Dao De Jing literally opens with,
道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。
"The way that can be followed is not the unchanging way; the name that can be called is not the unchanging name."
If that wasn't trans enough, one translation renders the immediately following line as, "With your mouth unopened, things left undefined, you stand at the beginning of the universe; make definitions, and you are the measure of all creation" - although this seems like a pretty deviant translation from the original text.
Here's how Le Guin's version renders these parts, just for fun:
The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real nameHeaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.Google translate has a different take:
Road to Road, very Avenue. Famous, very famous
I now understand how people thought the CPC announced a ban on femboys
To be fair, it's much better for modern Chinese (most of the time) but this being so old and poetic yeah it just has no idea what to do with it lol
Google translate barely works for modern Chinese. and this is a company where half the employees have names like "Charlie Huang". Biggest Bazinga L.
It works pretty okay at very stuffy formal stuff but it's pretty bad at informal speech, in my experience
lmao
道可道 the path you can take
非常道 is not the usual path道 means road/path/way
可 means can道可道 means the path/way you can go/take
非 means not, 常 by itself means normal/conventional/usual, but 非常 together means very (lit. unusual but common usage simply means “very”)
the translator interpreted it as 非常 道 “very road” lol when it should be 非 常道 “not the normal/conventional path”
名 means name
名可名 the name you can name
非常名 is not the usual name
The way you can go isn't the real way. The name you can say isn't the real name
NONBINARY REP LETS GOOOO
The gender that can be labeled is not the unchanging expression
for me it was a strong dose of ketamine and Nyx told me I was trans while floating in a beautiful cosmic void
I had the same talk with Nyx, but she told me that I'm 110% a white cis man. Void was p nice tho
I needed somebody to tell me it was not a kink and then 4 years of dealing with little Hitler's little Helpers that gatekeep the shit out of it
Shit, I did the same shit back in the day. Where's my helpful vision?!
Best I got was a half-coherent toilet telling me my life was following the same path as the log I just flushed.
For me, the thing that sealed my transition was a depression trip. A few years ago, I had just come to terms with being trans and came out to my girlfriend. Being a cis person, she didn't take it well. Rough month. I was having second thoughts about transitioning just because of how awful my social environment was for transitioning. Well the night before my first family dinner after accepting I'm trans, my birthday dinner, I dropped molly, just ate shrooms out of the jar when I had pounds at any given point, and took a random amount of acid tabs from a full sheet. I took an insane amount of shit, I have no idea how I maintained any sort of lucidity. Terrible idea, don't do it. Track your doses, and Most of the trip was hellish and depressing. However, there was one moment in the middle of it that was completely life changing. I had been bawling my eyes out all night because I just felt the pressure of never being accepted as my chosen gender. I looked in the mirror (also usually a terrible idea on trips) and didn't see what I expected to see. I saw an insanely beautiful woman staring back at me in the mirror. Long curly hair, brown eyes, bright red cheeks, freckles, she was me! I wasn't seeing who I was in that moment, but I saw the woman that I wanted to become, and realized that it was perfectly attainable. I spent at least an hour just staring at myself in the mirror during that trip, I was completely entranced by the idea of that being what I looked like on the inside.
As a child, I always imagined this girl with a flowy dress standing next to dried bush, with the overcast of an early October afternoon. I always thought that was my dream woman, but in that moment in the bathroom, I realized it had always been me. I was imagining who I wanted to be.
