How Open Minded Are You ?

[Kate G]

Kia Ora,

Rehashed, from an old threat... that wasn't locked   

It's a common belief that  People who are open Minded:
•   Are more accepting of others and have fewer prejudices
•   Are more optimistic and make the most of life
•   Have less stress because they are more open to change
•   Have better problem solving skills
•   Want to learn more, therefore are more interesting

As a trans-person do you think the above statements hold truth ? Especially number one....

When it comes to people doing their own thing, I like to think I'm very open minded, but not so open minded that my brains fall out ! 

So how open minded are you ?

Happy Mindfulness 

Metta Zenda

As a trans person do I believe that the above statements hold true?  What is "accepting", perhaps if trans people were "accepting" they would conform to what was between their legs.  Wouldn't that seem like the accepting thing to do? "I see that between my legs is [X] and Society deems that people with [X] between their legs are [X] so I will accept that I am [X]?

In my experiences and observations, when we accept someone else's choices typically we don't care, we have little attachment to what they choose or don't choose, or we decide to accept [whatever] because we want that other person to be happy.  And really what about trans people?  Often times trans people believe that if a trans man or trans woman just wants to be known as a man or a woman that he or she is not accepting the truth that he or she is trans.  Whereas that man or woman tends to be confused as to why other trans people doesn't understand how important it is for himself or herself to accept that he or she is a man or a woman.

What I have been noticing over the years is that there is this tendency of people to have to determine right away if something is true or false, right or wrong, right or left, on or off, black or white.  It is like most people are only capable of binary thought and it is impossible for them to entertain an idea without either finding fault with it or determining it is correct.  In the United States we have two major political parties however since the death of John F. Kennedy all presidents, regardless of political affiliation are Hell bent on Collectivism.  And it seems as though that philosophical Collectivism is being applied to everything.  Everyone is a winner, better to send someone to the next grade than to ensure they have a good education.  Men are exactly the same thing as women.  Muslims are exactly the same as Christians.  Everyone is equal and no one is an individual but we accept everyone or the group consensus is that we need to accept everyone but no one is special, everyone is equal, everyone is the same.  Someone committed a criminal act with a weapon therefore we must outlaw all weapons because if he or she did it then you will probably do it too.

We have to stupid proof the entire world because Society is incapable of making good decisions. 

So my question is what is acceptance?  Do you accept that some people like to eat other people?  Honestly...  What I have found in my own life is that the people who were "accepting" of my transition...  The people for whom acceptance was something they consciously chose to do... They all accepted me as a man, as a man who wants to be a woman.  And in their minds I will always be a man who wants to be a woman and it doesn't matter that I had SRS in 2004 or that I have been living a female life now for roughly 14 years.  Because they accept me as a MAN who wants to be a woman.  Because their "acceptance" causes them to be incapable of experiencing me as a woman.

My Dad has been studying the Mexican form of Spanish off and on for some time now because he likes to think of himself as someone who accepts Mexicans.  My mother tends to have some issues with Mexicans which she occasionally expresses as a form of prejudice.  My Father is making a conscious effort to "accept" Mexicans whereas my Mother just says what she thinks.  But if my father really accepted Mexicans he wouldn't continue to see them as different and he wouldn't see them as a group of people who were dependent upon acceptance, would he?  If he really accepted Mexicans what would he accept them as?  Would he accept them for their differences or would he accept them for their similarities or would he just not care or would he accept them the way they are because he loves them?  Collectivism seems to originate out of a complete disregard for the individual.  I think the healthier acceptance is to realize that people are different and to consciously choose to "accept" them out of love and regard for their welfare.  To love someone is to do no harm.

Collectivism forgets that trans women are women and it forgets that trans men are men.  And most all of us are guilty.  Collectivism forgets that Mexicans are individuals and that every individual has varying needs.

When ordinary people accept me as a man who wants to be a woman it causes me harm.  And I have noticed that this happens with much more frequency around gays and lesbians who seem to project their own issues onto trans people and who use their own issues to understand the motivations of trans people.

Really the only way that we can love one another is by experiencing enlightenment because until we do even our desire to love one another will tend to fail or backfire.  I have had plenty of people who thought they were doing me a huge favor by accepting me as a MAN who wants to become a woman cause me to suffer.  Telling their friends that so and so isn't really a woman, he is a man because if other people didn't realize that I was a man then their "acceptance" of me would go unseen and unrewarded.

This is why in order to love one another we have to get out of ego space and into what is sometimes referred to as Christ Consciousness (not a specifically Christian terminology) but a terminology that begins to describe the heart or the heart chakra.  Ego space is my father creating a distinction between himself and Mexicans in order to allow him self the opportunity to accept them.  Ego space is people creating a distinction between me and real women in order to accept me as a trans woman.  Some distinctions are healthy, some are sick like Collectivism.  Deciding that everyone is equal (a buzz word for 'the same') in order to feel like everyone's needs are being met is sick because it ignores the individual out of laziness or ignorance/stupidity.  It is a process of reducing everyone down to being the same square peg so that people can feel like they are accepting others when painting everyone with the same broad brush and absolutely ignoring the individual and it is about the farthest thing from "acceptance" as anyone could ever possibly imagine.

Anyway... Christ Consciousness says that Love does no harm and that we should love one another as we love ourselves.  That means not "Accepting" someone in order to boost our own ego or to feel good about our self.  That means not reducing everyone to being a square peg in order to accept everyone and make everyone "equal" (i.e. the same).  And really it means that a lot of the stuff that we think is good for other people is actually serving another purpose other than the welfare of the individuals we are "accepting".

Collectivism is a way to make everyone a slave.  Women are equal to men therefore a nine year old girl should be able to carry an equally heavy burden as a male twice her age.  A 220 pound male bodybuilder should have a 70 pound female bodyguard because we are all equal. On guildwars 2 a tiny Asuran can jump just as high and run just as fast and fight just as hard as a giant Charr because we have to accept that everyone is equal at the cost of individualism.

Essentially we are all the same if you were to break each of us down into consciousness except even then some of us are more conscious than others.  But what makes us human is our human condition and everyone's condition is not the same.  My condition is that I am female and I have always been female but people who like to feel good about accepting me tend to feel that I am a man who wants to be a woman.  They can't see that I am a female who was born with a screwed up body because they believe that people are screwed up bodies.  In order for someone to "accept" me he or she would have to be capable of suspension of disbelief, in other words a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of acceptance and human beings to my knowledge are not capable of suspension of belief for this purpose.  If someone came up to you and told you that you are really just a brain in a tank that is wired up to a computer and that you are experiencing a virtual reality, would you believe them?

Anyway... I guess what I am attempting to say is that conscious acceptance of others requires that the one doing the accepting be fully conscious as in like some sort of Zen awakening.  Or you can rely on the heart chakra and Christ consciousness (heart consciousness) and ask the one you are accepting questions in order to better understand him or her.  The important thing is to accept others not for ideas because the ego is ideas, ideas about who we are and why we are so amazing for accepting so and so.  If you can't know everything then learn to understand with your heart.  As women and men who transition or are trans it isn't our accomplishments that allow us to be better able to understand and accept others, it is our suffering.  Suffering teaches us compassion and gives us empathy.

[Kate G]

Often times on the road to self discovery we apply labels to ourselves. It is like a process of narrowing down who we are, except labels tend to be fairly broad descriptions.  At some point we may determine that the label 'Trans' is a pretty good fit, but as we narrow ourselves down we may begin to find that the label has become too loose and it no longer fits comfortably.

There is something called Maslow's Pyramid which begins to explain the human condition pretty well.  I never learned about it in school, I got it from the Internet.  School barely taught me anything.



Most of us are struggling with the yellow and red layers on a daily basis, we are struggling just to survive and protect ourselves.  a "Trans" person experiences Maslow's Pyramid on a whole nuther level.  When the sexual identity of the individual needs to be established through transition he or she has real difficulty getting past the first three lower layers of the pyramid, though he or she may feel like he or she accomplished the entire pyramid but as a false representation of self or as a facade from behind a mask, never being recognized or experienced (screw acceptance) for who he or she really was or is.  To be accepted is more or less something that happens between the ears of the one doing the so-called accepting but to be experienced as one truly is, well that generates an interaction that combines the truth of two people rather than ignoring the reality of an individual for the purpose of intercourse (the non sexual variety, most of the time). 

And really that is important, acceptance is something that tends to happen between the ears of the one doing the accepting and typically to say to someone that you accept them can be pretty insulting.  As if anyone needs your acceptance, how dare you Sir or Madame!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjqsB1huDxg&feature=player_detailpage#t=694
Bad Question #11 i.e, "I "accept" you as a woman." 

I would much rather be experienced as a woman than accepted as a woman, especially when that acceptance primarily translates into lip service rather than actions.  When was the last time you made a conscious effort to accept a woman as a woman or a man as a man and if you did were you projecting your own needs onto them because you identified with them as trans or were you experiencing them as an individual female or male?  Usually acceptance amounts to an idea between the ears of the one doing the supposed acceptance but really acceptance is recognizing that someone else is different which tends to generate exception and interferes with one's ability to interact with another person normally. 

Which further illustrates the point I am trying to make that loving other people is way better than this supposed acceptance thing.  Love incorporates the individual whereas acceptance in my experience tends to look past the individual.  And the suffering that I had to experience as a woman who needed to transition (and the suffering I continue to experience) can either make me bitter and mean or cause me to become empathetic towards others.  Today I choose love.


As to whether someone is more open-minded or not I feel that this question sort of creates a false sense of reality, because whether or not we experience someone as being open-minded tends to be a judgment on our part.  And how can we be open-minded if we experience others upon the basis of a personal judgment? Does my personal judgment equal open-mindedness on my part?  If I am failing in my open-mindedness how capable am I of determining whether someone else is open-minded or not? 

It is believed by many that parallel worlds exist one upon another but that each parallel world exists at a different frequency.  I believe it was Ghandi who said, "If you want to change the world, change yourself."  In my own personal experience transition is a means to experience this on a profound level.  Adapting a famous quote by Yogi Berra I get, "Ninety percent of transition is half mental."  Transition is like Maslow's Pyramid, in the beginning we are just seeking to survive and protect ourselves and we don't take the upper layers of the pyramid into perspective, because a house is built from the ground up, a journey starts at the beginning, not the end.

So what if what we believe creates the world around us.  I would submit that it does.  And that you don't change other people by changing other people, you change other people by changing yourself.  It is Psychologically, Scientifically true that as human beings we tend to hate in others what we recognize from ourselves.  Spiritual people have been telling us for years that at our core we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, that basically we are all consciousness and that we are one.  People don't believe in reality as it is, people believe in their ideas about what they think reality is. The ego isn't pride, the ego isn't thinking you are better than you are.  The ego is your ideas.

The Christ said that if you want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven that you have to be as little children.  Little children have little egos.  Little children therefore tend to experience the world as it is rather than their ideas about the world.  The older a person is typically, the less he or she experiences the world as it is and the more he or she experiences his or her accumulated and reinforced ideas about what they world is. Little children tend to live outside of themselves whereas older people tend to live between their ears, experiencing life as preconceived notions and prejudice.  This is why little children experience acceptance as love but it is why adults experience acceptance as an idea.

Children may not always say things you want to hear but children experience the world as it is.  Do you want to go around saying the darnedest things or is love a better bandaid than open-mindedness?  But really, you can change worlds by changing your frequency.  You will inhabit the parallel universe that you are in tune with.  So for the sake of open-mindedness it is imperative that you begin to realize that whatever you believe or think about, you will get more of.  If you believe in a half empty cup then you will live in an world of empty cups.  It sounds trivial or like a surface experience but I assure you, it runs all the way to the core and fills every corner given time.  The Christ said that he was not of this world but that he came here to save us so that we could enter into the Kingdom of Heaven which he said was not up in the sky somewhere but already existed here on earth.  Step out of binary think if you can and begin to realize that everything is connected.

[Danielle Emmalee]

I'm extremely open minded but also very skeptical.  Some people might think that open minded is the opposite of skeptical.  In my mind its not and you can be open minded and skeptical.  Open minded doesn't mean believing everything, it just means that you are receptive to new ideas, not that you will accept them, just that you will not reject them.  I believe ANYTHING is possible as long as it is logically possible(in the purest sense of logic, meaning as long as you aren't saying that A=B and A<>B at the same time), for example it is logically possible that the empty jar of peanut butter in my room is God.  Its not reasonable or probable but it does make sense using first order logic, therefore it's possible.  My level of belief that something may be true is relative to the probability that it is true.  Of course that probability is all in my head and based on inherently flawed observations using a brain that has remained unproven to be perfect in its reasoning.  I'm choosing to live my life mostly believing that my brain has the ability to interpret life around me correctly.  That in itself could end up being possibly the most dangerous thing I could choose to do. 

There is one thing on that list of attributes of open minded people that I don't agree with and that's optimism.  It doesn't have anything to do with how open you are.  You can be extremely closed minded and extremely optimistic and you can be completely open minded and extremely pessimistic.  In fact if you look at some of the more closed minded people in the world (people that are a part of certain organized religions) they tend to be really optimistic, sometimes overly optimistic.  Someone who is more open-minded may end up being extremely pessimistic about life because its entirely possible that there is no meaning to life, it might not even be real, etc

Just my $0.02

[Kate G]

Just so people know, I edited my post fifty thousand times fifty one thousand times and I just finished my last edit.  And perhaps it's a little ironic that Maslow's Pyramid is often expressed as a rainbow triangle 



Also the peak of Maslow's pyramid is Self Actualization and men and women who transition tend to be the most self-actualized people on the planet.