Hot-Tubbing in Non-Binaryland

There is a section of the social media platform Reddit titled “AITA?” It is an acronym for “Am I the A—-le?” It is a place for moral rumination about whether one’s own behavior is objectionable, or at fault.

AITA?

I had an experience in a Brooklyn bathhouse yesterday, which elicited a lot of feelings. They are, in many social worlds now, inadmissible feelings. But, as I promised God (and you), I would always tell the truth here, because I didn’t die of sepsis in 2023. So I’ll share these feelings — and you decide. AITA? The Blue, the Gray, an... Check Amazon for Pricing.

I’ve been in physical pain for some time. Sadly the pain is getting worse. You know already that I deal with a nerve-related condition: I was born with spina bifida occulta, a condition in which the spine, though not exposed, does not fully fuse around the spinal cord. My seeking ways to not be stricken by this potentially serious condition, has led to what I feel, paradoxically enough, is the great blessing of my education as an amateur, in alternative health and healing treatments. All the weird non-allopathic things I do and take, have, thank God, helped me to defy my former allopathic neurologists’ brochure, which explained that I would be in a wheelchair, slowly losing various functions, in a matter of time.

But even the best of alternative practices (all of which I do) and supports and herbs and supplements (all of which I take) can’t completely heal a structural problem, or a bad injury, or a structural problem exacerbated by a bad injury.

In the past month, I learned, from new MRIs and X-Rays, and from a new physician whom I trust, that not only do I have pleasure of having spina bifida occulta, but that I also have the bonus defect of bilateral hip dysplasia. You may have heard of this charming condition from its occurrence in overbred dogs . This is a condition in which both hip sockets are abnormally shallow, and thus cannot fully cover and support the top of the femur. Bilateral hip dysplasia in humans can cause instability, limping, pain, and early arthritis.

So — I put this off with alternative treatments for a year, but now there is no way to avoid it; I am scheduled for surgery shortly.

This information, and this experience, have been drains on my sense of self, and they have left me with a welter of difficult emotions. I don’t see myself as someone weak or physically fragile. Yet I am limping. I don’t see myself as someone to pity. Yet people pity me, as I struggle to get in and out of cabs, or walk up stairs one step at a time, with one active leg. I am lucky to have an amazing husband, who makes unprintable and very reassuring jokes about all of this; though he is nothing but supportive, I for my part don’t want him to be married to someone who can’t hike, ski, dance, run; someone for whom he needs to wait as we walk. I want him to be married to a superheroine.

It is incredibly humbling and ego-leveling to go from being someone who has always felt strong and well, to being someone in chronic pain, who limps.

As I put it to a good friend, who hadn’t seen me for a while, whom I met recently in a bar,

“What’s new? It turns out I’m f—ed up and crippled.”

He replied, “I don’t think of you that way.”

I don’t think of myself that way either — but here we are.

Now let me add the really fun part.

I was born with these structural insufficiencies within my very skeleton. I was born half-broken, and unusually breakable.

And at seven, I was raped by an adult man — a male babysitter. JFKu2019s War with the... Horne, Douglas Check Amazon for Pricing.

My point here is that, when my own body was seven years old, the entire weight of an adult man — 200 pounds, perhaps, and about six feet in height — bore down on my entire little body; this monstrous heaviness forced my legs open and apart, and pinned them against the bed.

The average seven year old girl is 48 inches long and weighs fifty pounds.

The bulk of the weight and pressure and violence of this 200 pounds, and of his unspeakable destruction of me in that way, centered of course upon my already-fragile pelvis.

My point is that people who think about child abuse, usually don’t consider how tiny children are, compared with adults; and about how fragile are their bones, cartilage, tendons and ligaments, and about how easily adults can break or injure them. People tend not to consider that in order to rape a little child, an adult man needs to crack that child’s body open, in an act of extreme, ruinous physical violence, as one cracks a walnut.

If people really thought about this, no sexual predator who ever assaulted children, would ever again see the light of day.

My point is that with every exam now, with every new practitioner, with every MRI, with every new intake questionnaire with every new neurologist and orthopedist — before every assisted stretching session, even — I am forced to say the words “I was raped at seven by an adult man.” We don’t know to what extent I was crippled by the conditions with which I was born, and to what extent the possible injuries to ligaments and cartilage from the assault which I sustained, led to my problems now; but with every exam, I have to fill in the full physiological picture, and I have to remember my assailant.

I am never, ever, ever, ever free of him.

That is the backstory of my visit to a bathhouse.

I was in pain, as I noted, and the bathhouse advertised “CBD Pain Relief Massage.”

That sounded wonderful; so I decided to book that treatment and see if it helped. I also looked forward to enjoying the couple of hours of access to the bathhouse that went along with the massage.

I’d been there before. It’s a cool place. There are hot tubs, cold plunges, and super-cold plunges; there are lovely saunas — Russian, Swedish and “American” — and there is a steam room. It’s a welcoming and affordable place to spend a couple of restorative hours, and I always feel better after I go. It’s not a salacious bathhouse, though those certainly exist; in this one, though it is coed in the public spaces, men and women are always dressed in swimsuits; it is relaxing, not socializing or cruising, that is the focus.

The CBD oil massage was wonderful indeed. Afterwards, having showered, I settled into the hot tub. Its warm soaking was exactly what I needed. I felt better immediately. NatureWise Vitamin D3 ... Buy New $14.99 ($0.04 / Count) (as of 11:50 UTC - Details)

Soon I was joined by a couple I had noticed; they had been wandering around, deciding what to do first. The pair consisted of a pretty young woman with curly red hair, and her partner, a blonde person who seemed also at first to be a woman. The second person was about six feet tall, with a slim, athletic figure and broad shoulders, and with perhaps a hint of shadow on the upper lip. This person was wearing a cute blue swimsuit, with chic little low-cut Audrey Hepburn-style bra cups, and with a flirty skirted bottom. Indeed, that swimsuit was a more provocative choice than were any of the other fashions worn by the women in the spa; the swimwear look for women there tended to be modest sports bras in dark colors, worn with plain high-waisted black or navy-blue swimsuit bottoms.

The couple, who seemed very pleasant, joined me in the hot tub. We chatted a bit as they climbed in and then settled themselves, one at a time, on the ledge where I also sat.

The woman sat down on the ledge. Then the second person sat down, between us, and thus next to me.

My gut immediately reacted with that prickling sensation you get when something happens to which your body wants you to pay attention, though it is below the level of your conscious awareness. Though my conscious mind couldn’t tell the person’s gender, “you are a man” was what my body silently said in reaction to the body of the person next to me.

Let me restate here, as I always do when the issue of “trans” people comes up, that I support what are now called “LGBTQ” rights. I passionately do. Luckily, the equal rights under law of people who are gay, lesbian and bisexual, as well as transsexual and transgender, are guaranteed in the US now. I also as a libertarian-leaning person, support the right of anyone to dress however he or she wishes and to have sex with any consenting adult.

I do.

But of course, the right to be free from legal discrimination as a “trans person” has been downgraded, as a matter of pressing social advocacy; and now the issues often put before us, if we do not wish to be “transphobic”, are “visibility” and “acceptance”, two cultural and non-legal desiderata.

But the “visibility” and “acceptance” of “trans” people are increasingly defined in ways they never have been before in the long history of the struggle for the legal rights of gay, lesbian, transvestite and transsexual people: that is to say, “visibility” and “acceptance” are being redefined as giving male cross-dressers access to all-female spaces.

My point is that this demand that an ill-defined subset newly called “trans people” should have access to women’s private spaces — is a recent and I think not organic goal.

In the first century of the struggle for gay men’s rights, in Britain and the US, no one in that movement asked for, let alone demanded, access to women’s spaces. The movement was primarily focused on securing legal equality for what we now call gay men, and ending laws that criminalized same-sex male relationships. Sports Researchu00ae V... Check Amazon for Pricing.

The gay men’s movement was joined by the 1950s with advocacy for lesbian legal rights, including eventually custody rights. Legal equality for both groups was secured in Britain and America by the late 1960s.

With the Stonewall riots of 1969, transvestite and transsexual men became more visible as part of the movement to secure legal rights for people seen as sexual minorities.

It wasn’t until quite recently, though, that our current and, to me, disorienting new reality was manufactured, in which a series of quite unrelated sexual identities are collapsed into one portmanteau “movement” — “LGBTQIA+.”

Lesbian, gay, bisexual — these are groups, of course, that have traditionally been part of the struggle for the rights of people with same-sex sexual orientations.

But — and I fear being seen as presumptuous in expressing these thoughts — a lot of random other identities are being pushed ahistorically into one “movement”.

“Trans” is a neologism. There have always been crossdressing men and women, in every culture. The words that were used to describe them in English were “Transvestites”. If they had surgery to alter their genitals and remove their breasts (not “change their sex”, which is impossible), they were called “transsexuals.”

“Fanny and Stella” — famous British Victorian male-to-female transvestites:

These established terms, “transvestites” and “transsexuals”, were inorganically shortened, recently, to the vague term “trans”, as if that is a category of humans that objectively exists.

But the thing the word described was defined out of any clear existence even as the term was coined.

Today the term does not mean someone who is a cross-dresser or someone who has had surgery to resemble the opposite sex. “Trans” also departs from the traditional gay and lesbian rights movements in that it does not necessarily refer to someone who feels same-sex attraction.

Read the Whole Article

Sports Researchu00ae O... Check Amazon for Pricing. Physician’s CHOI... Check Amazon for Pricing. WEEM Hair Skin and Nai... Check Amazon for Pricing. Garden of Life Once Da... Check Amazon for Pricing.