Sakia Campert – the Netherlands
Saskia Campert
Introduction by the author
I wrote the article below some time ago. Must admit, the subject is rather difficult, but I felt I had to write it since I have personally witnessed that having one’s body rebuilt is not always as simple and joyful as it is sometimes presented.
More than 20 years ago, Joyce was a delightful young woman who lived next door. At one point in time she concluded that she would rather be a man. She came over to our house telling us cheerfully about her decision and promised to keep us informed regarding her progress. In those days this was a new phenomenon for us, so we followed her with great interest. One operation after another followed, her breasts were removed and her vagina was folded out to form a penis, etc. Joyce was a small, slender woman, so John (the new name) became a small, slender man. In order to turn more masculine, going to the gym regularly seemed to be the solution. The result of a lot of training: the tendons (i.e. the tissues that connect the muscles to the bones) couldn’t handle those stronger muscles and tore , causing much painful suffering and disappointment.
John ended up walking with crutches. It slowly became clear to him that he was forced to take hormones for the rest of his life. If he wouldn’t do that his body was simply going to return to its initial shape. That obviously would be traumatic due to all the surgeries he had undergone. It also turned out that the men at the office where he worked as an accountant did not really consider him to be a man. In short, a complete disillusion. He realized that he was only accepted within a small so called 'progressive circle'. After a while, it all became too much for him. He started working less because he was often very tired but also confused.
When we moved to France we lost contact with John.
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The beauty of theosophical teachings is that they are ancient yet useful in hypermodern circumstances. Living from a theosophical base, I have support from ancient wisdom to make sense of life today. Herewith a tentative attempt to come to grips with the new thinking on gender/sex/gender choice. Is it confusion, a fad created by medical developments or a new step in the evolution of humanity?
Until recently, children were taught that people are born with two X chromosomes or with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. People with two X chromosomes developed female sex organs, while people with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome developed male sex organs. The sex organs produce hormones: estrogens in women and testosterone in men. Among other things, these determine what a fully grown human being looks like physically.
The world was clear: everyone had a clear place in society as a man or woman from puberty onward. Sporadically there were congenital physical abnormalities, e.g. part of the sex organ is missing or not functioning. Medical intervention could usually correct these problems. Deviant behaviors or feelings (e.g., transvestism, homophilia, exhibitionism, pedophilia or zoophilia) were frowned upon and/or prohibited.
New thinking
In the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, major upheavals are taking place in the Western world (North America and EU). Growing economies, increased prosperity and an educated and empowered population are at the root of this. Self-determination and individuality are becoming core values. Liberation movements are becoming explicitly committed to groups and individuals outside the established order. Much of the focus is on class, racial and female discrimination, but in its wake other groups (LGBTQIAP+) (1) are swept along. The latter group lived a hidden existence until then, but is starting to raise its profile.
Sexual relations are changing: intercourse between husband and wife is changing from an almost sacred act to conceive offspring to a cozy leisure activity, with the connection to parenthood disappearing completely. The freedom gained invites experimentation, because any pleasure eventually ends in boredom, creating a search for new and more exciting pleasure.
Meanwhile, in the Western world, one's sexual preference in which the man remains a man and the woman remains a woman is accepted by a large part of the population. The idea is that there are now female men and male women. Respect for the individual and the freedom to be yourself are central to this.
In recent years we are increasingly confronted with the idea that human beings can actually change their gender through hormone treatments and surgery. As a result many people are becoming confused, misunderstood and criticized. On this latest development I am trying to shine a light.
Man-woman theosophical view
Ancient wisdom teaches us (in a nutshell) that man is more than the physical being that most of us think we are. At his deepest core, man is a god-spark (atman in Sanskrit), temporarily residing in a body on earth. After the death of the body, this god-spark goes into rest, only to return to a body on earth at a later time. In this view, our body is merely the temple in which our deepest inner being temporarily resides. This god spark (pure consciousness) is neither male nor female.
The genesis of present-day man is approached differently from Theosophy than from the current Darwinian view. The first “man,” according to theosophical teachings many millions of years ago, was no more than an astral projection, which reproduced through cell division. In small steps, humanity developed further. From astral shadows to gelatinous beings, which reproduced by fanning seeds or sweat drops. It wasn't until about 18 million years ago that the faculty of thought awoke and the split of the sexes occurred. We began to reproduce as we do today. The Bible refers to these developments with the story of Adam and Eve (the serpent as a symbol of budding thinking capacity and the creation of woman from man's rib as a symbol of the split of the sexes).
Now that we have lived in this situation for millions of years, evolution can be expected to advance and new forms for humanity to come into view. In the foreseeable future (billions of years), man is expected to develop more senses than the five we have today, the physical differences between man and woman will diminish, and the method of reproduction will change. How all this will take shape is shrouded in mists, but the ancient rishis spoke seriously about this. So for now we have to make do with the present situation.
Who are we really?
Theosophy offers a sevenfold view of man, distinguishing (in short) between our physical body, our astral body, our thoughts/emotions and the immortal sexless god-spark/atman. At the end of our earthly life, we gradually lose all the aforementioned bodies and only our god-spark will continue to travel. More clearly, in fact, we are this god spark and the rest are no more than “temporary shells.
So first of all it is important to realize that we are not our bodies, not our thoughts, not our emotions. This is easy to understand because you can look at these entities....and what you can look at is not yourself. After all, you know your body, you know your thoughts, you know your emotions, etc. You are the one who is “watching” all this and therefore separate from it. You are the watching genderless consciousness.
For young people, this awareness is very important, because at puberty we are introduced to our changing bodies and unfamiliar new thoughts/emotions. As long as we realize that we are not that body or those emotions, there is no problem. We stand apart from it, look at it and learn to deal with it. So did many generations before us.
However, if we forget who we really are (atman) and start identifying with our body or with our emotions, we can become confused. If the emotions are not happy with the body, we want to adjust our body, which can have drastic and often unrecoverable consequences when hormone treatments and surgical intervention are decided upon.
Peace with your temporary housing
How we look is not a coincidence but, according to theosophical teachings, is closely related to karmic influences from past lives. We chose our parents ourselves, and our physical body is built around the astral body that is already established before our birth. This astral body continues to accompany us during our journey on this earth. Well-known are the stories of people who feel pain in a leg that has been amputated. The reason is that the body part is still present in the astral body. Adepts, like Mrs. Blavatsky, (she always considered herself just a student), can use their astral body to grasp or remove objects. This shows that it plays an important role in our earthly life. It is our second body, is stronger than our physical body and determines its form.
Dissatisfaction with the body assigned to us has been on the rise in recent years. Of course, by no means everyone is happy with the house they have to live in. Puberty is therefore a period in which one traditionally learns to deal with this. Realizing that our bodies fit exactly with our current level of personal evolution can provide a release from negative feelings. It also always helps to remember that we are not our body at all; we are only its temporary occupant.
Control over thoughts and emotions
Life becomes a lot more pleasant when we recognize that we are not guided by our thoughts and emotions, but that we are in control of them. Our eternal self (atman) is the detached neutral observer of what happens in our mind. Some practice ensures that we are no longer slaves to our emotions, but are in control of them. Thus, we avoid stepping onto slippery ice and - instead of courageously and steadfastly following the path karma has laid out for us - pursuing illusions in the vain hope of dramatically improving our lives. I am not promoting phlegmatic fatalism, but a real view of life.
Preliminary conclusion
As far as I can see at present, the new trend to question your gender stems from a combination of the three causes mentioned in the first paragraph of this text.
Confusion because we do not sufficiently realize who we really are and, relatedly, the mistaken idea that our thoughts and emotions guide and determine our lives. According to the Eastern schools, how you feel depends on how much control you have over your emotions. In that view, allowing yourself to be carried away by them indicates weakness and leads to confusion.
With the medical advances that can make many of our dreams a reality, we are tempted to realize some dreams without realizing that we are too small as human beings to change our karma. Problems that we do not overcome but bypass will, according to ancient wisdom, return irrevocably until we have learned to overcome them. So it is better to tackle them right now and face reality. After all, you are who you must be now by virtue of your karma.
Finally, perhaps we can also see this new trend as a rather premature first step on our evolutionary path, where developments are expected by seers that will change the relationship m/f in the distant future. Now a days humans are impatient and convinced that the world is makeable. Quietly waiting for future evolutionary steps are therefore considered unacceptable. They, haughty as they are, prefer to take their destiny into their own hands.
I do hope these reflections are an inspiration to those trying to understand the new developments in gender and gender identification.
Footnote:
(1) An explanation of the letters: Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer (doesn’t fit a box), Intersex, A-sexual, Pansexual and + (stands for all other genders not mentioned). More than fifty genders are now clearly defined, while this group continues to expand.
[This article was also published in Dutch inTHEOSOFIA, the March 2025 issue. Theosofia is the official periodical of the Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society.]