By Tom Jacobs — 2017
What are the fundamental forces that drive human behavior? A group of evolutionary thinkers offer an answer by revising one of psychology’s most familiar images.
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CLEAR ALL
When I told my family I was trans, one of their initial reactions was, “But you’re so hairy! It’s going to be so difficult to remove all your hair to be a woman, so you should just give up.” They were zeroing in on my body hair as the barrier for me to be seen as feminine.
One of life’s paradoxes is that we are encouraged to “be ourselves,” but are often punished when we do.
“Representation and visibility is given to us by larger power structures, but what do we give ourselves? I’m more interested in that. What questions are we asking ourselves to grow and heal? To challenge the ways this world constantly teaches us to hate ourselves?”
We talked to the writer about his debut memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and his move from poetry to prose.
Who owns your identity, and how can old ways of thinking be replaced?
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