Non-Binary Gender Boy On BBC

Interesting to view from a mechanism standpoint:

I’m not a boy.

I thought I was a boy, because I’m not entirely a girl. We tried that for a bit, and I thought: “No, this is not right.”

Then we did some research and we found the word is gender non-binary… and it really works, it’s just me.

I don’t know what age I was when I identified that I wasn’t feeling right.

Actually I told my teacher first. I got really frustrated because I asked why none of the girls got boys’ parts in a play that we were doing. It wasn’t right.

I pulled her over and said: “I’m not a girl.”

She didn’t think I was lying. But because it’s not very common at all, I don’t think she entirely thought that was how I was feeling.

I brought up the conversation with mum. I knew that mum would be totally supportive, but because I didn’t know if this was actually how I was feeling, it felt like I should wait until I was sure. But then I didn’t think that would do any good either.

I was quite nervous.

Mum was completely on board. Totally interested.

I encourage you to try and read the article, to gain a greater understanding of what your amygdala feels like when it is firing off, and how little things like words on a computer screen can make it trip. I made it halfway through the article, and I wanted to put on some Rob Zombie and begin head-banging – to either physically shake what I had read out of my skull, or knock myself out into a blissfully unconscious state.

I assume those who are programmed for K-selection are also programmed to purge such insanity out of their group’s ranks to improve survivability. All I know is I cannot take that. It is weirdly unsettling.

Notice, there are downsides to each gender that could be seen as negative. Women lack the force and power to physically subdue enemies, meaning they have to adapt to a certain level of powerlessness. Men are expected to be self-reliant, meaning they must endure a certain amount of threat and hardship as they traverse life.

That is just on the surface, but each gender will have many aspects which appeal, and those which leave amygdalae tweaked – if you think about them.

Those of us with functional amygdalae never do. We are what we are, and the rest never touches our radar. I have never wished I was prettier in an artistic sense, or that guys would hold doors open for me and defend me in fights, or so on. But as amygdalae become less stress-adapted, they become increasingly sensitive to the most subtle of stresses, and suddenly each insignificant gender-related negative becomes an out-sized abomination, convincing the afflicted that they could not possibly be meant to be the gender they were born as.

My own belief is that characters like Bruce Jenner derive a relaxation of anxiety by slipping into the role of a woman who is beyond conflict, because she is a woman. When he adopts that role, a small conflict detecting section of his brain shuts off, and he feels relaxed and safe. As a man, he feels a need to be defensive, and that is what is freaking him out.

In his head he thinks he feels better as a woman because he was meant to be a woman, but it is really just tripping some neural circuits that shut off the little part of the brain that produces cognitive discomfort. That may be why so many transgenders who go the full surgical route are ultimately disappointed – their problems had nothing to do with gender. They were simply hacking perceptions of conflict, or some other amygdala-stimulant, inside the amygdala. Having done that by playing female, they had gotten as much relief as they could, so the additional step of surgery just created more amygdala angst about something else.

There is probably an additional element of the reversal of sexual dimorphism and sex-specific behaviors that is inherent to the switch between r and K-selection, but I would view it mostly through the prism of amygdala for simplicity. These things wouldn’t happen if you had grown up fending off Hordes and seeing friends killed in battle.

Humans were made to be molded by stress, hardship and violence, in a world where you fought to survive. Once all of that was removed from the environment, brains began to malform, and the varieties of misery, unhappiness, and insanity that resulted know no bounds.