alexandraerin | (no subject)

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fuck my life

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Fun fact: it turns out that the bathtub that failed in so spectacular a fashion so recently was among the newer things that came with this apartment. Among the components that antedate the installation of the late lamented Bathtub, Sr. are the air conditioning unit.

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At least you can take a bath to cool off now?

This is true. Though I couldn't really do that during the day yesterday during the hot part of the day... I had to be ready to answer the door at a moment's notice so as not to give the maintenance guy any excuse to flake off.

Stressful and non-productive day. I think I deleted more words that I wrote yesterday than I usually do in a month. :P

In other, unrelated news, I saw this last night. A short writeup about the campaign to get the APA to remove being transgendered from the list of mental disorders.

The second story it links to, in the Atlantic, is rather long, and convoluted. But it's interesting to me to read, and think about. It supports the point in the first entry, about transgenderism, and perhaps transvestitism, as being akin to gender attraction: a sliding scale, something that is not so simple as ones and zeros, not so much a matter of you are or aren't but more a matter of how much, and how to deal with it.

Of course, the situation outlined in the story makes that last part more of a question- but it's a good question. It's one that moves past the matter of gender identity being separate from the physical, and focuses more on a question of finding the right answer when you have few clues and potentially large consequences.

I think that's a promising start. It means at least some people will be honestly looking for answers.

You should also include: being attracted to trans people, bdsm, and any sexual contact that isn't leading up to vaginal intercourse or its various homosexual counterparts.

I should include those in what?

The campaign.

As in those are considered mental illnesses and should be removed, they are already campaigning to have them removed, or something else?

Personally I don't see any of them as mental illnesses, although to be honest I would not be surprised if they were considered to be such. It seems the list of mental illnesses is in need of a rather large and broad revision. It seems to have been primarily written based on what was seen as moral and acceptable behavior decades or centuries ago, rather than what is actually a problem.

What we need a campaign for is to take the stigma off of the phrase "mental disorder".

It's a minority mental condition that causes difficulty functioning in normal life and/or distress. Many "mental disorders" are such only because there is stigma around them, and it is the stigma that is the major cause of the distress. Mental disorders aren't something that people have decided need curing, they're something that people need help living around, often because they are stigmatized.

Amen to that, rozencrantz

I used to know a professor in psychology who, especially while drunk, would endlessly repeat "everyone is neurotic". He would explain further that in de normal course of life, everyone had experiences that shocked, frustrated of traumatised them, and neuroses where born from that. They were quite unavoidable and while they varied in severty and shape by the time people reach an adult age they have at least a few. People without any neuroses where in his book, not normal.
As to why he would repeat this when drunk especially I never discovered if it was to say that he drank to cope with the neuroses of everyone else or his own.

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