Wrong body def 1 & 2
But I've felt that all my life. Wrong body, wrong family, wrong century, wrong country.
— Philip Pullman (@PhilipPullman) February 2, 2019
No, I don’t think so, I think those are two different things. Glinner means literal “born into the wrong body” and I think that’s not what Pullman means. I think Pullman is talking about not feeling entirely at home in one’s circumstances, and longing for different ones – a kind of homesickness, it can be, or a feeling of other possibilities and wishing one could live them. I think lots of us or maybe most of us have at least glimpses of that. But the current orthodoxy about being “born in the wrong body” is very literal, and backed up with menaces. It’s the opposite of imaginative, and it also tends strongly toward narcissism.
And it’s so much like religion it’s frightening. “Disagree with our ‘reality’ and we’ll destroy you.”
Good grief, at times in mylife, especially when young, I so badly wanted a different body, a close and supportive family and to live in the idealised movie reality of earlier heroic times *. I have even had flashes of wanting to live in different lands. None of that has a god damn thing to do with being trans.
* funny, like most people I suspect, such dreams don’t involve being a serf and living a brief brutal life of poverty, grinding work, servitude, disease and victimisation.
But Rob, it’s just like “Upstairs, Downstairs,” but with a slightly higher body count.
I have a vague memory of hearing a comedy sketch about someone visiting a psychic to find out about their past lives, and being given a long list of “peasant, peasant, peasant, peasant, oooh, bit of change, serf! Peasant” etc. Needless to say, the client was not thrilled.
Its the smug coopting of every resistance to gender-roles as ‘trans.’ Someone wrote about realizing:
‘I wasn’t a boy, I was a feminist.’
I’m a man who dislikes patriarchy. That doesn’t make me ‘really’ a woman, or ‘really’ gay. It just makes me uncomfortable a lot of the time.
If Pullman thinks about it though…
I’d love to be 6 feet tall, but if I put it on my driver’s license, it’d be a lie.
If you feel you’re born in the wrong family, that doesn’t mean you can demand to join the family across the street. If you feel you’d be happier in the 19th century, sure dress and furnish your home however you’d like, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to play into the fantasy.
Really of the things he listed, the only one you can change is your country, and still, you wouldn’t have been raised there. The natives are going to treat you a little differently.
When I was in my pre-teens, and was reading a lot of British literature, I just knew I was born in the wrong place/time. I related to the stories of foggy days and the heath and the roaring fires. But I’m not British, and saying I am will not make me so.
At one point, I wanted to be an Amazon, because they seemed so, so cool. But I wasn’t.
Did I ever think I might want to be a boy? Only when I wanted to do things I was told I couldn’t do because they were “boy” things. I would have been happier in Chemistry than in Home Ec, but I never assumed that made me a boy. I would have been happier not doing dishes than I was doing dishes, but that didn’t mean I was a boy. That just meant I wanted girls to be able to goof off and read after dinner like my brothers could. I was a girl, I just wanted to do things that were forbidden to me because I was not born with a penis.
Catwhisperer, that sketch (I vaguely recall something similar, possibly Monty Python) is the exact opposite of most ‘reincarnation’ stories as discovered through hypnotic regression. Very few people ‘recall’ being peasants, being instead the reincarnated souls of great leaders, royalty, or other historically important people. I’ve read of at least a dozen ‘Cleopatras’, which is made all rhe more impressive as many of those claimants were alive at the same time.
AoS: Haha, strangely enough, I think Cleopatra was who the client in my version of this sketch felt “a strange affinity” with, hint hint. At which point I think she was told that she had in fact been a succession of slaves during Cleopatra’s time.
I’ve met a few people who’ve done past life regressions, and they all seem to have been ‘ordinary people’ in whatever culture in the past that they found/imagined themselves in. It’s interesting for them to ask themselves ‘what am I trying to communicate to myself by imagining I was a, say, Native American boy watching his village burning down?’
I think people may be putting their thumbs on the scale a bit when playing the ‘what would my life have been if I were in the past?’ I mean, if I’m not a peasant now, like most people are now, why would I be a peasant then? Pretty much everyone we know who asks and answers that question would be in the top 1% of world incomes (or at the very least top 5%).
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp
If I were living in, say, medieval Europe as someone in the same social class I’m in now I guess I’d be an educated nun; I think I could probably cope with that.
guest, I would possibly have been a peasant, since I was born into a much lower place than I am now. I suppose my personal history might have suggested that I could have pulled myself out, but I doubt it, especially if I were a woman then (and why wouldn’t I be? Why do people imagine they were the opposite sex in a past life, when they seem to believe that sexual characteristics are immutable?).
I would likely have been a nun, too, because I am a second daughter. That was usually the fate of second daughters. I don’t think I could have handled that, because I hate religion, and because the lives of nuns back then were much more restrictive than they are now.