So, as I sit here, rocking slowly in my old porch swing, old-blue sleeping deeply at my feet after rounding up the sheep and working the meat off the bone Ma set out for him from our supper, there's something nagging at my mind. As the red sun sinks at last into the hills of gold, while drawing pensively on my evening pinch of tobacco, my mind keeps drifting off the remaining demands of the evening before I retire to my armchair beside the Philco and catch the next episode of The Shadow.
I can't stay focused on anything right now because I can't stop thinking about sex.
My sentimental-journey introduction aside, I really do believe that we carry biases and prejudices of all kinds throughout our lives. Things we learned as children through observation and societal dictates gradually evolve and change over the years, to a point where we start to think perhaps the good old days really are better than those that lie ahead. I myself have had multiple experiences wherein my own inherent and unconscious biases have been challenged. And in many cases I've had to learn something new. To grow. To evolve.
The past couple of decades have witnessed numerous changes in our society, some of which I championed from day one, and others that struck me as extreme. I'll be the first to admit, for example, that when the tides turned on TV and more and more shows suddenly started having a "token" gay character, my joke-du-jur was that I didn't care what people did with their dicks behind closed doors but I didn't want it shoved down my throat. I though it was funny at the time. I still do, in hindsight, because it is. And it was said without malice.
But there was a point where it all did get annoying. it felt formulaic and forced on me. As if it was just inherently necessary, relevant or not to the plot of a show, that there be a gay character. And so it got old. So old, in fact, that I stopped caring or paying attention and just accepted it as the new norm.
And that's likely exactly how a society changes. It's not something I've thought of much, but my momentary discomfort at a transition of this nature is perhaps akin to the experience of integration to a southerner who's only known segregation. Or a settlement of east coast pioneer families adapting to the changes that the railroads and chinese labor brought to their culture. The comparison are endless. You can likely pick any point in the history of any society and find numerous instances wherein old world and new worlds continously collide. Wherein the morays and beliefs of the waning generation make way for the changes a new one brings into existence.
A discussion came up with my daughter tonight about a friend of hers that's biologically female but choses to identify as male. OK. So, that's a particular change I've been exposed to over the course of the past few years, along with the #metoo movement, and I have read/listened to a few books including "Invisible Women" and "Men Tell Me Things" that have been eye opening. My SO has just started on and is raving about Melinda Gates' "The Moment of Lift", which it next on my Audible list. And all of this has opened my eyes to the inherent ignorance, stupidity and outright atrocity that has been the ingrained gender bias of our society within prior and current generations.
I can't imagine this next comment is a new thought, but as the dialog about my daughter's friends' gender came about, being that she was choosing to identify as a he, it struck me. Choosing a pronoun is treating the symptom, not the root cause. The root problem is not which identify you might want to be associated with. The problem is simply that it your gender matters at all, in any capacity, whatsoever. The problem is that you would NEED to identify as anything other than a human being.
As long as our society is one in which a human being is treated differently due to not just the presence of a penis or a vagina but also based on a gender selection, we have not solved the problem. We are not evolving. We're just modifying the rules of the game, instead of stopping the game altogether.
Let's dissect this in the simplest terms. The only reason I can see somebody wanting to "choose" a gender identity is because doing so will enable them to somehow act or function or be treated specific to that gender choice. So, in a stereotypically judgemental scenario, if I want to live my life as a more emotionally centered person who wears "women's" clothing and wants to be offered a man's seat on a crowded bus, I should choose female? If I want to feel more aggressive and boisterous, or dominant, If I want a better salary or inclusion in a testosterone dominated field, and to feel free to swear more in public, and slam down beers at a ball game, I should choose male?
How does that make any sense? What, exactly, does selecting a gender buy us?
Our biology is not our identify. Why should we have to select one of two options at all? Why can't we all just be people... and stop there. Same pay, same rights, same respect, same freedom, same opportunities, same everything. Across the board.
In a truly free and completely equal society, gender should not need to be a choice anybody feels a compulsion to have to make.