I know I am showing extreme ignorance but seeking knowledge is never as shameful as not seeking it.

Does anybody know what this impossibly ugly building in Madrid is? And whose brilliant idea it was to stick it in the midst of beautiful buildings and monuments? It looks like an ugly mushroom that tried to be a pagoda and failed miserably. In Madrid, every building is a work of art in itself. This is why it is very jarring to encounter the ugly mushroom.

When an insecurity in one’s own gender meets a profound unhappiness in one’s personal life with an attendant heavy dose of repressed aggression, transphobia happens.

Of course, it is easier to fixate on other people’s genitals than to resolve one’s own issues. But it’s a road to nowhere.

I’m watching a Spanish TV show right now about a man who is a compulsive cheater. He was married, had a daughter, kept cheating on his wife, so she kicked him out. The worst part is that the wife kept their daughter from having any contact with the father. The daughter hasn’t seen her father for 15 years.

Then the man got married to another woman, had two daughters with her, and kept cheating. So she kicked him out and told the daughters that their father was dead. The poor kids had to visit a psychologist for years.

Now they are all grown women and their father has invited them to the program to get reunited. All three daughters are extremely happy to see their father, all three say he has nothing to apologize for, all three say that their mothers will be livid when they see the show but they don’t care because they are very happy to be back in touch with their father. And the sisters are especially content to have met each other. All of this happiness has been stolen from them by selfish, self-centered mothers and a weak, pathetic father who has only dared to get in touch with his daughters now after suffering from a life-threatening disease.

It is very sad when people are so incapable of getting over their partners’ cheating that they take revenge on the children and force them to pay the price of their unhappy relationships. The really tragic part is that both mothers have long since remarried. The daughters, in the meanwhile, have continued to pay for their parents’ incapacity to be happy together 15+ years ago.

This is why I always laugh whenever I hear people mention maternal instinct. (I would also laugh if people talked about paternal instinct but that myth doesn’t really exist.) There are too many people who are incapable of noticing that their children are human beings with needs and interests of their own.