Cis people's gender dysphoria: when others' gender identity doesn't align with their gender expectations

“The first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power (1032)

I'm not really addressing the main point of the post here...
just a small observation

Ego is not really a bad translation in this context, since it's Latin for "I", just as ich is its German counterpart...

(Interestingly, this is also what happened with Freud... the translator(s) translated das Ich as 'ego'; and likewise, das Es as 'id', das Über-Ich as 'super-ego')


But the noscript of the first (1907) English translation, as The Ego and His Own, is of course a bad translation... since Stirner was talking about der Einzige — 'the unique one' — and it's very different from the ego/I/ich...

It also contributed to a misunderstanding of his (anti-)philosophy, since what he valued more in his writing was ownness (die Eigenheit) rather than a more vague notion of egoism... the latter concept, conflated with the colloquial meaning of ego(t)ism, contributed to the misunderstanding that Stirner advocated a narrow egoism


As for Marx, it was typical of him to strawman his opponents with petty arguments

passive nihilism, capitalism

“We few or many who again dare to live in a dismoralized world, we pagans in faith: we are probably also the first to grasp what a pagan faith is:—to have to imagine higher creatures than man, but beyond good and evil; to have to consider all being higher as also being immoral. We believe in Olympus—and not in the ‘Crucified’.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power (1034)

When Fichte says, “the ego* is all”, this seems to harmonize per­fectly with my thesis. But it is not that the ego is all, but the ego destroys all, and only the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the – finite ego is really I. Fichte speaks of the “absolute” ego, but I speak of me, the transitory ego.

* das Ich – the “I”

People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to the human because I am – man. This is the Christian magic circle. Fichte's ego too is the same essence outside me, for every one is ego; and, if only this ego has rights, then it is “the ego”, it is not I. But I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego: I am unique. Hence my wants too are unique, and my deeds; in short, everything about me is unique. And it is only as this unique I that I take every thing for my own, as I set myself to work, and develop myself, only as this. I do not develop men, nor as man, but, as I, I develop – myself.

This is the meaning of the – unique one [Einzigen].

— Max Stirner

“The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

liberal democracy, social contract

Stirner here destroys the concept of a social contract—without even specifically mentioning it—by striking at its root: the concept of duty itself

And of course, social contract is a most obvious lie, it is baseless liberal nonsense

to be more precise...

"Hinduism is not a religion, it is a way of life"

“Beggars. — Beggars ought to be abolished: for one is vexed at giving to them and vexed at not giving to them.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (185)

“Business people. — Your business – is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business – but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (186)

Gender Obsession Disorder

I trust that the defenders of gender binarism will ultimately lose. But at present, they keep fanning what I’ve called a gender obsession disorder: an excessive, even pathological concern with making sure that men and women remain discernibly different.

Those most obsessed with gender differences seem to believe that the slightest blurring of the binary between men and women will result in the end of civilization. This is why the ‘gendervariant’ pay such a high price, why they’re scrutinized not just at high-security venues such as airports and subways, but also at work and school, in restaurants and locker rooms, and in the general flow of daily life.

— Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings (chapter 3)

“Rightful, or legitimate, property of another will be only that which you are content to recognize as such. If your content ceases, then this property has lost legitimacy for you, and you will laugh at the absolute right to it.”

— Max Stirner

Feuerbach, in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, is always harping upon being [das Sein]. In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for ‘being’ is abstraction, as is even ‘the I’. Only I am not abstraction alone: I am all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing: I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns the own, mine [das Meinige] — ‘opinion [Meinung]’. ‘Absolute thinking’ is that which forgets that it is my thinking, that I think, and that it exists only through me. But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change, annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach wants to smite Heg­el's ‘absolute thinking’ with unconquered being. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is my being, as the other is my thinking.

— Max Stirner

human nature

Every hierarchical, authoritarian system is a death machine, rooted in ressentiment and perpetuates itself through it...
A cancer...
All they do ultimately is kill life, both literally and figuratively...

Only those spirits vigorously full of life can bring the death machine to an end, so that life may flourish... so that we all may thrive

Every (wanna-be) authority, every (wanna-be) cop, every fascist manifests this desire for death within them... their will too weak to overcome it, too weak to affirm life... (but there is nothing essentialist about it, one can overcome this condition)

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’; for instance, ‘I think,’ or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, ‘I will’; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that ‘immediate certainty,’ as well as ‘absolute knowledge’ and the ‘thing in itself,’ involve a contradictio in adjecto;* we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘I’ [ego], and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I think,’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.”

In place of the ‘immediate certainty’ in which the people may believe in the given case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: “Whence did I get the notion of ‘thinking’? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘ego,’ and even of an ‘ego’ as cause, and finally of an ‘ego’ as cause of thought?” He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, “I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain”—will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. “Sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?”

* Latin: a logical inconsistency between a noun and its modifier

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (16)

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ One thinks;* but that this ‘one’ [es] is precisely the famous old ‘ego,’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty.’ After all, one has even gone too far with this ‘one thinks’—even the ‘one’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—“To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently”... It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating ‘power,’ the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates—the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this ‘earth-residuum’ [Erdenrest], and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little ‘one’ (to which the worthy old ‘ego’ has refined itself).

* es denkt — another translator (Marion Faber) interprets this as ‘there is thinking’

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the ‘free will’ owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (17, 18)