The Best Lies

I don't know if I want to continue this blog. 

"Genevieve" told me the best lies are the truth. I know this individual actively studied con artistry and social engineering.

Genevieve and her good friend who torpedoed her shot at the 20 Under 20 program have spent sixteen years stepping over my body in the gutter while I did a LOT for them.

Since I no longer participate on Hacker News, have reason to believe Genevieve outright lied about me and neither of them is in touch with me, I have no means to fact check anything.

There's a social truism that you should assume good faith.

What tends to not get discussed is the expectation of assuming good faith only makes logical sense if you have no hard evidence to contradict that.

Abusers like to insist you forget all past offenses and like to have a cow about you being the problem and never letting anything go. Meanwhile, courts consider past behavior in drawing conclusions.

I did something big for these two and they've never done anything in return for me.

When I initially went homeless, Genevieve PROMPTLY emailed me to lecture me for being a fuck up and a loser and tell me to get my act together. She did nothing to in any way materially assist me in getting back into housing.

So I have past experience with this individual still reading my public writing after we stopped speaking. It's not unreasonable to assume she STILL reads my writing and KNOWS I'm again homeless, my life has NEVER recovered from trying to help her and getting burned by her and my life is still in the toilet.

We are well past reasonable expectation of assuming good faith for two individuals with a track record of taking advantage of me and my good nature and doing nothing whatsoever to return any favors.

I have absolutely no substantiating evidence, but I have begun speculating that:

1. Genevieve is not really trans. 

Perhaps he or she knew so much more about being trans because she researched it to run a con job on wealthy foreigners in a quest to escape India where this individual has multiple relatives in the government, making it difficult to get away from an abusive family.

Perhaps the only real truth is a prosaic tale of not getting along with the parents and wanting out of their "shit country" of India and they didn't feel that was going to get them a ticket out of there. But add trans to their tale and suddenly they have a compelling hook of a sort where most people have no hope of catching the lie because being trans is still a wild west problem space.

2. Her MTF trans friend may also be faking it.

This individual also moved to the US from elsewhere. Perhaps this individual is guilty of something so serious they needed to disappear entirely identity-wise and decided changing gender would do a lot to hide their real identity and cut ties between the two identities.

That could explain why this individual is not out as trans and most people think this is a cis woman.

I have reason to believe I know more than average about trans issues in part because of knowing these two people and my posts here were made in good faith. I don't feel compelled to redact anything as I believe it's still potentially useful information.

But I was NEVER really liked or accepted by any trans community, not on Metafilter and not on Reddit, and I don't currently have any trans friends or associates.

This blog and my other blogs aren't getting any meaningful traction or engagement as far as I can tell. So I'm writing about old memories.

I felt extremely extremely extremely burned by this person. I felt compelled to write to retrieve my identity and my self esteem from this DEBACLE and sort things in my mind.

That impulse has largely been satisfied. 

Lack of ANY engagement or trans associates means I am not getting any feedback of any kind and I am not comfortable continuing to write about a topic where I'm not really keeping current and not really in any meaningful position to feel confident that my opinions and "advice" are on solid ground going forward, though I feel what I've written so far is fine.

I don't really want to keep "trying to HELP people in dire straits" or something like that when this feels to me like I am unappreciated, unwanted, etc. If the trans community is getting something out of this and not promoting it, not talking to me, not supporting my Patreon etc. then it's basically an abusive relationship and I feel plenty abused already by the two supposedly trans individuals I knew best.

I'm writing this in part to say if I'm correct and these two people are FRAUDS pretending to be trans, that might be a partial explanation for why so much of the world is transphobic. It's a crack the size of the Grand Canyon in social expectations, scientific understanding and a thousand other things and maybe I'm not the only one who has been badly burned by someone claiming to be trans and wondering what the hell happened.

It also opens the door on a question: If you aren't trans -- if you don't have a sex hormone syndrome like I talk about on Formulary of Life -- and are biologically male and taking estrogen, could that make you into a sadistic monster?

We have two extremely famous movies about MTF trans serial killer nutcases, one of them based on real world events: Dressed to Kill and Silence of the Lambs.

They aren't usually described as trans films and probably the trans community doesn't want to call attention to those films as being about trans people.

What if the existence of those movies implies that some people already have some vague awareness that biologically male individuals taking estrogen can go extremely bad places sometimes?

Without establishing medical testing to determine who is actually in need of hormones, it's not possible to determine if someone is just LYING about having dysphoria and lying about FEELING like not their AGAB etc.

The current state of the art is FEELING like they have the wrong body. That's not testable and the trans community actively argues against medical testing as if it's merely transphobic gatekeeping intended to prevent people from getting what they need.

The site linked above -- Formulary of Life -- provides a good faith effort to make hormones available to anyone with zero gatekeeping. I have no means to TEST my hypothesis, but IF I'm correct, it provides information for both estrogen and testosterone (plus progesterone, a precursor to both and used separately by some MTF individuals -- I'm fairly confident my formula for making progesterone should work).

I'm NOT someone where it's REASONABLE to accuse me of trying to gatekeep out trans people, though it won't stop such accusations from happening.

But I have reason to believe both of these individuals got enormous help and latitude from multiple wealthy foreigners largely because of claiming to be trans. And I have reason to believe some of those people are extremely ethical and genuinely mean well and were likely taken advantage of and mistreated.

So I'm not okay with agreeing "You should just take our word for it or YOU are a transphobe!" when I feel extremely mistreated and feel multiple people I respect got mistreated by people I have reasonable basis to feel aren't nice people and aren't acting in good faith.

I will add that without testing available to confirm the diagnosis of trans, it has occurred to me "I'm trans!" is potentially a means for a homophobic gay person to tell themselves "It's okay to be attracted to people of the same gender if you change yours." And that would amount to maiming themselves very expensively to try to deny to themselves that they are gay.