{"id":19144,"date":"2014-10-12T19:44:17","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T02:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19144"},"modified":"2014-10-12T19:44:17","modified_gmt":"2014-10-13T02:44:17","slug":"first-approximations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19144","title":{"rendered":"First Approximations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fantastic<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

I once saw a good friend of mine by chance in line at a restaurant. \u00a0He was facing away, but I know him well, and I was confident from his height, the color of his hair, the set of his shoulders, his clothing style, that it was him. \u00a0I walked over and was about to say, \u201cHey, Tom! \u00a0What are you doing here?\u201d when he turned to look at something out the window and I saw that it was not my friend after all. \u00a0I’d had excellent reason to suppose that he was Tom, but once I had more evidence I knew better.<\/p>\n

And I knew that the person had never been<\/i> Tom. \u00a0He did not go from being Tom to being not-Tom. \u00a0He was never Tom.<\/p>\n

\n

When I was a child, my Grandpa sometimes let me help him in his wood shop. \u00a0On one occasion, he told me to get him a piece of white oak. \u00a0I went and got a piece. \u00a0It felt good, to be helping my Grandpa, and I loved the smell of the sawdust and the wood stains. \u00a0When I handed him the wood, he smiled and explained that I had brought him white pine. \u00a0I had remembered him describing some of the wood in his storage area as \u201cwhite\u201d something, and had made a mistake. \u00a0He showed me how light it was, and how he could mark it with his fingernail, and he explained that it rotted easily, while white oak was dense and much harder, and reluctant to rot.<\/p>\n

And I understood, even as a child, that the piece of wood I had brought him had never been<\/i> white oak. \u00a0It did not go from being white oak to being white pine. \u00a0It was white pine all along.<\/p>\n

\n

Where I grew up, there were lizards which we called \u201cbluebelly lizards\u201d. \u00a0On top, they were a rough mottled sandy color, but their bellies were a light shade of blue. \u00a0If you were quick enough, and the day was cold enough, you could catch them and then hold them upside-down and look at their bellies. \u00a0And if you did, sometimes they froze in place. \u00a0They pretended to be dead. \u00a0If you didn\u2019t see them before they feared your proximity, you would not know that they were alive. \u00a0But if you let them go, they flipped over and ran away. \u00a0I later learned that they are not unique; many lizards play dead, as a survival strategy. \u00a0Though I didn\u2019t understand it in these terms at the time, I now know that they\u2019re just pretending to be dead because past evidence ((in the aggregate result of millions of generations of evolution)) has shown them that their chance of survival is better if they seem dead than if they seem alive. \u00a0So they play dead, because they don\u2019t want to actually die.<\/p>\n

And I knew, even as a child, that they had never been<\/i> dead. \u00a0They did not go from being dead to being alive. \u00a0They were alive the whole time.<\/p>\n

\n

There was no shame in any of these \u201cmistakes.\u201d \u00a0They were reasonable conclusions, based on imperfect knowledge, incomplete evidence. \u00a0They were first approximations. \u00a0They all turned out to be erroneous, but that\u2019s in the nature of first approximations; if they were always right, we could call them final conclusions.<\/p>\n

\n

I once met a woman who looked like a man. \u00a0She apparently had a man\u2019s body, under her man\u2019s clothes. \u00a0She had what sounded like a man\u2019s voice. \u00a0She had facial hair. \u00a0But after awhile she transitioned to live openly as herself. \u00a0Her transition was difficult and expensive and awkward, and it was probably difficult for people to understand why on earth she would go through all that. \u00a0But I understood. She was doing what she had to do to live whole. \u00a0I understood that she was a woman.<\/p>\n

And I knew that she had never been<\/i> a man. \u00a0She did not go from being a man to being a woman. \u00a0She was a woman the whole time. ((\u201c\u2026from the standpoint of people who reject the gender they were assigned at birth, transition and its related activities can be seen as taking what has been inside and bringing it out into the world for others to experience. The brain is ordered, it is simply that the brain\u2019s orderliness is obscured for others by the screen of our bodies. …transition isn\u2019t changing so much as revealing.\u201d
\n\u2014Diana Powe, retired police officer, trans woman))<\/p>\n

\n

Grace ((I am indebted to Barry Deutsch, who suggested many edits, and made this a much better piece than it would have been.))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I once saw a good friend of mine by chance in line at a restaurant. \u00a0He was facing away, but I know him well, and I was confident from his height, the color of his hair, the set of his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transsexual-and-transgender-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19144"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19164,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19144\/revisions\/19164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}