Wanting to be what we are not is the result of not accepting our limits, not accepting the reality we experience. In several contexts, some fat people who want to be thin, some Black people who want to be white, those who think they're ugly and hope to become what they think is beautiful, poor people who dream of becoming millionaires, men who want to become women, and women who want to become men are all examples of non-acceptance. The question I want to address is not about the fulfilment of what is desired, but rather to question this desire, this non-acceptance of limits, especially when we are in a society that provides the technology to fulfil any desire without having to face the psychological conflicts that they hide.

The topic of transsexuality is well addressed by the authors Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge and Natalia Pereira Travassos in their book Transsexuality - The Body between the Subject and the Science (in Portuguese Transexualidade - O Corpo entre o Sujeito e a Ciência), published by Zahar Publishing House in Brazil, which in the following excerpt expresses:

“But science, by disregarding the fact that the ultimate expression of subjectivity is the psychic conflict that necessarily underlies the issue of transsexuality, responds in a shallow way to this demand and uses its technological paraphernalia too readily to meet it. In our view, it is necessary to suspend the abrupt solutions that the discourse of science provides, which paralyse the possibility of elaborating the conflicts that individuals need to make before deliberating on the most important choices of their lives.” 1

What is being questioned here is not the satisfaction, the fulfilment of dreams or fantasy, but whether these dreams, by denying biological limits, hide problems, and value solutions, just as happens in the well-known situations in which we see individuals valuing money, power, and beauty as the keys to success and well-being. The conflict between what we have and what we want, between what we are and what we would like to be, is a conflict that reveals dissatisfaction and non-acceptance. This non-acceptance can only be transformed through questioning. Seeking what we want is not necessarily seeking the goal of what we want: countless examples show that a person doesn't want to be rich in order to accumulate money, but rather wants to be rich in order to attract other people and opportunities, and generate events and consideration, to be accepted and recognised, for example.

When a man wants to be transformed into a woman, he may just want consideration and attention; or sometimes he wants to avoid being stigmatised for his feminine mannerisms; or countless other issues and difficulties. Many women, on the other hand, may not want a beard, moustache or other signs of virility; they want freedom, uncoerced rights, physical safety, or to avoid discrimination. In short, the displacements of non-acceptance must be considered because the configurations that result from them often change.

The manipulation of desires generated by the non-acceptance of realities, the non-acceptance of oneself and the others, can be instrumentalized by economic orders through their industries, technicians and laboratories. Markets are opened up by the products offered to increase and polarize desire and satisfy the non-acceptance of limits, such as the dissatisfaction of being a man or a woman, for example, which leads to countless physical and hormonal problems, as well as requiring continually improved surgical techniques. It's almost the same as the relationship between spam and antivirus. Desire is ignited, as are the ways in which it can be realised. In this capitalization of desires, frustrations and illusions, nothing is impossible, every hope can be fulfilled. Our desires to fly may be fulfilled in the future by the existence of implanted wings that take us beyond the ground, for example.

The new world that is opening up is an ever bigger world: it satisfies needs and desires, but also cancels out difficulties that should be faced, consequently alienating man from himself. In this world, the words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, chosen by the authors of the book Transsexuality, are increasingly valid: "Man is defined by what worries him, not by what assures him".

In the attempt to expand and transform boundaries, we can be victorious, managing to change the world and ourselves, but we can also become a mass of manoeuvre for the expansion of exhausted and now revitalized markets. It all depends on how we question our own desire, our acceptance or non-acceptance of realities. There is no way to realise our humanity without questioning, without availability and transcendence. We cannot realise our humanity by being co-opted by advantages and disadvantages, by the dynamics of the system, by neutralising conflicts that allow us to be-in-the-world-with-others.

Notes

1 Transexualidade - O Corpo entre o Sujeito e a Ciência, by Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge and Natalia Pereira Travassos, Editora Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 2018, pages 47-48.