/lit/ - Literature

>>14580028
I think there's an interesting angle here, in that by striving - by overcoming ones own body and notions of self as well as eschewing ones gender/cultural norms, as well as usually having to shrug off former friends and family members that they become something greater than that which they might have been had they never needed to strive in the first place.

This is, I think, why some people meme about Nietzsche being 'the first trans philosopher'. Striving is something that a trans person implicitly understands, whereas most people never have that kind of a personal mountain to climb, and even if they do they generally have support from their friends/family/culture/self. A trans person often does most of their striving entirely alone or with only a small community that might understand their quest, as well as often with having a notion of self that has been fractured, split or damaged by 'becoming something new' - so they tend to become more defined by the experience.

I think this might perhaps serve to explain at least some of the phenomenon that >>14579874 pointed out. Trans people do tend to demonstrate above average IQs, but that is likely because being somewhat clever and developing networks of support is necessary for their survival, whereas the average cisgender hetrosexual normie can, cognitively speaking, get by with a lot less. The trans people without the high IQ, or even with the high IQ but with no network for help when they need it is less likely to be able to respond to a survey - to put it euphemistically.

However, by expanding queerness into the larger social spaces around them, trans people open the way towards new ways of experiencing (lines of flight, if you will) gender and sexuality, but of entirely new ways of 'being in the world' - new archetypes and new memes are born out of their mere existence in the contemporary mire we find ourselves in. The 'product' of the life of a trans person is not a biological child with half their genetic makeup, but rather it is ideas, themes, stories about humanity and the world and how any given individual can chose to interact with these things.

To put that a bit differently, to be trans it to transgress your existing social conditioning. It is to create something new from the ashes of your previous self, and ideally to share that newly created thing with the world at large. To become trans is to become your own constantly evolving work of art. That's why it's hard being trans sometimes, anon. It's not just because of benises or bagines.