Good News about Oppression
The Good news and the bad news is that you are a social construct.
I just listened to a song. The lyrics are:
Whatever you want me to be I’ll be/
I’ll be anything for you.
I thought, “I’ve never heard a person who was socialized as Male say a thing like that. But people who were socialized Female sing that song a lot.”
This sentiment is a great example of the construct of “woman” in the gender binary.
I have thought things like that myself; even taking pride in just how malleable and flexible I could be as I transformed and reduced myself into what I thought someone wanted.
So, the bad news is we’ve been socialized to be a construct. Which means we’re not being ourselves.
The good news is, if human beings can be constructed, in any moment that we don’t like what was built, we can construct something, or someone, new.
We are fluid and switchy like that. ;)
The goal of sanism and transphobia is to convince us that we are not fluid and not transformable. To convince us that we are rigid and stable by convincing us we ARE the false binaries, which are rigid and stable. The Paradigm of Oppression endlessly warns us of the dangers that lie outside the walls of our prison.
Don’t be crazy. Don’t be different. Don’t evolve.
But the view of ourselves we hold today, is simply the view of ourselves filtered through the lens of reality that the (current) Group of People With The Most Privilege declares is true.
In a different era, when the Group of People With The Most Authority held a different worldview, we would have been constructed to be different sorts of people. If we go back far enough, we would reach the point when human beings were constructed by the aliveness of life, not by society at all. We would have evolved according to the most natural and authentic path for each of us. In contrast, today we are constructed to be something that serves a complex matrix of power dynamics based on false binaries.
The way out is to connect to our aliveness and build a relationship with this truest, primal, wise, divine part of us. Our aliveness is the part of us that is connected to the Aliveness of life which holds a wider perspective. Our aliveness knows exactly what we need next on our path to liberation.
Unleashing our aliveness isn’t hard, it’s just scary. It’s only scary because we have been taught Aliveness is dangerous.
But being dead when you are alive is the danger.
But Aliveness is not as dangerous as we’ve just been taught it is. Systems of oppression will try to punish you for being alive, but a human social and financial system is so much weaker than the Aliveness of Life. I have chosen to only ever be more alive in the face of danger.
If you choose Aliveness, you cannot be stopped; even in death.
Poem Playlist: The Dangers of Being Dead When You Are Alive
