Make Someone Happy

Fame if you win it, comes and goes in a minute.
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to
Love is the answer, Someone to love is the answer.
Make Somone Happy  /  Styne, Comden and Greene.

Where is the real stuff in life to cling to?  I have been hearing this tune for the past week in the cavern of my heart, where there are a surprising number of songs from my parent's generation.  I can't argue with the first line.  It's the third that is giving me some trouble.  Let me paraphrase

Love if you win it, comes and goes in a minute..  where's..... You get the point.  Love particularly the Love that was being promoted here, is conditional.  As a veteran of more than one marriage I can certainly endorse that.  It comes and it goes.  Or at my age it mostly does neither, but that is another story, and if it ain't the real stuff in life to cling to...then I guess it doesn't matter at this point.

So what is the real stuff in live to cling to?   Well if we are on the right track at all, then I think we can say Love that lasts.  And if it really lasts, and it doesn't check every few minutes whether you turned into an asshole, then I would call that love unconditional.

In this life, I have only seen this approached not by brotherly or otherly love, but by motherly love.  Even the most unsavory characters can often take comfort in the fact that their mother loves them.  But it is not really something you control, Is it?  I mean your mother loves you or she doesn't.  Then there is the transgender angle.  A number of transgender people that i have known have experienced traumatic interactions with their parents when they came out to them.  This I think is more likely with their fathers than their mothers from my limited sample, and in my own case, my mother and father never knew about my gender issues during their lifetimes.  Which points to the other issue with motherly love.  Presumably it ends when your mother dies.

I have been of course saving the obvious answer for last.  Unconditional Love... The Love of God.
But not so fast.   I have been recently mulling over my old Catholic roots,  And I can assure you that in that tradition .... well let me sing it for you....

God's Love if you win it comes and goes in a minute...  That is what the concept of mortal sin, and mortal sin's old friend damnation is all about.  Is it not.

And so I am left still with the unanswered question.
Where is the real stuff in life to cling to?
I am not getting any younger or smarter,  so there is a certain urgency to the question.  
Should I announce a prize for the best answer?

May I See Your Gender Identification II

There is a movement afoot to reject the gender binary.  One facet of this movement is an acknowledgement that the gender binary, may be flawed.  What is a male, and what is a female?  This determination is needed for traditional marriage, and traditional post gold medal investigations at the Olympics.  The athletic world where the perils of this common sense distinction have been well established, has taken to avoiding the issue where possible.  Wikipedia: Gender_verification_in_sports  The problems of answering this question in the case of marriage, are discussed in a very informative blog:  Intersex Roadshow.   Being raised catholic, I have looked at that perspective, and written in detail about it, on my new alternate blog, the one where I am pretentious and boring,  (Ok, more pretentious and boring):   The Other Side of That Life I've Been Living.
All these problems.  Why not just chuck the whole thing.   Recently a friend had an exchange with some young people on Fetlife.  My friend was interested in creating coalition and bonding across the generations for transgender people, perceiving a split between TOG and TNG.  The young people, most of whom descrribed themselves as Queer, or Gender Queer, seemed uninterested, because the older generation of transgender people in their opinion was poisoned by indoctrination in the gender binary.  A clear example would be folks who described themselves as transexuals, and went into a doctors care, establishing their "femaleness" to said doctors satisfaction as per legal requirements, and then were permitted sex re-assignment to the other side of the binary.  "Hooey" my young friends would have said if they know any such quaint phrases.  Secondly, they didn't regard being trans and being so very important that it needed to be worked on.   This was one of their identities,  woman, lesbian, queer being others.  They were not by their own descriptions hung up on the gender labels.

So relax Grandma....(Grandpa?)

My instincts finely honed on the generational conflicts of the 60's is to give these folks a virtual hug and a right on sister.  Not that I don't believe that there will continue to be a gender binary  centered around love and family etc. , but only that the ascendancy of this binary to relationships of power, dress, interests, car you drive, cigarette you smoke etc etc.. ad nauseum...is oppresive to everyone, not just those who straddle the gender fence.
That being said, I am clearly a creature of a culture for which the empire of gender was big, even as it was crumbling.   I femulate, and I masculinizie myself when that is required at work or with family.  In that framework, I fret and fret.   Am I looking weird at the mall.  Am I looking weird at the family re-union.  I seek help.  The philosophers provide guidance.   Free your mind. The rest will follow.