A fiction is sure is!!
Another thing that definitely belongs in there with the "fiction" is gender, which is exactly what the controversy with my friend is about who claims that "chromosomes determine your gender and you are that gender," irrevocably. This is so wrong on so many levels, obviously - well, at least to me it couldn't possibly be more obvious, and I'm absolutely puzzled how it can be less than obvious to my friend, especially since there's been other confrontations involving racism in the past in which I've always made clear I won't condone such bullshit.
(The only times I'm all for "white power" is when it's really Great White power!)
I'm certainly not one of those who get easily offended or "butthurt", and I'm tolerant of people having very different opinions. But what startles me is that I've had this friend for nearly 10 years, we've even talked on the phone so she has heard my less-than-feminine voice, my voice which is this way because I've taken the testosterone injections even longer than 10 years, these injections which have been the only thing to save me from the verge of suicide back then in my more than troubled teenage when I despised my then weak and wimpy body more than words could ever tell.
Back to the baby meme - yes, we all have been thrown into this,born into these vessels with minds like perfectly blank pages at birth, to be filled with anything that starts pouring into them from then on, unceasingly. And it's perfectly normal to believe whatever your are told when you're a young child. Children have no concept of truth and untruth until they are at least about 5 years old, and then it's only the beginning.
Name, religion, nationality... I've disowned all of these things and more. I don't have a true name for myself except "Satan's warrior", and that's not a name, but that's the one, truest thing I feel I am. "Diana" isn't really my name... I go by that name, yes, but how can it be "mine" if thousands or millions of other people on Earth share the same name?!
"Diana" says absolutely nothing about who I am. I don't know who I am, and I'm here to find it out. "Warrior", "Satan's warrior", at least that says something. Including the fact that I replaced the religion I was born into with one of my own choice - with the faith in a God of rebellion, in the struggle for freedom and quest for truth, and in these efforts I see it as a very fundamental step to see through all these pseudo-truth pushed upon me by others.
It was hard to sort out, especially this gender issue. I certainly don't want to be a man - but back as a teen that's what I thought I wanted, because the common people make you believe there were only those two alternatives, and I knew I didn't want to be a woman. And I still don't. I absolutely don't care for the parts that make me female, I've never liked them and I usually ignore them. Well, I've had breast reduction surgery, and the rest I ignore.
I think in a strange way it even makes it easier for me than it is for others to see through the delusion - I've never identified very much with my body. I never hated myself, I only hated my body - I strictly distinguished between the two; it was my adverse circumstances that taught me to do this.
Name, religion, nationality, race; all these things are handed to you by your family, and as far as I'm concerned I have no family; I disowned them along with these things more than they've ever disowned me, they would have never understood anything, they frankly weren't very bright.
As I see it, the body I currently inhabit is borrowed from their genetic material, I'm living in it, but that has little to do with who I am except for the life experience I've had in it.
Amid all the adversity, it may have been these circumstances that forced me to keep questioning in ways as some smart children will but that most adults eventually cease to do, and to their detriment. They lose the ability to see the forest for all the trees.
A while ago the famous physicist Dr. Brian Greene posted on Facebook some new findings about the planet Pluto, in which he also confessed that he will continually regard Pluto as a planet indeed. Some of the comments on the post criticized this view as "unscientific", or even as "dismissing science in favor of a personal belief", which struck me as most ludicrous and I felt compelled to add my own comment, as follows:
"Oh dear. This has NOTHING to do with either science, truth, or personal belief. WHY is Pluto either a planet or not a planet? Because of arbitrary classification! It's as if I'm saying, "even when everyone else says a week has 7 days, to me a week has 10 days." I would be neither right nor wrong because a week has been made up, it doesn't correspond to any cycle in nature. If I said that to me a year had either more or fewer days than 365 I'd either be wrong or I'd have to move to a planet where my chosen amount of days in a year was true. Because a year is one full orbit of a planet around its star, and one day is one full revolution of the planet around its axis. The duration of a year or a day can be objectively measured. But the duration of a week, an hour, a minute, or which day is Christmas, have all been made up by humans and therefore can't be true or false, they're purely a matter of consensus, nothing else. Same goes for Pluto being a planet or not. And to me it always will be a planet as well, because that's what I learned when I was ~5 years old and I see no logical reason to revise it. It's like using either the Fahrenheit or Celsius (or Kelvin) scale for temperature, one can prefer one or another but none of them are wrong."
That's how it is - conventions, conventions. In case you wondered, the 360 degrees naturally also fall into this category. Have you ever wondered why a circle has 360 degrees? If not then you really should - just another convention!
I'm not saying conventions are always necessarily bad, in the contrary, they often prove indispensable for effective communication. Errors in translations can lead to grave misunderstandings, and confusion about the use of the metric system vs English units can cause the very expensive loss of a spacecraft.
Still it should be kept in mind that they are but conventions, but in this digital age the fallacy to adopt a binary way of thinking, just as like a computer system, may come easily. Only a while ago I chanced upon a video on the subject of consciousness in which this was brought up, and the lecturer related that in some other cultures people use more categories than only "true or false", that in addition to these two something can as well be either neither true nor false or both true and false. I imagine it might be pretty difficult sometimes to distinguish between the latter two... but right now I can't think of any examples nor will I bother to even try and find back that video, as it's already pretty late at night here in Germany.
Instead I'll ask you this question: How many colors are there in a black and white photograph?
Some people will say, "that's easy, it's called black and white, that already tells you how many: there is black and there is white, so it's two colors!"
Someone else will say, "but that's bullshit, you can see that most of the picture is neither black nor white but a shade of gray, and there's an uncountable number of shades, so there's an infinite number of colors in the photo."
The next person may agree for the most part but says, "ok, but humans can't distinguish an infinite number of colors, let alone of only shades of gray. My Photoshop program has 20 shades of gray in the default palette, and even in those the difference between one nuance and the next is barely perceptible to me, so I'll say there are about 20 colors in it."
Another one comes along and say, "but that's all bullshit - black and white are not even colors, so there are no colors at all in a black and white photograph!"
That's four different answers to a simple question, and I don't think any of them is true or false. Pick one that you agree most with, or find your own. But keep an open mind to different options... the photographer might have had a different number of colors in mind.
And when it comes to gender there certainly is much more than only black or white.
