#Date idea lets study gender theory and apply it to our own lives

[bloobyposting]

Can we ACTUALLY talk about "gendered socialisation" with some nuance pls

Every time i see someone pretending that 'amab folks will never transition because they're always gonna be raised male' i make another person trans

Every time i see someone pretending that 'gendered socialisation literally doesn't exist/i am immune to gendered socialisation because im just a silly little transgender' i make that person cis again

Socialisation divvied up on gendered lines exists. It's a real strong, oppressive, arbitrary force that was invented by bathroom companies to sell more bathrooms. You are not immune to it either, you absolutely grew up with it and you're not going to lose it by accident once you find out you're a woman now. It's probably happening to you as I speak, in fact it might be in the room with you right now, and you wouldn't even know it. And some of the ways it presents will often be cut from the same cloth as toxic masculinity, and that's on you to unlearn. Call it what you want, but it came to you because you were raised to be a certain way according to the gendered expectations of your parents.

On the other hand, it's not innate. TERFs keep using that shit to push their own fascistic worldview. Gender, like biological sex, is completely malleable given time. If you hormone wash your body with estrogen, progesterone and antiandrogens, you become biologically female, your ovaries just come in a little plastic container that you get through a shady website online through legally sourced methods and a doctor's note. In the same way, you surround yourself with a bunch of women who love and appreciate you, who uplift you through your gender identity and treat you as one of their own, and you do exactly the same with and for them, your socialisation as 'masculine' will be withered away and you'll literally see your personality change in front of your eyes. It's literally so beautiful to be in a room as the person you are and have become and then realise that they see you as that person.

But, it takes a lot of work. It's bendy, and it's malleable, but it's not fully fluid. not yet at least You can't just manifestrogen HRT into your veins, you can't just will your own gender presentation into existence flawlessly without doing the busywork that comes with becoming a different person completely. It's a skill, one that takes dedication and effort to become better at.

[markktong0217-blog]

Life Sucks When You Are Uncool

When the Siddhartha first encountered an old man, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic, it depressed him. He realized that life involves suffering (Dukkha) in obvious and subtle forms. Even when things seem good, we always feel an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty inside (The First Noble Truth). We spend our entire life struggling with aging, sickness, and death. Only maybe 10% of us achieve any semblance of real lifelong happiness—wonderful loving spouse, decent children who go on to successful careers, a healthy life free of disease and financial burdens. However, when we realize that we will inevitably die in few years anyway, none of these matter. So in the midst of all our pain and suffering, how can we remain calm in the middle of the storm? The answer is to be cool.

At the time of slavery, being cool was a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States. A cool manner helped slaves to cope with suffering and death, or simply made it possible to have fun in their desperate lives. During slavery, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death (philosophynow.org). It was very important to remain inoffensive and calm, and any level of serious emotion or intent should be disguised. However, cool always reminded blacks to resist and rebel against authority through creativity and innovation. Joseph L. White wrote: Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioral tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become "the only distinctive American artistic creation" (Black Man Emerging: Facing the Past and Seizing the Future, 1999, p. 60). Thus, it is more accurate to conclude that cool represents a fusion of submission and subversion.

Today, the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. We might know that sticking our tongue out during photo-taking is cool, but we do not understand the cool worldview behind this pose. Cool becomes a cheap word and is used as a universal term of approval among the young around the world, right from children in primary school playgrounds up to college-aged adults. Some people would argue that we are living in a relatively peaceful world that slavery and major wars rarely happen, so original cool does not work anymore in the 21st century. However, the truth is that we are still living in a chaotic world where races, religions, genders, parties, nationalities, and social classes deeply split us. While the rich and privileged upper class dominates the society, suffering is still the biggest part of minorities' lives. It is still essential to understand what cool really is and how to use cool to deal with the new challenges and difficulties of the 21st century.

One of the most dangerous things in the 21st century is "parents." In the dictionary of cool, "parents" are one of the authorities, including family, school, religion, and government, who teach us the truth in life and make rules for us for our own good. What makes it really uncool is that you and I rarely question them. We think that we are in the driver's seat, but the truth is that we are just a back-seat passenger wearing the seatbelt and waiting for someone to drive us to somewhere he wants us to go. As a child raised in a traditional Chinese family, my life view was formed by my parents and the society. I was expected to graduate from a top college, work for a big-name company with decent pay, marry a virtuous woman at twenty-six, and enjoy the rest of my family life. In my favorite movie Whiplash, Andrew, a music student, aspires to be the next Buddy Rich, though his parents question his ambitions. As Andrew puts it, "I'd rather die broke and drunk at 34 and have people at a dinner table somewhere talk about it than die rich and sober at 90 and have no one remember me." Cool teaches me to stay away from "parents" and think independently and critically. Dick Poutain wrote in his book: Cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express a defiance state to authority (Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude). Here, cool is a rebellious attitude, an expression of a belief that the mainstream mores of your society have no legitimacy and do not apply to you. Oscar Wilde also read rebellion as "man's original virtue" and said, "it is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made." In the science era, we have continuous "rebellions" and "revolutions" on previous ideas, theories, or technologies, so we can make ourselves so far today.

"You can either travel or read, but either your body or soul must be on the way." It is a quote from the movie Roman Holiday, which perfectly reflects another core value of cool: to know different perspectives. Nowadays, we only trust our own opinions, but believing full scale only on the versions of one party is being unmindful of what the truth is. Cool encourages us to travel around the city, talk to people on the streets, and listen to different stories and views. Reading books is another great way of exploring new ideas and perspectives. By thinking carefully about the mindsets behind the books, we are able to view the world through the same lenses that the authors used. All of these different ideas can get us out of the boxes that have limited our vision for so long. Given that major media companies dominate the way in which we gain information and knowledge nowadays, we should read and listen to more perspectives in order to view the situation more fairly and objectively.

The world changes every day, and this means that we should change constantly, too. In 1923, the sound film started to replace the silent film. However, Charlie Chaplin refused to change at first because silent comedy had made his name famous around the world. It is too easy to stay in one's comfort zone, but cool encourages us to get comfy in an uncomfy world. In the 21st century, new technologies such as VR, AI, and Cloud Technology are gradually stepping into people's lives. Companies like Google and Facebook are spending billions of dollars studying these technologies because they see them as the future. Most people, including myself, did not see it until we realized that our future jobs could be replaced by AI very soon. It takes a lot of time and effort to understand these technologies, but cool people are willing to change to be ready for better opportunities. Charles Dickens wrote it in his book, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" (A Tale of Two Cities). It is very dangerous to be out-dated in the 21st century. The price of being unchanged is a yawning wealth gap: the poor would dramatically fall further behind the middle classes, and those middle classes would be squeezed as well. The upper class will still triumph in the end.

As a young man full of exuberant fancy, I tried to draw up a plan of the "goods" of life when I walked onto this campus. However, coolness woke me from the fantasy and taught me to deal with my sufferings and imperfections by acknowledging and accepting them. When more than half of the students in the school believe in the American dream, they have already fallen into the trap by listening to the authorities. They accept the identity given by the UM, wearing hurricane T-shirts and tattooing the UM logo on their bodies, but forget to present and work on their real identity. The vast uncontrollability of this environment has a great influence on their pursuit of joy: alcohol, drugs, and sex. When the ambulance drove onto the campus and carried them away on a stretcher, they lost their calm manners and self-control. When they only study before the tests, they forget to work hard for themselves. During this class, I was confused. What is the point of striving if our lives are designed to be a struggle and purposeless? Again, this class has given me a very cool answer: Life sucks, no matter if you are cool; but life would suck a lot more if you were uncool. Thank you for letting me know "what's cool," and now it is my time to practice all the ideas above to be cool.

Work Cited

“Charlie Chaplin : Overview of His Life.” Charlie Chaplin : Filming The Kid, www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/21-Overview-of-His-Life.

Dr Thorsten Botz-BorNstein. “What Does It Mean To Be Cool?” Philosophy Now: a Magazine of Ideas, 2010, philosophynow.org/issues/80/What_Does_It_Mean_To_Be_Cool.

Johnson, A., et al. A Tale of Two Cities. Pearson Education, 2008.

O'Brien, Barbara. “What Is the Importance of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism?” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, www.thoughtco.com/the-four-noble-truths-450095.

Pountain, Dick, and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. Reaktion Books, 2000.

“Sound Film.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 May 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film.