I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film production I can't believe it was even made.
One day I looked up the soundtrack at the local record store and bought it..."Composer Wendy Carlos" huh, never heard of her and couldn't find anything really other than contributions to Clockwork Orange and Hooked on Bach and not much else. I moved on.
Later, when there was more Internet to be had, I decided to look up Wendy and was shocked to learn she was trans. It started me down a journey of reflection, challenging my upbringing, and reexamining many "truths" that I had been taught. Along that journey I learned about the tragedy of Alan Turing and other stories.
Wendy's music planted a seed that significantly transformed my inner life, much for the better. It helped me develop significantly in my thoughts on freedom, empathy, justice and the kind of future world I'd like to live in and leave behind.
In 1982 it took a lot of daring for a Disney exec to green light bringing her music to their audience. This was during an age of great an unjust moral panic on a variety of topics.
for reference: I remember my mother receiving a letter from her pastor outlining why "Back to the Future Part II" was the work of Satan and they should never allow it in their household. The central argument was a table that counted the number of time the seven dirty swear words were mentioned in the movie, challenged its rating, and attributed the low rating (PG I think) to a conspiracy by Satan worshipers to corrupt God's youth. This was 1989.
Thanks for sharing. I think for some, that could have been a very uncomfortable story to share, but it's just so important that stories like this are spoken out loud. We all have capacity for such growth.
Regarding the BTTF 2 is a work of Satan anecdote: it's so convenient that any time the actions of any authority are at odds with how a group expects/wants things to work, instead of challenging their own priors ("why did the majority steer so far from our beliefs?"), they just declare it a conspiracy by Satan. This is exactly what we see in politics these days as well.
It's exceedingly difficult for one to completely up-end their foundation of understanding, culture, and being. It's easier to do absolutely ridiculous things like declare a contrary outcome as a conspiracy by Satan or the Deep State or whatnot. I think that overcoming that ontological inertia speaks volumes to your individual strength as a person, and the power Carlos' brilliant work.
Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is a great read; it puts into many important words the capacity that we all possess for growth and large mindset changes, which you mention in your first paragraph
It's quite strange that someone clearly nuts like that pastor can be considered sane, wise, and morally authoritative. While in the same circles a trans person like Carlos is considered inherently deviant and somehow immensely threatening - even though all they have to offer is a life-long list of creative achievements, and absolutely no evidence of harm to anyone.
My conversations with my deeply religious grandmother left me with the impression that religion is a very dirty game: it inserts itself into your psyche in a way that it can become nearly impossible to distance yourself from it without massively breaking open what you consider to be your identity. This makes what the OP did all that much stronger, to be able to overcome that conditioning.
My grandmother never managed to, but, to her considerable credit, she did realize that some of her views were no longer supported by the evidence available, she was just too rooted in her ways to change.
I agree with your observation, but I don’t think religion is uniquely notable along those lines.
Ideology comes to mind as a pretty clean analog.
But looming in my mind is culture. Terminally, it seems indistinguishable from religion: it’s arbitrary, self-perpetuating, operates by getting deep psychological hooks into people and relies on (often blunt) communal enforcement.
And further, it seems “culture” has been elevated to the exalted, sacred status religion once commanded in society. In my view, this shift happened over the latter half of the 20th… cemented by 2010.
You are probably right, but because until very recently here religion was so strongly intertwined with culture that it is hard to see the difference and that the bulk of the people that stepped out of it haven't had time enough to establish a real culture of their own other than some common labels it is hard to make the distinction (for me, at least). This is probably yet another example of such conditioning. And in the meantime Islam has made an appearance and is gaining a lot of strength, to the point that it is only a matter of time before it will be the dominant religion, and given the cultural distance this is likely only going to cause even more issues.
That may be so, but religion seems to go out of its way to embed itself in the psyche of its subjects to the point that they experience severe identity crisis when trying to break free of it.
There are other groups that employ the same mechanisms.
Idk what maladaptive from an evolutionary basis means, dude. We’re not beholden to survival of the fittest anymore. We got glasses, bro. We do shit like microdosing, keto, and cryo therapy.
If someone wants to take estrogen and call themselves Jessica, why should I give a shit any more than when some gym rat (therefore on artificial testosterone) wants me to call him Jake instead of Jacob?
I don’t think there’s any religion in this, just good ol fashioned icky feelings about things that aren’t really a problem, they’re just icky feeling.
Idk what you’re talking about… I don’t look at depressed people like some evolutionary whatever whatever lol
If they want therapy I can pay for the therapy, if they want me to call them depresso mcfesso I can do that too idc. There’s no reason to be all high minded about stuff like this, man
Your understanding does not match the scientific evidence. One of the reasons being trans is not a mental illness is that cis people experience gender dysphoria all the time as well, like cis men when they're called girls, cis women with facial hair, or the revulsion many cis people experience when they even so much as think about the idea of taking hormones that don't align with their gender. To the extent that this is a "mental illness", the vast majority of people have it.
Rather than maladaptive, I’d characterize being trans and in the early stages of the journey to be painful emotionally and physically.
Merely having to look in the mirror and think constantly “this is not who I should be” is damaging. That’s why people deserve sympathy and aid from society.
When people say it’s maladaptive and characterize it as psychological disorder they are falling into the trap of believing that mental anguish must always have a mental solution. Thus they would prescribe therapy, drugs, and asylums.
On the converse, it is much easier in reality to change physical gender than it is to change one’s mind.
The times when we had to run and hide from tigers, when men were real men and women were left behind in the compound to rear the children is long behind us. And the simple fact is that even then there were gay and trans people, they just weren't recognized as such and ended up having problems to fit in.
I was a huge fan of Switched-On Bach. My dad bought the album for me and it said "Walter Carlos". Many years later I was in a music store and saw the CD and it said "Wendy Carlos". I thought it was a typo and would be worth lots of money so I bought it.
Years later I learned the real story.
I'm still glad for my purchase and Wendy Carlos has made my life just a little bit better because of her art.
Thanks for the recollection, it is a nice testimony to how prejudiced we can become due to our environment, and props to you for recognizing it for what it was and dealing with it the way you did.
> “I can't remember last time when I've seen(in person) a transexual person.”
How do you know? Presumably you’re not doing a genital inspection on most people.
If you assume you can just tell, it’s easy to err into many false positives. (A section of the American far right seems to genuinely believe that Michelle Obama is trans — not just as an insult they like to throw around, but literally.)
> A section of the American far right seems to genuinely believe that Michelle Obama is trans — not just as an insult they like to throw around, but literally.
Which is pretty incredible all by itself. But people seem to be very susceptible to contracting this kind of mind-virus and then becoming instrumental in spreading it. But at the root of these things are some very malicious people. One of them is on trial in NL right now, and I'm really happy to see the structural and deliberate approach to finding out where the limits on just being able to spout off are. The damage these characters do is real, and - ironically - the biggest risk to free speech comes from them.
Such a weird meme, why are people so obsessed with this idea of genitals being inspected these days.
Feels a bit like the obsession with koro or fan death. Like come on, no-one wants to look at your nob or your gash, no-one is demanding this. A very silly suggestion.
I was raised in a fairly religious household and taught to respect everyone including everyone in the lgbtq community
This was in the south as well. I grew up in the 90s if that means anything.
In Amsterdam drag and trans people always were part of the background and not considered anything special, they sometimes looked extravagant but they were simply also people. We're talking 1970's or so here, my earliest memories of that.
> I wonder, who was raised to think well of trans people?
Well, we should all try and make the world better, right? Many kids and young adults today have been raised with a sense of curiosity and empathy rather than one of scorn and judgment, and that includes fully supporting trans people. That is surely true of older adults as well, especially those whose parents are trans themselves or have close friends/relatives who are trans.
This is a bad take both on the nature of art and Wendy Carlos.
Art encompasses all aspects of the human experience. How could this not include identity and sexuality, and yes, the treatment one lives through as an aspect of those things. Also wrong is the supposition that a ideological art is somehow a lesser form of creativity. Some of the greatest works in history were made by "ideologues", and made specifically as tracts for their beliefs, either expressly or subtextually. To demand that art be politically inert and sanitized of the identity of its creator is to demand art that says nothing to the viewer and means nothing to the artist. It is to chide a mural for not being a wallpaper.
But even then: Wendy Carlos is perhaps one of the weakest examples of someone doing this, as the article itself makes abundantly clear. Her identity as a transgender woman was something she had to hide for over a decade, and even then the social stigma has driven her into seclusion ever since. Rather, the story of Wendy Carlos is one that massively underscores the sheer importance of having the loud-and-proud expressions of people's identity and experiences that we're (and I am) fortunate enough to have today. If you don't like that, well, maybe you can be the one to close your blinds this time.
Bingo, you get it exactly. It's Wendy's reluctance to "flaunt" it that makes her all the more appealing as a person. I understand that she regrets her time in seclusion, but it makes her unassailable as somebody who was "throwing it in your face."
You seem to think that an artist by default creates art that is purely impersonal and unconnected from who they are and then manipulatively goes back to add stuff that you don't like. But it's the other way around. If the work is divorced from who they are in favor of consumer needs, it's just craft. Art is inevitably personal.
So what I think you're really asking for is for people to hide who they are if you don't like parts of them.
One day I looked up the soundtrack at the local record store and bought it..."Composer Wendy Carlos" huh, never heard of her and couldn't find anything really other than contributions to Clockwork Orange and Hooked on Bach and not much else. I moved on.
Later, when there was more Internet to be had, I decided to look up Wendy and was shocked to learn she was trans. It started me down a journey of reflection, challenging my upbringing, and reexamining many "truths" that I had been taught. Along that journey I learned about the tragedy of Alan Turing and other stories.
Wendy's music planted a seed that significantly transformed my inner life, much for the better. It helped me develop significantly in my thoughts on freedom, empathy, justice and the kind of future world I'd like to live in and leave behind.
In 1982 it took a lot of daring for a Disney exec to green light bringing her music to their audience. This was during an age of great an unjust moral panic on a variety of topics.
for reference: I remember my mother receiving a letter from her pastor outlining why "Back to the Future Part II" was the work of Satan and they should never allow it in their household. The central argument was a table that counted the number of time the seven dirty swear words were mentioned in the movie, challenged its rating, and attributed the low rating (PG I think) to a conspiracy by Satan worshipers to corrupt God's youth. This was 1989.