Voyager Beyond Gender
--
This magazine and the stunning images it contained probably saved my life in Janurary 1980.
I came awfully near to suicide after plunging into a masculinizing puberty i dreaded. There are no words to describe the terror and sense of helplessness, defeat and hopelessness that one feels as one’s body marches inexorably towards the acquisition of secondary sex characteristics that one feels are deeply wrong. I just wanted out.
But, aside from gender dysphoria and sexual abuse, my puberty was defined by a planet. By 15, it was becoming apparent to me that i had better than average mathematical and physics understanding, and then at the beginning of my 17th year, 1980, i saw this magazine. I wept uncontrollably at the photos i saw within, i had never wept so much and i had never seen anything so sublime as the exquisite subtlety of color and the delicacy of the swirls of the clouds of Jupiter. The Great Red Spot is a storm that has raged since before the time of Galileo! Just imagine that! I was overcome with crashing waves of emotion at the beauty of what i saw, the dizzying realization that it came from a tiny, vulnerable spacecraft unimaginably far from human affairs put together by thoroughly ordinary but at the same time thoroughly extraordinary people, the realization that there was a whole World beyond humans and gender, and, also, with my understanding of mathematics and physics, the sublime descriptive languages that Nature Herself has granted us of Herself , a feeling of obligation to answer Her with the abilities that She had granted me. An obligation to keep going and live, even as i just wanted to die and end the pain i felt.
That sense of obligation, when i had decided i just wanted out, was probably, in hindsight, what made me cry the hardest. That’s why i chose physics. When one grows into the wrong body, one feels untrue to one’s self, and intimacy is very hard, if not impossible, without sincerity. But i, although quiet and valuing solitude, am an intensely social person. I adore people and their stories, and i yearned for intimacy, but my circumstance denied me it. So i turned to the one intimate relationship that was left for me: that with Nature Herself. Fundamental Science is about listening to Her. Dispelling all one’s preconceptions and prejudices, stilling one’s thoughts and delving into the meaning of what She, through bare experimental results, tells us. The practice of science is often highly political and deeply tainted by hubris, but the true essence of science is humility, an understanding that we humans are not the center of everything. This was intensely comforting for someone born in the wrong body. Science brought me comforting humility and it showed me the profound beauty of worlds — in the sense of fields of study as well as literal planets — where gender has no meaning and whose beauty is independent of us humans and whether we even exist at all.
And so i became, like that vulnerable little spacecraft, which is still talking to us 42 years later and probing the edge of interstellar space, a voyager beyond gender. And this kept my pain to bearable levels for a long time.
A most wonderful documentary to see about the Voyager missions and the vision and passion of those behind them is “The Farthest”
And, as for Jupiter itself, it is a mysterious place. My fave fact about Jupiter is that it is so big that, if you throw stuff into it (like Comet Shoemaker Levy, as happenned on the 16th and 22nd of July 1994) the planet actually shrinks. For smaller planets like the Earth, adding to them makes them bigger, as one would intuitively at first expect. But this weird fact of Jupiter is not too hard to seem plausible. If you squeeze anything hard enough, it will in the end compress. The pressure forces at Jupiter's core of metallic hydrogen arise from its self gravitation. If one adds to the planet, these forces are increased. And the core is so prodigiously compressed that the matter there has reached a strange state where the shrinking owing to the increased gravitation is bigger than the volume of the matter that is added to the planet.
