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Just move on when it’s boring or when you’re stuck. Change what you can, accept what you can’t. Failures are inherent, but success is very likely over the long haul and makes trying worth it. It’s truly in your power to change things. Try, try again. Don’t take on debt without an honest plan to pay it back. Avoid. Uncontrolled debt is a life sandbag. People don't change unless they want to, and even then it's a process requiring diligence. Love evolves, not necessarily into something worse. The fairytale is only part of the truth. Dwelling on negatives punishes you first and worst. Are things really what they seem? You’d better find out. It’s all about you, really. But, it’s not just you. Worry is a negative default of an idle mind. Take a walk, it's not that serious, someday you'll be dead. An advice list will change depending on your target person or audience. These are the top tips 33-year-old me thinks would have most helped 18-year-old me (and up to 33, I guess). Youthful naivety prevents full understanding, and with blissful ignorance, so I tried to phrase it in a way that might have gotten my younger self thinking and thinking back again after some experience, or in a way to which I would have been receptive, especially since I was prone to rationalism. I suppose this list would work without the influence of Rand, but I found Rand right around that age... so, she's baked in by now. I wonder how a list like this might be different 10 years from now, as it won't be geared toward a flailing know-nothing who hasn't established mental habits of systematized truth gathering. Some other tips weren't as important to my younger self without first learning something about the other tips on the list, and they arose naturally afterward based on life experience. Life doesn't seem like a catch-up game anymore. What are your 10?

I suppose that's possible, but I think it is the most generous, positive assumption of the motive involved. Would you call it the intrinsic view of transitioning? I don't mean they are literally destroying their life. But they often do destroy their sex organs and other physical characteristics. My deeper point is that this is what transitioning means for them: destroying the man, and becoming a woman, or vice versa. Bruce is dead, long live Caitlyn! It's like some kind of crucifixion and resurrection. It's less about "identification" or "confirmation", and more about self-annihilation and rebirth. They hate the person they are and want to be someone else--only the someone else is the opposite sex. And so they rationalize the transition and claim that a man can become a woman, rather than admit that they are mentally ill. Mentally ill people rarely diagnose themselves. It's up to the mentally healthy to recognize the problem and help these people. Instead, we are allowing them to dictate laws.

I'd say that's exactly what they are. Though we'll probably squabble over the adjective imaginary. Here is the popular definition at Google: And here is the more serious definition at Oxford: Notice the genera: an idea, notion, invention, artifice, concept, perception. And the differentia: created by or based on a society, collective, social group; but does not exist naturally and might not represent reality. Sounds very much like a product of imagination to me. You'll have to give me an example. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that trans people don't identify with a biological or physiological trait, but instead with a social or cultural value. For example, let's say a biological male identifies with the cultural values of beauty and seduction traditionally associated with females. If he already identifies with those values, then why does he need to chop off his penis, get breast implants, and take hormones to change his appearance? The point is that he doesn't identify with those values. Identification is the recognition of reality. If he identified with beauty and seduction, he wouldn't need to transition into something beautiful and seductive. He'd already be it. Trans people want to transition precisely because they are not what they imagine themselves to be. It's not about identifying who they are. It's about destroying who they are and becoming something else.

Right. Agreed. I'm not certain that this stance is justified (more or less than we would take anyone else at their word, at least). Well, all right. If his rationale requires individual attention, then I don't think that we should make an off-the-cuff or prejudicial decision that a trans person has something terribly wrong with him or that he cannot be taken at his word. I believe those sorts of things should yet be assessed individually. It may be a mistake to try to answer for someone else, hypothetical or no, but suppose that the purpose is to manifest physically in a way that is consonant with one's sense of being or identity? To look in reality how one envisions one looking, ideally. Honestly, there are a lot of things I don't understand about the choices people make in terms of appearance, personal style, and what not. Fashion, as a rule, is beyond me. I further do not understand the tie, or why one would ever wear such a thing... (except in response to threats, cajoling and peer pressure, which seems to me to be how that particular wear survives into the modern era.) I do understand that how one appears has something to do with both personal expression, and also how one is received by the world. If I saw myself as female, fundamentally (whatever that means to me; though speaking personally, I don't expect it would mean a hell of a lot), then I guess I could understand the desire to both express myself as a female, and for the world to respond to me accordingly, as I see myself. I don't want to say that it's as simple as fashion -- I don't think that's it (if, in fact, fashion is all that simple... which despite my ignorance of the subject, it might not be). But I suspect that there may be commonalities. Exactly. And, not to speak for him, but I believe that these are the issues that 2046 is driving at when he refers to "social construct." The penis, and whether one has one, is a metaphysical condition. But everything that we associate with "being a man"? That, I suspect, is a grab bag of metaphysical and man-made. And if we hold these ideas of "being a man" or "being a woman" above and beyond the simple possession of certain physical genitalia, and etc., and if one is identified in one category but considers himself to belong to the other, on the basis of these other qualities, that's the point at which I say that we can at least begin to understand the desire to "transition." This is largely what I'm referring to by "the state of the science." But -- and this may be the tip of the iceberg here -- I'm not certain that the possession of all of the physical genitalia is central to our idea of "sex," or to most people who seek to transition. For instance, the ability to nourish and develop a fetus. I don't know whether that's of genuine importance to this subject (though of course it may be very important to a given individual), but my initial inclination says that it is largely immaterial. In saying "I consider myself a woman," I don't think that most trans folks are saying that they desire to have a functioning uterus, though perhaps they would avail themselves of that, if the science made it possible; and when some people respond, "no -- you're not a woman," I don't think they're saying that they don't have a functioning uterus, or that it would matter to them if science did make that possible.

But social constructs are not imaginary things. There are tons of things that are social constructs. Culture, language, institutions, none of these things are imaginary or nonobjective. Race and gender identity are just part of those things. What you appear to think is "innately" a part of gender identity (genitals) and race (presumably color, body structure, hair type, etc.) aren't non existent, they're just not significant or essential to these psychological and social concepts as you seem to want them to be. Wheb someone says "I identify as" a man, woman, trans, black, white, whatever, they aren't saying the identify in those ways which are biological only. That would be subject to your criticism. But rather, they are saying they identify in those ways which are not regarding biological sex, or race or whatever, those ways to which they are perfectly entitled to claim, those ways in which gender roles are conventional practices or accepted cultural values and norms. And regarding things like acting appropriate for an objectivist... an argument from intimidation isn't becoming of an objectivist either, nor is knee jerk reactions against perceived heretical opinions. Let us avoid ignorant kneejerkism and dogmatic pronouncements on what an objectivist should act like.

Ok but there are allegedly conscious states about the following: God, near death experience, astral projection, reincarnation. That's just off the top of my head. Isn't it special pleading to make sex transitioning an exception? You're an Objectivist for crying out loud. Act like one.

Transitioning is the belief that you can change the sex or race with which you were born. This is not merely the idea that you can make yourself look very much like a different sex or a different race, which is certainly true. Rather, it is the full-blown delusion that the fake sex or race is the real sex or race, that the artificial one is the natural one, that the man-made thing is the metaphysical thing. Many transition advocates are hard subjectivists who believe that reality is determined by their thoughts, i.e., wishing makes it so. In this view, if a white man believes that he is a black woman, then in truth he is an actual black woman, despite what anyone else says. Despite even what his own eyes tell him! He could look into a mirror and see a white man, yet still validly believe that he is a black woman, because, you know, he feels like a black woman, and he has always felt that way since childhood. Still, there is always that pesky image in the mirror. And to resolve the clear conflict between body and mind, one of those things must be altered for the sake of personal integrity. This is where the man's subjectivism motivates him to change his body to reflect his mind, rather than change his mind to reflect his body. After all, it's much easier to let a doctor work on your flesh and bones than it is to question your own belief system. And so this mixed-up white man undergoes surgeries and hormone treatments to look like a black woman. Other transition advocates present a soft subjectivist position. They begin by saying that sex and race should be understood as spectrum conditions. There is a range of non-binary sexes, they say, just like there is a range of non-binary races. At first this sounds somewhat rational and objective, because, of course, mixed sexes (hermaphrodites) and mixed races (mulattos) have been identified by scientists long before the transition advocates came along. But then something weird happens. These advocates evade or simply reject established biological knowledge, when they claim that sex and race are determined partly by psychological factors, i.e., how the mind develops. And since only the subject knows his own mind, we must accept whatever sex or race he claims to be as the truth of reality. Both the soft and hard subjectivists make sex and race a quality of the mind, rather than of the body. And this is why you cannot argue rationally with them about the finer points of biology and chromosomes and matter and consciousness. They simply don't care about objective reality. To them, the mind is primary. Sex and race are out. Gender and ethnicity are in. And that's that.