When is a dick not a dick?

I am feeling slightly confused or left out. There seems a sleuth of terms generated by the media or a team of academic experts that have found themselves onto the world stage that I know nothing about. Terms like woke, social warrior, cancel culture, TERF, white fragility or even white privilege.

Maybe I am just too old and have been cast aside by the youthful generation for a discussion I am not allowed to join. Maybe I need to go back to university to gen up on the current trends or speak to my local govt. representative for an update on new terms and phrases for modern times.

Luckily I have Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey an interesting book on its own but also comes with a list of the above associated terms and there meanings, oh I missed one, ‘intersectionality’ wtf!

So far I seem to be progressing well and that I may even be handed the term woke if it wasn’t for the fact that I practically live in a Wetherspoons pub every day; a bastion for what is now termed Gammon which is white faced bald headed men over the age of 50 who voted Brexit and are perceived to not like anything that doesn’t look like them. No I didn’t vote Brexit.

My excuse for being in a Wetherspoons is that as a care worker on 8GBP I dream of affording a crafted brew from a fancy micro-brewery pub for 5GBP a pint but for now will do with the cost saving pizza and a pint for 6.99.

Now back to the dick that is no longer  a dick. As I work my way through the slews of terms and try my best to understand this Brave New World, I am stuck on what the fuss is with transgenderism, and why are arguments breaking out between JK Rowling and other trans-activists? JK Rowling seems to be saying she supports trans-people as I do in the sense that I don’t really care because it’s highly unlikely that statistically I will bump into one, and if I do I will speak to them as I see them, and also if any mistakes are made I shall correct them in accordance with their wishes.

So why become irate when major news channels or media organizations issue statements such as a ‘persons’ vagina? Or even funnier apparently a woman’s dick? Suddenly JK Rowling is screaming at the top about the erasure of female identity and part of me likes to agree but only to look at why it creates fear on straight thinking people who believe themselves to be real, or one indivisible unit.

At this point I take a diversion to pull on my Buddhist roots but why? It seems the current debates or concerns that circle around the LGBT+ organization are around new terms or labels to define those that don’t wish to be defined at all. Don’t want to be a girl, or even a boy, despite what biology tells you? then define yourself as Non-Binary. If you are a man that feels you are a woman but don’t want to go through the operation then it’s a female dick or a person’s dick.

All these arguments circle around labels. Boy is a label, so is girl. Dick, and vagina, and gay or straight are labels and that is fine but when you try to hit it back to a straight thinking community and suggest their labels are not so fixed a panic can set it. Because while you may have been forced to question the notion of identity, and labels on your quest to become you, most people are wedded or bound to their identities, in fact it is the very root of their being and when you shake the root of their being, great fear sets in.

They, like the beginner Buddhists, are single independent selves, an object you might say, separate from the rest of the world, an ego or persona. That object may have further religious beliefs in a subject outside of themselves, and if you question their identity then it can cause the fragile persona to crack and this can create greater fear. If all that effort is put into an indivisible object that believes in an undividable subject then it will not want that to break so when it sees a ‘persons’ label, that is an attempt to break their wholeness, or even their solid identity, of man or woman, and potentially their belief in other things outside of themselves.

From a Buddhist point of view it’s kind of funny because from the onset you are looking at the self and are seeing that it is made up of many thoughts, feelings, and of course labels. The whole world is made up of labels; tree, table, cup, earth, ground, straight, man and vagina, and we are taught these things exist but they also do not exist. They do not exist in the sense that they are ephemeral and fleeting, just words created from the onset when we were babies or societies, but they are still also real, but not as an indivisible whole unit as one, but as many labels you might say coming together like a movie reel in a cinema that has many images, sounds and actions, that when spun together create the illusion of seamless reality, or self, or identity.

So while the argument rages on about whether a trans-woman is a woman and is a vagina a persons vagina or a woman’s vagina expect there to be much upheaval from ordinary thinking individuals who have never questioned the notion of identity and what it means to be you and expect an even greater fight from those with faith because when you crack one you crack the other too. Although if this all leads to a planetary psychosis or breakdown you can be rest assured that the over all outcome will be the understanding of the oneness of us all and that we are all swimming in the divinity of human existence. Peace.