Later
that same workout, we were both over by the freeweights at the same time, and
started chatting between sets.
I asked
him if he was teaching any the upcoming term, and it turns out that he was a
teaching assistant for a basic psychology course, and so I told him that I had
been reading a ton on the history of sex change surgery in the U.S. and I started
asking him about the effects of testosterone and estrogen on human behavior,
and he started telling me that biology and psychology are now in conversation
more than they used to be etc. etc. etc.
“I just
finished a book,” I was like, “about a set of twins where the one lost his dick
in a tragic circumcision accident, so they raised him as a girl.”
“That
must have not turned out well,” the Bulgarian psychology Ph.D. student was like.
“It
didn’t,” I said.
“Of
course not,” he responded.
He then
started telling me about some East German women athletes who they pumped so
full of testosterone to compete, that one even has a moustache to this day and
looks like a man, he recently saw pictures of her when she was old.
“She was
totally a man,” he was like, “Completely.
And she didn’t even want that, they began to give her testosterone, and
she did not know.”
“Well,”
I was like, “It just goes to show you, we should all be Buddhists.”
At that,
he seem dismayed.
“We
think we have control over everything, but we really don’t, even our bodies can
betray us, even in ways that we would never expect,” I was like.
He kind
of looked at me, open-eyed.
“Hey,” I
was like, “Inner peace, it’s a necessity.”
Then, I
added, “We need to be prepared.”
Then, I
went off to go work on my pecs.
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