All violence exist on this spectrum, and at such all violence threatens, to us, the structure that keeps us toghether. So while Raymond calls it "false transcendence," she has a too narrow, or poor, understanding of what transendence is, and what the point of trancendant moments are. She recognize it as trancendence, but calls it "false transcendence," because it's "sought where only cyclic and static being can be found." But isn't sex a transcendent act? If I punch a guy, and he bleeds, I made a violent transgression; if I punch him and he dies, I just transitioned that dude into a new life stage, the most fundamental shift we will ever experience. Blood always marks transition in human cultures, but it's used just as often to transition into the transcendant place as out of it. The jewish high priest enters the holies of holies, but he always leaves and comes back to the profane world. There's no human ritual that makes us Whinnie the Pooh into the fifth dimension never to return. Trancendent rituals are used just as often to mark a transition as it is for the goal of trancendence itself. Humans, dis-continouous, are bad at understanding continuity. (This is the classic "how many genders are there" problem, because humans, idiots, fail to see the nonduality between male-female. Saying there's a "nonduality" between male and female is not saying gender is fake, that's 4d chess, we're trying to figure out the structure of the universe, keep up) The universe is infinte, i.e. there's infinite points in it, i.e., it's one. (Yes Janice Raymond, yes Michael Knowles, you wanted to discuss metaphysics, let's go, tits out, books open, let's figure out what a woman is.)

All people go through these profane/sacred moments in their life, but with the lack of gender-transition rituals, negative rituals seem to emerge organically. Serano writes about how sex-reassignment surgeons would advice their patients to leave their families and children after their transition; in Sweden, trans people were chemically castrated until 2007 (cruel, but fascinating in the context of holy people as eunuchs and celibates, a human tendency living on to less than a decade ago.)

Listened to these quotes: to erase difference is to erase humanity. These are existential fears about what constitutes me, about the structures needed to uphold society. They are fears, of death. But Adam did not say, ... he said "this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." There's differention, but unity. The one does not exist within the other, even within individuals. Most christians are yet to accept that in the next life they shall be, sex-wise, "like angels in heaven." More are yet to accept that after death, they will most likely not be just like they are now, but on a cloud. I think the reason even Roman Catholics are less comfortable talking about purgatory that heaven and hell, is because purgatory implies transition, and transition is scary and boundary breaking. It's the surgeons knife intruding on our skin. I think the over-economical theology of purgatory where indulgences can be weighed in quantity of time, is another way of un-making the transitionary reality of death, the movement, the sacred thing. "Grandma is in heaven now" implies a safe transition, one that does not scare children, because Grandma's Ego is intact behind the pearly gates. In this version of reality, gran never trancended anything, she never reached outside herself, she never escaped her own subject, she's fine, actually. It's a geographical shift, not an existential one. It implies non-death. "Grandma is suffering in purgatory right now for the debt of her sins," is scarier, because implies grandma might need to change, suffer, to enjoy eternal communion with the Divine and unity with existence.

It implies that some parts of grandma that wanted to go to heaven, maybe didn't go to heaven at all, but burnt away, rotted, disappeared. It implies that maybe this "I" never will go to heaven, but rather the "You" that calls out from inside me, and that calls out to me from outside. When two become one, the individual parts disappear. "It would be better to enter the kingdom of heaven with only one hand than go into hell with two hands." It implies that when I die I (gasp) die. Maybe what goes to heaven is that point were the surgeons knife meets my bones, maybe the point were my finger reaches out and the Divine reaches out for me, maybe it's the moments that too creative for mundane society, authorative notebooks, and rational bores. Maybe our fears about men and women are linked to a secular inability to create rituals that can keep neccessary structures intact but disable them when we need to - maybe it's linked to our inability to die, our inability to suffer.

I wanted to write this as a sort of response to the over-systemizing I see all the time everywhere, that's deveolped to such a good, self-affirming system with it's own points of self-affirming ways of thinking, that might seem niche but is so common in certain online spaces (john money lore, teenage girl mutilation, autogynophilia, delusion, aristotailian metaphysics,) that it's almost running out of oxygen. And it's annoying to see this sophism win debates just because the other side is someone who's brave enough to be honest and say they don't have all the answers, only to then be accused of being the ideologist, when in actuality they're just wise enough to accept exceptions, embrace emptiness, live intuitively, observe, vibe.∎