Advice NOBODY Wants to Hear.

I once saw an interview with an
african-american male who joined a biker gang and when he was asked how did you get this idea and you read in the first place what made you decide that you wanted to be a member of a biker gang he said you know when he was a kid when he was a small child he saw a member of this gang leaning on his motorbike on the block and this guy apparently had the affections of beautiful women and just looked so cool and looked confident looked dangerous and he thought that's what I want to be that cross this isn't just something that happened once apparently in his neighborhood members of the same gang were around every so often and on some level it was just aesthetic it was just something he idealized the surprising thing is not that he was an african-american male but that this particular biker gang had as its main symbol the Nazi swastika unusual combination of things and I think very few members of that biker gang were more black or were african-american although they disclaimed and I believe them they were not they were not white supremacists or maybe not anymore I don't know it's hey um the role of fantasy in the life of the adult mind is something I'm really skeptical about you know we encourage children to live rich vivid lives of fantasy at our peril we think it's harmless or even virtuous to encourage children to imagine all the things they can become and you don't really stop to consider what if a child becomes powerfully attached to the fantasy that they can become a member of a biker gang because they can that fantasy is quite attainable whereas becoming an astronaut much less common than one in a million biker gangs on your corner sign up now I wonder which group has a better sex life to be quite honest with you um there were a lot of ways in which joining a biker gang might be more rewarding at least in the short term for young people the role of fantasy you know as a child I even found this troubling in the context of Sesame Street in the context of Disney World in the context of different rides and attractions and TV shows that told me to close my eyes and imagine something and wish for something and it seemed to me like this was the culture of Christian prayer that had somehow escaped from the church basement still with a chain attached to one ankle rattling behind it as it ran went straight down the block into the modern American shopping mall to start turning a profit somehow fantasy and marketing fantasy to children and become the fulcrum of the American economy I was growing up surrounded by this and I really felt a strange sort of suspicion I wasn't I wasn't entirely clear on what these people were selling me but the idea that you know childhood is a process of preparing yourself to act out certain fantasies of who you want to be as an adult compares very strangely the idea of a life built on duty honor and station and trust me I know the old ways in Europe had their disadvantages like men fighting each other to the death and duels over incredibly trivial points of Honor um in many ways what we think of as a man of honor from the Renaissance is much closer to the modern member of a biker gang violent brutal ideology of what it meant to lead a meaningful life even for intellectuals just just a few centuries ago but there's a further complexity here in that the idea of pursuing your own fantasy of who it is you want to be necessarily and inexorably excludes other people's fantasy of who you might be who you ought to be the young man who joined the biker gang probably not his parents fantasy of who has to be probably not his first girlfriend's fantasy of who he might be over we ought to be and we're going through a period of time now where the triumph of the gay rights movement which I celebrate 100% the triumph of gay rights in a country like Canada or the United States has led to a period of adulation for people not being themselves which would be good but instead people living and acting out fantasies as adults that they may have adopted in childhood in adolescence as teenagers and they may not have really reflected on what kind of a life this is leading them into and in what ways that's going to exclude others that's going to impose on others okay head of view or the channel right in explaining and this isn't the first time we've talked he and I have talked many times now but he could say he was reminding me that he is basically in his own eyes he considers himself a heterosexual transsexual person and when I say this terminology is quite confusing there were four different combinations of genders that might conjure up in your mind's eye so he's someone who was born biological male he currently dresses and presents himself in public as male but he feels in his heart of hearts that would he'd like to do is dress and present himself as female while at the same time he wants to be in heterosexual relationships in this context meaning he would play the male role and would date women who were conventionally attractive women who dressed as women and presented themselves as women he would continue having a sex life okay um it is quite possible in the next 10 years we will see the single category transgender break down into four eight different categories so that we don't have to have this kind of clarification of terms like even when people say look if you say he's a heterosexual male transgender wait do you mean male to female do you mean do you mean that someone living dressed as a woman who wants to be heterosexual in the sense of being with a man mmm so there's some disambiguation to come I think for that movement in that community even if it's just - in economies onwards and avoid confusion these discussions and you know the first and most significant thing is that this guy was writing to me asking for advice about what he should do next rather than the myriad personalities you could write to here on YouTube who would be eager to tell him that the most important thing in life you still live out your dream is to act out those fantasies that if this is a fantasy you have you've got to live it out you know if this is what you want to be if this is what you think will make you happy then pursue your dream act out that fantasy don't think about anything else let the fantasy become your identity there are many many people of many different sexual persuasions and ideological persuasions again even just within YouTube and across the internet he could have asked for advice and who would have just given him positive encouragement to go ahead and start living dressed as the other gender and he wrote to me and I pointed out him look you wrote to me you chose to write to me asking for the device because you already know what I'm gonna tell you and what I'm gonna tell you is there were a lot of things in life that are more important than acting at your fantasies there were a lot of things in life more important than indulging your own desires including if you don't want to be alone other people's fantasies and other people's desires so if what you want is to live as a heterosexual man with a heterosexual woman in your life right whoever that woman is currently unknown a hypothetical person you're gonna be in the future that means that you're committing to be willing to cater to her desires to cater to her fantasies to cater to her expectations when I was living in places like Cambodia Thailand and Laos I met a lot of adult white Western men who were still trapped in living out a fantasy of who they ought to be that they formed as a child there's one guy who was a successful author I could tell the whole story we're not going to he was a white Western man then more like 50 years old and you know probably when he was about 10 years old the Rolling Stones were at their peak you know medium stretching the decades here a bit um but he obviously at a very young age decided that he wanted to look just like Mick Jagger the lead singer throwing stones and he really did it I've got to he nailed that look he was a white man in Southeast Asia he had long hair just every element of his style of dress was this eclectic assemblage of late 1960s and early 1970s time and sky walks into a room and everyone I mean he stand he would stand out even in California right and you know people in Thailand Laos and Cambodia would treat him like crap he lit quite an eventful sex life also and he wasn't the only white man who complained was me but he had a peculiar problem whenever he would start approaching a woman or sometimes in other social situations with men there would often be this initial confusion because people would think he was transgender people would think he was a man trying to present himself as a woman and just doing a really bad job at it and it wasn't just the long hair by the way it's true always with Mick Jagger there were certain kind of feminine elements in those disguise I could see why like from their cultural perspective and let me just say this Thailand is the most accepting country for transgender people okay Thailand and Laos together are tied they were incredibly accepting they're incredibly positive but like when you be talking women are sometimes men becoming overturn him the assumption would just be like oh okay so you're you know you're a transgender person you know kind of and from his perspective he's still acting out a child advantage this is something macho and strong and butch and you know that's that's not what it means there any you know he complained to me about the different different kind of harassment yeah look so I'm not saying your fantasy means nothing I'm saying it means something to you and if your highest priority is living out your fantasy and gratifying your desires then you're gonna live alone and that's okay only in as much as you continue to live a totally self-centered isolated self-indulgent life alone right if you want to be a man who has a woman come into your life and you want to get to know her parents and have kids with her let's just say go the whole way with a white picket fence conventional family there are so many compromises you're gonna have to make Lin let's just stick with the same guy who kind of looks like Mick Jagger what if he gets a Cambodian girlfriend and the first thing her parents say is he's got to cut his hair there's no way I'm gonna let a guy like that have wedding photos with my zit no for him it's not even a gender identity but it is an identity and I think it's an identity in that guy's case he got hung up on you know as a child he got committed to in a lot of the same way is that guy joining a biker gangs just an idea of strength and the role there's there's a fantasy of what kind of adult he he wanted to be built in there and for some kids that's wearing a long leather trench coat dressing like neo from the matrix they're a child they watch that movie The Matrix and they think that's what it means that's the kind of adult I want to be I want to have sunglasses in a suit and I want people to respect me and I want people to target me a certain way there are all these different roles that people get out of get it of movies and although most of these identities are not quite as politicized as the concept of being transgender right it's true there's a lower level of intensity I have known white people who were incredibly devoted to the image of themselves as a white person with dreadlocks were wearing their hair in dreadlocks and whatever strange spiritual political commitment they had smoking marijuana and wearing dreadlocks and that they're the kind of person who listens to music from Jamaica like this is this is a political identity to them this is this may be started as a childhood fantasy and it very often also is a kind of sexual identity it matters to them that when they present themselves to the opposite sex they don't right away they're part of the drug culture they're part of this Rastafarians subculture they're they're a white guy with dreadlocks and that managed them so much and say okay and here are all the other people you're excluding from your life and here are they're all the roles you can't play in your life because this is the childhood fantasy you're committed to acting out twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and if that's the decision you want to make and your only priority is your own happiness you can act out that fantasy your whole life alone but just be aware this is something you are doing for you it's something in a very simple sense that's that's selfish you could ask the guys a member of a biker gang do you love someone enough to quit this biker game that particular guy is wearing a jacket with a swastika on it every day what if you fall in love with a you have a Jewish girlfriend would you stop wearing this jacket for her or for her parents just to make her if would you would you do it for that he said whatever the details are about this biker take light at you it uncle asked the guy with dreadlocks do you think you could ever fall and you think it ever loves someone enough to shave your head to stop having dreadlocks to stop smoking marijuana to stop being involved with this Rastafarians June or something and you could ask the guy who dressed up like you know the lead singer throwing stones every day you know some kind of similar question right the problem is all of us in life have to ask this about hypothetical people that we're excluding all the time and hypothetical opportunities were excluded on Diamond we don't even know who they are or if we care about them or if they could ever care about us all right and this applies to me also okay I had to make a decision when I first started even writing on the Internet am I gonna alienate others am I going to be really honest about my opinions and my positions and my convictions in a way that that makes enemies that makes people hate me or you mean like 90% of youtubers am I going to kind of engage in virtue signaling or you know follow the crowd or mask my real opinions and just be positive encouraging towards everyone and make make friends and live a life of half-truths to avoid that and you know my personal commitment to keeping me real my personal commitment to keeping it real means that I'm alienating others all the time in the same way that having dreadlocks is gonna mean it but we're not talking about alienating the same people right I made the decision that I'm gonna live my life in a way where I'm comfortable with being hated for who I really am I'm more comfortable with that than people hating me for who they assume I am or who they imagine I am when when they're wrong all right I don't get to choose whether I'm hated or loved I get to choose whether I'm known or unknown I want to play game that way and as a result I have fewer people in my life I have fewer friends I have more enemies I have fewer women who could potentially or actually love me there were fewer men who'd want to play a game of chess with me or you know have a conversation with me so on and so forth it's so keeping it real is a lonely road so my advice to this heterosexual transgendered man who's considering living his woman addressing women to some extent while he still wants to romance head of sexual women is precisely this if what you want is only to be with a heterosexual woman who will also accept you or also be attracted to you in your role as a transgender man if that is very specifically what you want to the exclusion of all else then you can make that same commitment I made to keeping it real you can get on that path you can walk that lonely road knowing that that that's that's something like one in a million it exists it absolutely exists and right now you can Google or search around YouTube and you can find couples like that where the woman is completely conventional a heterosexual and the man is a transgender man so living as a woman and so on and where they get along and it works or even maybe turns her on she's into it okay it may be one in a million it's out there I would not even say you can find it maybe maybe you can find it and maybe it's a long lonely road and you're one of the people who never finds it and that person never finds you all right but if you want to live a life where you're really open to meeting and getting to know people of the opposite sex of the same sex where that's not going to be a barrier where that's not going to a lien in others with that's not going to preclude those relationships you know a very large percentage of heterosexual women want to be with a man who is masculine who presents himself as masculine in every way right in ways both subtle and obvious and yes there's the potential after a woman falls in love with you that she acts it fantasy with you I'm not saying you have to live a lie in the bedroom or or what have you you know but the question really is is that something that's gonna be a fantasy once in a while on a weekend that you act out with the girlfriend or I don't know once a month or ever it is or is that a fantasy you're so committed to that you're gonna act it out 24 hours a day seven days a week and turn the equation around would you accept someone else in your life if that were the price would you be willing to accept a woman in your life if she had a diaper fetish where she wanted to wear a diaper and pretend that she was a newborn baby because that's what she was into and she wanted you to act out that fantasy with her again and again again choose your own fantasy choose your own fetish imagine something that really challenges you imagine something that turns you off whatever it is how would you cope with the world or anyone else around you let alone everyone else around you were in a completely self-centered way set on acting out a fantasy of the pursuit of their own desires to the exclusion of all else and where they presume to impose on you in asking you to play your part in acting out their fantasy