Mile-End Six

This is the 6th blog post about me, a not so passable but still very sexy mature transsexual woman wandering in the streets of Montréal, Québec after landing in a shitty small room in a 65 room building following an eviction for renovations...

and after spending most time after transition locked away inside the apartment where I lived since 2015 and that I had to leave in a rush on July 5, 2021. It's not necessarily written in a chronological order, and I might (so it seems) be repeating myself. Excuse my English: not my 1st language.

 Against the grain

I cannot think freely, no human being can think freely at any time.

There are presets in my brain, or any human brain, that were passed along by genetics, firstly very basic things to ensure I will flee or fight if facing threat, to ensure I will be thirsty if I get dehydrated, hungry… I will crave sex to insure reproduction, etc.

I can work on not eating even if I’m hungry, same for sex, thirst, any of these basic presets transmitted to us just like to any mammals, but these mechanisms in my brain remain nonetheless. It’s a good part of what a human being is: we breathe, our heart beat… we don’t have to think about it.

The need to socialize is another preset that was transmitted to us by genetics, and the ancestors developed culture to respond to that basic need, or both evolved in parallel.

I met many people in my life, even many professionals like my psychologist, doctors… who told me to fight, that life is tough and that one has got to fight… and that this was the essential part of the human being: its capacity to fight.

Now come on! Fighting isn’t at all one of Homo Sapiens’ skills. Au contraire, it’s the fact that they are social, even with strangers, with other species (of hominidae and others like the wolf), that they bred with them in the past, and it’s the fact that communitarianism was at the center of the life of Homo Sapiens that made us, first survive, then thrive, certainly not fighting. Yes they had to fight big prey, but they did it in groups, and without that culture of being together, sharing, helping, language, we wouldn’t be here today, because first, we wouldn’t have been able to kill big prey, therefore our brain wouldn’t have developed, and so on.

War was only part of hominidae for about 10,000 years, most of our existence was spent without any knowledge even of war. War brings nothing good to humans, nothing at all (and Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens did not fight one another, not at all: they bred together, that’s what they did, just like the Natives of America welcomed the European newcomers and offered them their daughters. They did! Encrypted in our brain is also the need to mix the genes, and that’s one point where human cultures have gone wrong since a couple thousand years).

Fighting is not the essence of humans, more resilience, adaptation and communitarianism.

So what I’m saying is that the need to socialize is one of the most important parts of Homo Sapiens. Culture was developed around that need.

And therefore, culture is a very important part of Homo Sapiens, but none of it, none at all, zero, nada is transmitted by genes to the next generation.

It is learned, all of it. Transmitted by the peers, by the elders, tradition… But still, it’s a very, very important part of Homo Sapiens, an imaginary thing (one cannot touch culture per say, traditions… it’s not real, it’s invented by the human brain), transmitted by peers and learned, and becoming so strong that it feels like the truth… THE truth; this particular culture of one group of humans feels to them as if it must have been dictated by a superior form of intelligence.

So then humans invented God.

All invented, it’s not real, it’s not palpable, it… doesn’t exist. Just in our mind. Like the language… Humans feel as though their language, their culture was always like how it is here and now, but it’s not the case, it evolved by adding up many little presets in the mind of these humans.

Presets, yes, just like the ones transmitted by the genes. Culture has become so strong, so important for humans that it has become as important for human’s survival as the basic needs presets, hunger, thirst...

All this to say that it’s impossible for humans to go very far, thrive and evolve if they don’t answer those basic needs, all of them.

It’s even impossible for them to think completely outside culture, or another, or a new one, culture there needs to be. Because simply, without culture, we go back a couple million years, and back then, hominids weren’t very much able to think, they were then similar to chimps today.

Therefore, therefore... it’s impossible to think outside these learned presets just as it is impossible to stop responding to the basic needs like hunger and thirst.

I can adopt a new culture, invent a new one, but at the base, it’s very difficult to overcome what was learned in childhood, and that is another preset we live with: what was learned before age 8 remains encrypted very deep in the brain, much more than whatever was learned further down in life. The likes for music, food, and many other things that we learned in our culture before age 8 remains the most important and very difficult to erase.

In order to think freely, one would need to bypass all those presets, which is actually quite impossible, just like one cannot go without eating.

And that is why it’s difficult for a older and not very passable transsexual woman to go out in society. About 70% of the people I go by on the street, in parks tell me with their eyes that I’m going very much against one of their presets. It hurts them; I hurt them, it touches them deep inside.

I’m going against the grain. I’m even a threat, a threat to the survival of the species. We’re not even from the same culture, often, I mean Montréal is a very diverse city, but there are some basic things that pretty much every Homo Sapiens culture share, and one of them is that a man is a man and a woman a woman.

And again (I feel I wrote this before), I’m not sure what defines that exactly, as I feel I just don’t pass enough so that the brain of the people I meet on the street doesn’t flash: error, error! Is it my face? My lack of breasts? The fact that my cock shows, somewhat, in my pants?

I’m really not sure. As I said before, I have the body of a top model, tall, very slim, flat belly, small breasts. Check the clothings ads... 

Maybe with more work, like plucking my eyebrows more, putting on make-up, jewelry… Well no. I always went against the grain. I feel I serve more humanity doing that then conforming to any presets, and I’m just being myself. Finally.

Dominique Rock