during their midlife crisis) show their soft sensitive feminine side. 🙂 They do, and it was always there. What’s wrong is that it takes intense psychological stress to make it integrate in any way.

Makes me love them more. You can indeed love someone for their foibles, we do all have them. This is just a fact. But another fact is that nature doesn’t make clear gender distinctions. Medicine just goes with what your functional traits are, but in human development masculine and feminine traits are pretty routinely mixed, even biologically.

If a male were to be without female traits, his flesh would be so unpliable his heart wouldn’t work. He would just be a dry husk of inert tissues or if alive maybe tree like, but generally he couldn’t survive. Likewise, if nature made a woman one hundred percent female, she would basically have zero metabolism, would survive off baby fat till that was gone, and would have no immune system. Nature tends to like things to be whole. It’s only human thinking that makes a big fuss about how things are balanced. There is even a species of frog that can change gender in its lifetime, and a species of lizard that has no male structure but hermaphroditic function, and one lizard plays the role of male for another.

Would that then imply that intersexed or hermaphrodite is a more perfect balance? No. It wouldn’t imply they are more perfect actually, because for material reality to be stable there have to be cycles. For there to be cycles, there has to be some degree of polarization, but polarization doesn’t require prejudice. That’s just a human view.

Philosophically, yes. Well, it’s more than philosophical. It is a basis in physics. Without cycles you get energy breaking down into a homogenous mass. No potential for any diversification and no propagation of energy, just universal heat death.

As it applies physically, I can assure you there are plenty of cycles that occur within the hermaphrodite including psychological swings between the male and female. Those psychological swings are vital to a whole mind, but what do we do to a soft man or an aggressive woman?

Lock them up and throw the key away. Call them both by a word that originally was just a reference to female canines, and yes, ostracise them. But the common view and thinking about identity, in this case gender identity, is the most fringe we can get short of suicidal psychopathic states.

Societal pressures do affect too. Societal pressures do have an impact, and to a degree that herd pressure is actually a good thing, or at least in humans it could be. Regrettably it isn’t, but we have two levels of awareness and we have these without trying. We have a sense of our own health, and we have a sense of the health of the herd. Yes, humans have it too, and if it weren’t for human prejudices it would just be a force for support of the herd, moving us toward acceptance or at least survival positive transcendence.

An example of this: Someone is on their death bed. Our natural instinct just tells us our family group is decreasing and that there might be more of a problem, but nothing more than that. If we accept this family/herd instinct, we attend to the situation without judgement, without insisting there is more than we know, or less, and we can have very appropriate responses. How does this natural healing instinct get twisted?

It is an insecurity of sorts. Fear? Yes, but only because like our opposable thumbs we often have no clue what to do with our minds.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~