Eternal Growth

Gender identity is a very fundamental aspect of the personal understanding of and relationship to the self that develops very early in age (before sexuality) in the physical structures of the brain, and cannot be affected by social/cultural factors or attempts at reparative therapy. Once formed, it will remain consistent throughout a person's life. One of many studies from the literature I quickly found: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/09513590400018231 "In the human brain, structural differences have been described that seem to be related to gender identity and sexual orientation." The earliest (from mid 90s) study on the physical brain structures behind gender identity as it relates to transsexuality: https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/files/515234/15106_285_swaab.pdf "Here we show that the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminals (BSTc), a brain area that is essential for sexual behaviour, is larger in men than in women. A female-sized BSTc was found in male-to-female transsexuals. The size of BSTc was not influenced by sex hormones in adulthood and was independent of sexual orientation." Transsexuality (which is a narrower category than "transgender", a term which includes other forms of gender variance, some of which may well be influenced by social factors) is a very rare condition in which an individual's gender identity - hence the neurological structures underlying it - are not consistent with other physical manifestations of sexual dimorphism that the individual has.

Without impositions of control. Not boundaries that follow from the parent's own self-ownership or their responsibility for the child, but anything arbitrarily restricting the child's independent development and will.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-raise-a-creative-child-step-one-back-off.html Seems pretty well-aligned with the message of peaceful parenting. Controlling parenting will in the best case just create an effective approval-seeking robot. Parenting without rules will lead to the development of independent thinkers. A similar argument was advanced back in this podcast:

I empathise with your situation. And I feel very curious to know more about it, not personally being from Quebec (or working in the healthcare field) and having trouble fully relating to what it would be like to live in a culture as misandrist as the one you describe. What was it like feeling as though you had to change your sex just to "fit in"? What were you experiencing as a guy and feared if you continued being one? I would also like to be the person in this thread who points out that the OP’s experience, while fully valid and important to bring to light in its own right as an experience, is not representative and to remind those whose intuition is to be skeptical towards trans people of the existence of confirmation bias - i.e. focusing on the minority of evidence supporting your viewpoint while disregarding the majority that does not. In particular, being trans typically (in some parts of the world less so than in the past, but still to a significant extent even in those) means that a person fits into mainstream society much less, and cultural expectations are not a motivating factor for transition (except in the OP's highly unusual and interesting case).

That's two mentions of Python, which seems like it'd be an ideal language for the project. Does anyone have any further thoughts on the native application vs. website decision? Python could be used for both. If making a native application, there are a lot of options for making it with a graphical interface in Python e.g. PyQt (which can also do things like desktop notifications to remind users to do stem completion): https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming Maybe we could get a Skype group chat and github repository open for those who are interested?

A very easy way to implement this (possibly just as first prototype) that would work on windows/mac/linux desktops and laptops would be to make a text-based native application, which is really all that is necessary for completing sentences. A graphical interface is something that could be added on top later. If made in this way, storage would be local, which would be private/confidential relative to storing it on a website, though there are ways to add secure remote storage as a later feature too. I've made a mock-up (~10 lines of code, named "sencom" after sentence completion) below of what it could be like. You would click the icon, and then a terminal window would open with the sentence stem there for you to complete. By typing in other text commands you could see the completions from previous days, add new stems, etc. I'm not sure if this is at all similar to what you had in mind, if the ability to use it across devices would be an essential (and more important than privacy) feature in your eyes, or if I'm going completely down my own path here. Let me know.

I love this idea! (And like the above poster it's similar to a set of ideas I've had as well.) I'd be very happy to contribute to the development process. My concern with this being a website is the privacy side. I personally might not want months or years of my stem endings to be stored on somebody's servers (where they are vulnerable to all kinds of potential attacks and snooping), and the knowledge that privacy isn't in my hands might censor some of the things I write, whereas stem completion is properly supposed to involve absolutely the first thing that comes to mind. Stem completion is essentially a form of self-therapy, and confidentiality in therapy is really important. It still might be possible to maintain privacy and have a website by either 1) using the local web storage API (which would come at the cost of being unable to read sentences completions made on another device) or 2) using client-side javascript encryption (which is not the easiest nor most problem-free process). From a privacy standpoint a single-device application that uses local storage might be preferable. Would you be using a public domain license? (It seems to me to be the only software "license" compatible with voluntaryism).

Hasty generalisation fallacy. Furthermore, if you're against "deviant and alternative lifestyles" (the horror!), why are you posting on a website that is specifically devoted to "personal and political freedom"? There are libertarian LGBT people who have no interest in anti-discrimination laws or "free stuff". Socialism and LGBT equality under the law are completely separate issues.

Child abuse Children born in Russia are abused by adults whenever they deviate from imposed ideas about gender. They internalise this abuse and become homophobic, transphobic etc. adults.

Wow, thank you. In this particular area I hadn’t made that connection: when I am self-attacking about a social situation, it’s still fundamentally my FOO who are doing that attacking. I am just doing it on their behalf. Now that I’ve made that connection whenever I am being attacked it’s going to be far easier to feel healthy anger and put a quick end to it. I think something else is going on here also. What my FOO modelled was having no standards about their behaviour at all. Perfectionism and very high standards is something I developed as a response in order to be nothing like them (which in many ways has been valuable, but is still the "defiance of abuses but still directly for the sake of abusers" dysfunctional dynamic). In that sense, I was experiencing myself as being responsible for the perfectionism… But really I see now that it is something caused by them and their failure to have and model reasonable, reality-oriented standards, which is what I really need now and needed as a child also.

Does anybody have any experience with, thoughts on or advice regarding productive ways to deal with self-consciousness? In general being self-aware is a great thing, the more self-aware one is, and its is what makes intimacy possible. To have no capacity for self-critique is to be a psychopath. However, what I am talking about here is a particular manifestation of self-awareness that takes the form of obsessively and involuntarily thinking about previous social interactions and every way in which I might have said the wrong thing, presented myself or been perceived in an undesirable way, or been awkward. It’s a form of self-attack that goes beyond productive self-reflection and concern for how one affects others and can paralyse further attempts at self-expression in social situations. It's also destructive to real intimacy, as doesn't involve and actually stands in the way of finding out what the other person's actual experience was. I’ve realised that I’ve been far more sensitive to this throughout my life than I thought and that it has been a significant influence on my social behaviour since very young. It seems that self-consciousness can affect a person’s behaviour in one of two ways (if it is accepted and acted upon, which when emotionally overwhelming and seemingly unstoppable can be difficult not to): either they self-erase through agreeability and people pleasing, sacrificing any individual identity they might have so they can glide through social situations without their self being at risk, or they withdraw and participate less in social interactions than they might otherwise have, which at least preserves the self, if only in hiding. The above dichotomy is a matter of choosing whether to forgo including yourself in other peoples’ lives or to forgo including other people in yours. Ideally, one would be able to have both yourself and other people: the most functional state would seem to be one where one could interact freely and confidently with others without feeling any need to hide or obscure oneself, one’s thoughts, feelings and identity in the process. Early childhood experiences of being attacked for self-expression would definitely seem to be related. What would be the kind of self-work that a person could do to develop a more functional self-awareness that is suited to the voluntaristic adult world?

Wow, I once had an idea for something like this which gave different parts of speech (e.g. noun phrases) a different colour to help reading, turning a block of words into something where your eyes can quickly move to the most relevant parts. It's powerful that you can achieve a similar effect just with spacing. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome Sindre! That's an ACE test result with 4 points too many and deepest sympathies for all of the experiences that counted under that. Really awesome to hear how you've discovered FDR and already benefited in your personal life.

Hi there Welcome to the boards. It might be possible to find a nice girl out of the 3,500,000,000+ on the planet. A man who was completely indifferent to women would not bother to call himself MGTOW.

Once a person accepts the principle "something is true because I have a deeply rooted belief that it is true", or the principle "something is true because I wish it so", how can I know where they will stop? Once they've accepted those principles, I actually begin to hope they have as little integrity and consistency as possible. But it is precisely the values that my partner holds, and his demonstrated integrity to them, that provide me an assurance of sustainable virtue within a relationship. Children spend more time in government schools than in church, and so the latter point about statheists being more resistant to reason than modern religious people is unsurprising. For the sake of practicality I'd still engage in value-for-value interactions with statheists (and religious people), but not take one as partner.