Being Bare

I had a strange dream this morning. I was in the kitchen, and standing next to the stove was what I at first thought was an adolescent girl. They were wearing female clothes, and their voice sounded female, but their pelvic region was exposed, and they had no genitalia at all, like a mannequin. Their chest was exposed too, and similarly it was perfectly smooth and featureless. I wonder what the dream means. Perhaps they were a robot.

My interpretation: The dream primarily concerns my transness, and especially the idea of idealizing my body, and wishing it to be perfect, like a mannequin. One of the symptoms of gender dysphoria is spending a lot of time gazing into mirrors, imagining yourself other than you are, and fantasizing sexually about yourself.

But the reality is that we’re monkeys, not mannequins or robots. And human monkeys, Michelangelo aside, are hardly smooth or ideal. They’re cute when they’re young, but they’re mammals, and ferocious ones at that. Humanity’s nearest cousins are chimpanzees, and chimps are tough customers, predisposed to gang banging, murder and warfare.

Perfection is nonexistent except in mathematics. In the physical universe, everything is lumpy, warped, and covered in dust. At the smallest scale, everything is nearly empty. Electrons and protons aren’t fixed entities as non-physicists imagine, they’re probability distributions. Reality is messy and uncertain. Perfect feminine beauty is an absurd idea, and likely offensive to feminists, not least because beauty is culturally relative. Things that you think are ugly may be considered beautiful in other cultures, and vice versa.

So the dream ultimately expresses discomfort with reality, and a yearning to be more like the perfectable constructions of mathematics, including AI, and perhaps in the future, synthetic persons inhabiting the idealized bodies that so many people, trans or otherwise, yearn for.