hello and welcome to philosophy tube a show about ideas tonight's idea what's it like to be transgender what would it be like to go through something like that how do trans people know it must be a pretty weird and huge thing to get your head around like really strange and different but hopefully with a happy ending in 1982 the american poet audre lorde wrote a book called sammy a new spelling of my name it's about her life how she changed over time to become the person she is it's not just an autobiography though it's what
she calls a biomythography a kind of blend of facts and history and myths with a lot of philosophy in it because she couldn't just create a work of art or jot some ideas down no she had to try and do both at the same time like a knob she talks about what it was like to be a black woman in the 40s and 50s to be a leftist during the mccarthy era and also what it was like to know she was a lesbian at a time when that was still illegal in a lot of places
and it's really really good it's one of those works of art that has quite a special place in history because black women just aren't written about in this way very often for one thing in a lot of english lit and philosophy black women just aren't even mentioned and when they are they get written about by other people in particular there's a lot of historical medical literature about black women's bodies that was written by white doctors who didn't always care what the women themselves thought but this is a black woman writing her own story and that
is pretty cool as is the fact that she focuses on her body as a sight of pleasure which is an academic way of saying this book has a lot of girls in it the fact that she describes her sexuality as a source of joy for her as opposed to men is cool and the fact that she describes herself as fat normally if we hear about a fat person's body it's portrayed as shameful or it's the before picture but audrey lord is like nope this is my story i'm not gonna let anyone else tell me who
i am anyway i really really like it i really got a sense of what life was like for her but that's the thing i learned what it was like for her to do all that stuff it was kind of at a distance because i couldn't really imagine what it would be like for me to do all that stuff and that's fine that's the kind of story it is this video is not that kind of story i'm going to show you what it's like to be transgender not what it's like for someone else no i'm gonna
show you what it would be like for you to know you were to have your whole life your memories and your identity as a person come apart disintegrate and then come together again as someone new it's a pretty weird and huge thing to get your head around like really strange and different but hopefully with a happy ending i'm going to show you what it's like in fact i've already started [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] the first video i ever made in this channel was about the 17th century french philosopher rene descartes he wanted to find
certain knowledge something he could be absolutely sure about so he decided to doubt everything like am i certain this table exists until he found out that he could not doubt that he was thinking because doubting is a kind of thinking so he was like aha i'm thinking so i must exist don't know about other people juries out on them don't know whether i really have a body because i could just be a brain in a jar like the matrix don't know about space don't know about time but i definitely have a mind i think therefore
i am and this move very much set the tone for a lot of western philosophy out of dakar's work comes loads of questions about skepticism about god about am i the only person in the world am i just a brain in a vat and about what we can really know if you've ever picked up a basic philosophy book or taken a 101 class that's all your standard bread and butter stuff for a while it very much set the tone for this channel too descartes was certain he had a mind and he had some ideas about
what kind of mind it was too a single unified detached thing separate from his body and other people and the world he even thought it wasn't made of matter like bodies are he thought it was made of special mind stuff or res coggit hands in latin big contrast to audrey lorde who like i said at the start was all about the body in fact the cart's idea of the mind is quite weird if we think about it the philosopher charles mills has pointed out that you have to be pretty secure in your life to question
whether the world and other people exist he says that if you're for example a black person in the united states like audrey lord was the question do other people exist might seem kind of frivolous because you are very used to the idea that other people control a large part of your life it seems weird to doubt that the world is there because you feel mental friction that occurs when it's difficult for you to move through it decarnt had to convince himself that other people were real but audrey lord had to convince other people that she
was she had to be like hey i'm not an object i'm a person just like you there's this famous argument in philosophy called the zombie problem which asks could there ever be such a thing that looks and behaves exactly like a human but doesn't have any internal thoughts or feelings no mind at all and it's supposed to provoke questions about consciousness but audrey lord found that's not an abstract philosophical conundrum as a black gay communist woman that's how people treated her every day like something that resembles a person but whose inner life doesn't matter descartes
also never had to convince himself that he was real he was certain of that i think therefore i am but mills points out if you're treated like that every day you will sometimes wonder maybe these people are right maybe i really am just a piece of there's a scene where the lord goes to washington dc and she's dazzled by all the monuments and the buildings and wow there's the white house where the president lives this is america this is the declaration of independence this is all men are created equal this is this is the place
where the manager of the ice cream parlor asked me to leave because i'm black this is the place where even in progressive communist meetings people exclude me because i'm a lesbian and where that kind of thing is not only allowed it's socially and legally required do i exist or not so lord puts forward a very different model of identity identity is the philosophical topic of what it's like to be for starters she's not a detached mind like descartes was like i said at the start she's very much inside her body and occasionally other people's she's
not just one individual either she's part of a web of people who shape her the white people who control her life obviously but also her friends her family her lovers affect who she becomes not in the sense that like i was straight and then i chatted to some lesbians and turned gay no but in the sense that there was some spark she saw something she loved or found intriguing in other people and over time realized that spark was recognition like whoa that's how i feel that's what i like too leonardo dicaprio pointing me she doesn't
sit alone in her chambers and learn everything about herself by examining her own mind like descartes she gets knowledge of herself from others we think therefore we are therefore i am for example here's a passage describing the first time she uh got to know a woman nothing explicit get your mind out of the gutter get your literature appreciating hats on loving ginger that night was like coming home to a joy i was meant for and i only wanted i only how i had not always known that it would be so my hands wherever i touched
felt right and completing as if i had been born to make love to this woman and i was remembering her body rather than learning it deeply for the first time so this was what i had been so afraid of not doing properly how ridiculous and far away those fears seemed now as if loving was some task outside of myself rather than simply reaching out and letting my own desire guide me i'll take that over dakar any day the other noticeable thing about lord's model of identity is that she's not just one thing the mind the
force like descartes was she's a woman and black and gay and a communist sometimes she's more one than the other depending on what she's doing and sometimes those aspects of her identity are in tension with each other like when she finds out one of her communist flatmates has been denounced by their organization for living with a lesbian there's a clash of identities there the crucial thing is these individual bits of her are not like fractures or scars on the surface of what once was whole they are the whole her identity is like a mosaic it's
not broken and stitched back together it's meant to be made up of lots of little pieces and only when you stand back and look at all of them at once do you see the whole picture and this affects her political philosophy too nowadays a lot of people think of identity politics as focusing on one particular aspect of a person like say race and forgetting everything else but actually the term identity politics was coined by black feminists in the 70s and it was meant to be like what lord is saying our political identity is a mosaic
it's not just about gender or race or sexuality or class it's about all of them at once and that was key to the ideas they put forward lord says as a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who i should be that is how i learned that if i didn't define myself for myself i would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive my poetry my life my work my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless i pretended to
match somebody else's norm [Music] the 17th century english philosopher john locke said that memory was one very important thing if not the most important thing for determining whether someone is the same person over time and a lot of philosophers since then have agreed with him he famously said that if a prince had all his memories transferred into the body of a cobbler then the body has changed but he's still the same person so i guess it's an interesting choice by lord to not write an autobiography but a biomythography these are her memories but there's also
other stuff in here too like bits of poetry and there's myths and bits of history that she wasn't there for and some stuff that's ambiguous like there's this one moment in chapter three where she says she was five years old and legally blind when i was five years old and still legally blind i started school in a psych conservation class in the local public school on 125th street and lennox avenue on the corner was a blue wooden booth where white women gave away free milk to black mothers with children i used to long for some
harst free milk fund milk in those cute little bottles with their red and white tops so she says she was legally blind but then describes a bunch of colors if we interpret this as trying to record accurate memories then what we learn is that she was legally blind but she actually could see at least some stuff and then later on in the book she gets glasses but especially in light of the other stuff she said about not letting other people define her we could read it another way legally she is one thing but actually that's
wrong and she's not that thing at all it's a subtle poetic way of telling us that she is the authority on her life even when other people are telling her what she can and can't do i think this blend of facts and poetry makes quite an important philosophical point about memory think of something that happened to you when you were 10 say and think of yourself as a 20 year old remembering that thing right and now there's you as you are remembering both the 10 year old and the 20 year old all three versions of
you remember the same thing the same facts but the memories aren't just factual they contain attitudes the 10 year old remembers something as exciting the 20 year old remembers something as maybe cringy or naive and then there's you as you are now well you could look back on the memory with nostalgia or all sorts of feelings [Music] i think lord really makes that clear that remembering something is an act of interpretation and that makes me wonder if you remember things from your life [Music] what if your interpretation of that thing has changed would that make
you a different person the first video i ever made in this channel was about the 17th century french philosopher rene descartes that was seven years ago i've been making the show now for seven years my entire twenties i look back and i definitely made those videos it was me but at the same time i look back and i have all these memories and it's kind of hard to know how to interpret them a while ago some kid came up to me after a live event and said you've been a masculine role model for me you
showed me a masculine man that i felt i wanted to be in the past few years a lot of people have said that [Music] and it's always felt strange it's always felt like they were talking about someone else it's the weirdest feeling i don't know if i can really explain it but it's like every time i see myself on the screen or even in the mirror i'm not sure i'm really there [Music] i don't know if i'm real [Music] it's like it's a different person not a bad person not someone i wouldn't want to be
like i'm just like oh there he is that handsome devil he looks chill whoever he is it's just this face and this body it's not who i was expecting [Music] but then i go out and people talk to me like i am him and i just sort of pretend i am i suppose the man who isn't there i do want to be like him i want to have whatever virtues that kid who came up to me thought i had i want to be like my dad and my brothers and have their intelligence and compassion but
those things aren't masculine anyone can have them to me pretending to be this man is like living in the trenches going to war every day if you've followed my channel for a while in particular if you've seen my episodes on mental health you'll know that i have been through some i've had suicide attempts self-harm body issues abuse trauma that's just the stuff i've mentioned on camera and i always try to soldier on and even when i'm not in the trenches even when i'm in the line in the bar somewhere miles from the front i can't
relax because i know tomorrow i've got to go right back out there the war never ends i can't put that rifle down because if i do and people did brave things in the trenches they wrote beautiful poetry about what it was like but it's no way to live sooner or later there has to be peace i think i'm dying in fact i feel like i've been dead for years i don't know if i can face another 60 years of this no not youtube i don't mean youtube jesus christ can you imagine if i'm still doing
this when i'm 80. no i mean pretending to be this i've been unhappy for a long time no that's not right i haven't allowed myself to be happy there was some spark that i found intriguing and that i loved in other people and that for as long as i can remember i would not allow myself to recognize i thought i can't leave this war it's impossible it's not allowed so i i just carried on pretending because it seemed to make everyone else happy at least i mean it's a hell of a role i won't deny
i have enjoyed it at times i've had the muscles and i've had the beard the success and the beautiful partners and that's all great if it's what you want but jesus christ it's not me i think i have to leave i'm sure civilian life will be quite the adjustment it's gonna be hard in some ways i'm i'm sad to be leaving but if i don't change now i don't know how much longer i'll live and i would regret not changing every day until the end i really hope that kid who came up to me said
i was a masculine role model won't feel like i've let him down too much it's been a privilege performing for you all literally i've always wanted to cultivate an audience that was kind and curious and open-minded and i really hope this doesn't change the way you see me in some ways i'll always be here in the last seven years of videos all the old ones if you want to see me then that's where i'll be as a performance a character on the screen the man who isn't there whatever happens i am incredibly grateful especially to
all the people who support me on patreon i really hope that you'll continue to support this show and the person who will be here after i'm gone thank you very much you have been a wonderful audience [Music] something happened on the day he died the spirit rose and stepped aside somebody else took his place [Music] i'm so glad i don't have to do the voice anymore okay hello my name is abigail thorne i'm the creator of philosophy tube i do a lot of characters and visual metaphor and stuff on the show so for the final
part of today's episode i wanted to drop the act and for once just to explain to you what's going on so first of all this is not a joke this is not a performance it's not part of the theater this is real i'm transgender if you've seen any philosophy tube before you might have known me by a different name but off camera all my friends and family call me abigail or abby or abs and everything i own is under that name all my id says miss abigail thorne and female and she went to the shops
to pick up her groceries i've been deliberately hiding it on this show for a long time i mean i think i started writing this script about a year ago almost as soon as we set up the cameras i change my clothes and i change my body language and i've been wearing big jackets to hide my breasts and i talk like this but actually this is the real me this is my coming out video behind the scenes i've been doing all the legal stuff and being on waiting lists which is a whole other story but now
i'm coming out although i suppose i actually came out ages ago i just didn't tell you so that's the first thing i'm actually a woman cool the second is some of you are probably thinking transgender sorry what is that and maybe you've heard about people being born in the wrong body [Music] when other people write about us that's often how they put it and it's kind of an old-fashioned idea now the way it works for me is when i was born they said it's a boy and this huge social and legal mechanism kicked into gear
there were official documents with boy written on them i was sent to a boys school at the age of five i was legally boy okay and have you ever had a crappy job that just really wears you down and sometimes it's all right but it just starts to get to you and that upset leaks into other areas of your life you're tired all the time but you also can't sleep and you're anxious and depressed and irritable and one day your partner turns on some music and you blow up at them you go can you turn
that off for five minutes i hate this song and then you go i'm sorry it's not really you i'm angry at it's it's this job it's really killing me i pretend like it's all right when i'm there but i just i can't do it anymore and i don't know if i can get a job doing anything else i don't know if i'm qualified if anyone else is even hiring so i don't know what i'm going to do but i know that a lot of other people would kill to have this job and i know i
wish i could just get on with it but i can't because it's not the right job for me well that's what it was like for me having to live as boy imagine that but instead of your job it's your whole life including your body all the time and then one day you pluck up the courage to quit that crappy job and it's rough for a while you try a few different things but eventually you get a new job where you're happy and fulfilled and they work you hard but it's okay and it doesn't solve all
your problems overnight but you start to sleep a little bit better your mental health starts to improve the people who love you say wow you you really seem like you're in a much better place i'm i'm really happy for you your relationships start clicking again and then one day you hear that same song on the radio and you go you know what i actually kind of like this that's what this is like and it's incredible i never thought i never thought that i could be so simply happy it's amazing the old job was hard but
this ah it's like i was made for it which of course i was because despite being legally blind i could still see all the colors and that's pretty much it were you expecting me to tell you about my childhood a little bit something like um oh ever since i was five years old i tried on my mother's dress and i knew i should have been called wendy that's kind of what you were expecting wasn't it a little bit that's okay that's valid i could tell you stories like that when other people write about us that's
often the kind of thing they write the parents the childhood it's very freudian plus things like surgery and hormones whenever other people write about being trans they usually focus on the suffering sometimes we do too but it's never like the suffering of not having a job or equal rights which a lot of us don't no people don't want to hear about that they want to hear like tell me about how you played with barbie dolls and were you bullied at school and how do you have sex and when are you having the surgery and that's
all hunky-dory i'm not saying that's bad but like audre lorde i wanted to tell my own story today to put forward my own philosophy of identity i don't want you to think about my body as a site of surgical intervention and pain because yeah those things might be part of my life but actually my primary experience of my body now is relaxation and comfort i don't want to give you the big monologue that you might have been expecting about how ashamed and disgusted i am with myself because my yeah sometimes but not today i'm actually
a little bit proud of being trans i've done something that's difficult and it's a little bit different but it makes me happy and it doesn't hurt anyone else so cool i've read enough feminist philosophy to know that being female is no less worthy than being male and i've read enough history to know that people like me have existed in all cultures across all recorded time so my identity is grounded not in the things that bring me pain or that other people do to me but in the things that i love and in the places that
i feel at home to paraphrase a great trans woman and a dear old friend i look inside myself and ask do i feel like a man or a woman and the answer is i feel happy i wish that i could end today's video there and that is the end of the philosophy but there's one more thing i need to add unfortunately in my country the uk trans people don't have equal rights yet it's a pretty big political controversy here at the moment and because of my existing following by coming out i have now instantly become
one of the most recognizable trans people in britain hooray i'm the transgender princess of turf island but seriously though with great platform comes great responsibility and so there are some things that i need to say to my regular audience and potentially also the press so i will record a separate little message that i will upload elsewhere and i'll put it on all my social media but hey if you're just here to have some fun and learn some philosophy why i'm a woman now i've got some great episodes planned for this year patreon.com philosophytube is where
you can sign up to help me make the show and i will see you next time [Music] with your head bye in sand i think all the [Music] [Applause] [Music] you're chances kinda stupid [Music] no matter how far [Music] keep coming back [Music] you got a hard [Music] in any case [Music] feel it all day [Music] oh [Music] guys [Music] with all emotions running wild i think i can't breathe for the very first time with all emotions running wild i think i can breathe for the very first time with all emotions running while you mean
it i'll feel it all [Music] [Applause] [Music] one [Music] you
