Freeing Your Body

The more things change, the more they are the same. History continues to mirror itself in 2025.

The Lilac People
by Milo Todd
© 2025
This story takes place in Germany from 1932 until the end of WWII. It is fictional within the context of the historical facts of the time. Doktor Magnus Hirschfeld, gay advocate in Germany for what became the LGBTQ+ population, was the Director of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin from the 1920s until the Institute was destroyed in 1933 by the N***s.
The author says this about the terminology used:
“Please note that all terms used in this novel reflect the story’s era. Terms such as transvestite are outdated and should be avoided when referring to transgender people of today.”

In The Lilac People as in life, Doktor Hirschfeld had been attacked by N**i “brownshirts”:

The worst was so bad that Herr Doktor had read his own obituary in the paper the next morning. But he had slowly recovered. And then he just kept on trying to make the world a better place for the third s*x.
“Why do you do it?” Bertie asked. “I know you’d look after your own kind, that makes sense. But why do you do so much for transvestites, too?”
“If I’m being honest, Bertie, my reasons are quite selfish. Do you know about the canaries? For twenty years now, miners in Britain and America have taken cages of them down into the mines while they work, to detect carbon monoxide.”
Bertie did not know why he was telling him this, “Why canaries? Why not some other animal?”
“They were the most vulnerable. A country is only as strong as its most vulnerable people. You’re a canary, Bertie. Transvestites are the canaries of the world. Bad people always go after transvestites first, no matter the country or culture. They are the first ones removed when an environment turns poisonous. What makes it more worrisome is you represent everything. You represent housing and job security and access to healthcare. You represent workers’ rights and voting rights and full stomachs and freedom. And perhaps most importantly of all, you represent the right to body and personhood. You represent a country not owning you; not using you benefits a select few at the top. You represent a country of a people, not a country of the dominant. If transvestites are under attack, then the whole of the country is on the brink of destruction. If transvestites are cared for, the rest of us are cared for. You touch everything a strong society has to offer. We could work, we could eat, we could be healthy, we could live in safe homes, we could decline to fight in unnecessary wars. Our country would be honest. We would no longer be tricked. Our country would take care of us and we, in turn, would take care of our country. So as long as transvestites are okay, we know society is, too.
Don’t regard me too heroically. I care about you because I care about everyone. Nothing I’m doing here is noble or generous. It’s simply common sense. It’s simply humanity. No person should encourage the suffering of another. There’s already too much given by nature. And when a person encourages the suffering of another, you can bet they won’t stop there. They want to see it because they hope it will fill the emptiness inside themselves, but it won’t, because it never does, and so they’ll look for the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.
Any invert [gay] who thinks Hi**er will stop at transvestites is a fool. And any person who thinks Hi**er will stop at inverts thereafter is just as foolish. They try to convince people that you’re the only group they’re after when really you’re just the first one. They look for the first domino to knock down, the one people will give the least resistance to, the one they care about the least. And once they’ve done it, it might be too late for everyone else.”

The author also notes that at the time of this novel, “transvestite was defined as someone wearing the clothes of the gender ‘opposite’ of them. The terminology of the time overall wasn’t intended to misgender, but [was] rather an attempt to understand and explain to the public in ways they might comprehend.”

At one point in the story Bertie, who has had a mastectomy, says to Gert, who is excited but worried about his upcoming surgery, “They’ve been doing surgeries for us for almost thirty years now. You’ll be just fine.”

It was disappointingly interesting to learn that when the war ended and prisoners of the concentration camps were released, murderers and thieves were allowed to go free by the American “liberators,” who felt they had served their sentences. But LGBTQ+ prisoners were sent to German jails to serve the sentences for their crime of simply being who they were.

“I thought it would be nice if I could invent a new language.
I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you.
Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages.
In any new language, there should only be we.
We do everything, and everything we do, we do to us.
That would have to be the first rule.”
Ariel, in The Alex Crow
by Andrew Smith

Neurodiversity vs Neurodivergence

One of the brain's functions is processing information.
Folks considered neurodivergent process information differently than folks considered neurotypical. Often a neurodivergent processes some information in a way which makes them challenged by society and processes other information in a remarkable way which make them uniquely valuable to society.

Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes, feels the diversity of human cognition hidden behind diagnostic labels like Autism, ADHD, Sensory Processing Disorder, Dyslexia, and others has played an important role in the functioning and flourishing of human society for millennia.

Jenara Nerenberg, author of Divergent Mind, celebrates the burgeoning neurodiversity movement as recognizing and celebrating the diversity of brain makeups instead of pathologizing some as "normal" and others as "abnormal."

Research suggests that 40% of the world population falls into one of the categories identified as "neurodivergent".
Which suggests to me that the 60% called "neurotypical"
is merely the portion of the neurological spectrum whose particular diverse characteristics haven't been categorized yet. Once categorized, they'll be identified as neurodivergent, too.
And "neurodiversity" will be obsolete.

No one should have to struggle to "fit into" a "typical" world.
We can simply acknowledge the natural diversity of each of us.
Which lets everyone automatically fit into our diverse world.

Photo by Hal Gatewood

Identity Check

I've been thinking about the simplicity of Ramana Maharishi's teaching lately:

If you inquire ‘Who am I?’ the mind will return to its source.
As you practice this more and more, the power of the mind to remain at its source increases.

So I've been looking into my self identity, and I'm finding it's difficult to pin down.
Which seems to be the point.

I seem to be convinced there's an entity identified as David to whom the term "I" applies. But on exploration there only seems to be a prefabricated construct somewhere in my mind which espouses that conviction without evidence.
Like someone built a conceptual robot named David and gave it a home in my mind. Then it drew boundaries around the limits of its robot perceptions and made itself the ruler of that tiny, arbitrary kingdom.

But in "my" explorations "I" haven't found any geographic or conceptual limit to what "my" bodymind can experience. Which would make it a mistake to attach identity to that robot with its limited and therefore inaccurate perception of "me". ("Me," "my," and "I" seem to be meaningless in this context.)

What Ramana Maharishi seems to say is by having the robot David look for this elusive sense of identity, the robot will unravel and deconstruct its own artificial inner workings until identity disappears and only awareness remains. Not awareness of "me". Just awareness.

Like I said, it's difficult to pin down.

Photo by Noah Buscher

Copyright© 2022 David Rowland