The issue is how I, how you, how people think: about themselves, the people they know and everyone else. It is something that society dictates to us and it is something we are raised as and in. It is the source of a lot of the division in society, inequity and personal strife. It is also the focus of violence in many many countries, I suspect all countries, but I am not sure there might be one country out there that that has none of these issues, it might be in Scandinavia.
What a great build up, Eh? Most people think that there are only two possibilities, but what I, and some other people propose is that there are two spectrums and one polar position, and the combination gives us the focus of the strife. I am suggesting that people, all people, are on each spectrum and are in one polar position. The simple term is Gender, but there are three wrapped up in that one word: Gender, Sexuality and Sex.
Sex is the easiest one, usually. We are all one or the other. It is dependent on whether you have a Y chromosome or not, but there are a few abnormalities, hermaphrodites and mutations like two penises, and internal testes. Usually there is one working sex, that is what Sex is represented by, nothing else. The vast majority of people are female or male.
Sexuality is something that may be drawing to a close in societies understanding, the information is out there, and there are a lot of people that are accepting and more people that are not, but I say it is drawing to a close, because people are talking about it and reacting to it. People want to make it about one or the other but not both. Truthfully, most people are okay with people who are one or the other, but are not okay with both. Most. Most is the wrong word. There are a lot of people that are not okay with anything other than heterosexuality. But it is a spectrum, not a polar position, once you accept this, you are a better person. There something called the Kinsey Scale, where do you fit on a ten point scale with exclusive heterosexuality on one side and exclusive homosexuality on the other. Exclusive, means never a thought never an experience, no desire at all. Between the extremes: most people fit along the line of varying degrees of bisexuality, desire only, experienced, or full throttle and on either end all over the place.
It must be said that there is still a lot of violence and discrimination based upon this Sexuality Spectrum. The reasons may be centered in the plethora of Bronze Age Religions that cover this world which focused on procreation and since procreation can only happen through heterosexual interactions, most of them have rules about the rest of the spectrum. The root is there, but there is fear too. People fear what they are not used to, there is nothing to fear from bisexuality or homosexuality and people are starting to understand this.
Gender is the other spectrum. This is the largest and most unknown aspect of out individual lives and it is completely artificial too, but because of our society and Gender Roles, Gender was created. Gender is the role that you fill in society simply or more complexly how you feel about yourself. Back in the day Gender was attached firmly, inseparably from Sex and your Sexuality was attached to your Gender. Homosexuals were considered or the opposite Gender. Gay men were Feminine and lesbians were butch or masculine; Gender was a polarity. This idea is patently false, but people including homosexuals bought into it. You could tell who these sexual deviants were because they looked and acted differently.
But this was false, of course. Back in the Nineties, a new term started to hit the public: Lipstick Lesbians. These were lesbians who liked to dress like the traditional woman. A little while later the Bear became known, the masculine gay man. To be clear, both these types of homosexuals had to be present in the world before the nineties, but they had not entered the publics mindset. What this meant for society was that homosexuals could not be pained with the same brush of Gender. A gay man or a gay woman was on a spectrum of gender and they were happy. If you have ever been to a Pride festival you would see that they are more than happy they are ecstatic! They were in the nineties relegated to the pervert side of society, still at that point, but they being on the fringe were able to express themselves as fully as possible. Which is an over simplification, there were people within the fringe that thought otherwise but for most it was free.
Thank you Internet, providing information around the world and keeping it there for everyone who could get access. Heterosexual people started to wake up and realize that they were they were not just their sex and they were more complicated. But Gender Roles were very entrenched and society was not built for the Age of Information that we are in. When I say the Roles were entrenched, I mean in our heads, but in practice they were being blurred. More women were in the work force, the traditional purview of Men, more men were expected to help with every aspect of child raising, the traditional purview of Women. The blurring of roles that started there continued to touch on every aspect of the roles of men and women, but without affecting our perceptions. This actually affected Men more than Women. In the Eighties and Nineties, there was a term for women that had entered the workforce, Super Moms. Super Moms were women who were workplace professionals AND maintained their gender roles as well. It was back in those years that it became impossible to raise a family with one income and things had to change. So, women were ahead of the curve, their Gender identity changed first and gradually.
For men it was more of a shock. Male values, that is Gender roles were still intact, at least in their mind or rather the mind of society. Society heavily reinforced the Male Gender role. The Internet showed us that we could be more. We could be different from how we were raised to believe. Men were spending more time single and more time engaging in traditional female roles like cooking and cleaning and liking them. But there was a mental price, because they were raised to believe something different than they felt. The question was, Can a man or a woman feel like the opposite and still be a man or a woman? Enter the Miracles of Medical Science, they finally figured out how to make a woman a man and a man a woman, at least on the superficial appearance side of things, well actually they can go as far as hormone treatment but not as far as reproduction. Before that men and women had to just dress according to their preferred gender, but now they can get their gender reassigned. Which did nothing to solve the problem. The problem is that Gender is not a polarity, it is a spectrum.
Well that last statement is untrue. Gender is not a spectrum, it is artificial, and therefore should not be expressed as with polarity, but as a rainbow. If you like doing things on the left side it does not mean you are left handed and if you like doing stuff on the right side you are not necessarily right handed. Why should gender be this way? Why is it that when men become Transgendered, they are more likely to also become Lesbians too? It is quite simple, their gender and their Sex and their Sexuality are not in sync. Do they need to be? Our society is changing to rapidly for our brains to adapt, because our children are raised by parents thirty years older than them, there is a lag in how people are raised and what they are raised to accept. Hopefully this will only be temporary.
I heard about I child many years ago, well about three years ago, named Archer. It was born to parents of an experimental mindset. They had experimented on there previous two children trying to raise them free of influence of society. For there third child they decided to go all out and not reveal its gender to anyone but the nuclear family he is genderless. Why would anyone want to do something like that?
Colours. There are certain colours that are girls colours and boy colours, but they are just colours. Again this comes from society and the Sexuality of Gender. Gay men are aloud to wear female colours, thank you Hitler. Really, everyone has heard that he put homosexuals in concentration camps and identified them with pink stars. Pink before that time was considered a masculine colour be cause you had to be brave to wear it, because it was so strong. Really, white people can't wear a few colours, and really pink is one of them, we just don't have the skin tones to pull it off, but brown skinned people look awesome in hot pink. But I digress. Girls diapers, boys diapers with different colours, but not an effectively different shape, I know that they have different placement of absorbency strips, but that is it. Blue is masculine pink is feminine but really there is no real difference. Are animals feminine? Truck pictures are masculine?
Toys are the big ones. What children play with might influence what they do in life. Girls get dolls, boys get trucks. Boys get toys with moving parts girls get toys that are soft. What the Fuck!?! Seriously. Boys get Lego, luckily girls can have Lego too now, it is in all those softer colours and all those plans that girls would like, horses and dollhouses and settings to play doll house around. Boy Lego sets have Star Wars and Battle Cats and the like. When you look at a toy catalogue you don't see it, but it is there, well you don't see it until you see the Swedish Toy Catalogue of 2013. Where ever there was a boy or a girl in a traditional picture, they reversed the sex of the model. It was then that people noticed how toys were marketed for the different sexes.
Boy toys that were being played with had both boys and girls, traditionally the boys would be playing with the toys and the girls would be watching the boys playing with the toys. That was just an example of the subtle manipulation of the masses and our imposed gender roles. Movies are also bad. I have friend who has two children, one of each sex, and they took me with them when they went to the movies. The girl was three years younger and the the boy had to go and see the princess movie, which he liked, but had to complain constantly thought the entire movie, because it was about princesses. Girl movies aimed at girls, television shows aimed at girls are the same too. Boys programming is centered around action and fighting. It is funny, in a way because young children's programming is not divergent yet and it contains action and problem solving as well as caring motifs. It is like when they hit a certain age they can be marketed to and the sexes are streamed.
So the idea of those parents was to raise a child that was not influenced by factors that every other child is influenced by. They decided that when people came by they had to give the baby gifts when it was born and those special days they had to do it without knowing its gender, dolls and trucks, Lego and Dollhouses, pink and blue, princesses and squirt guns. What would I have been like if I was exposed to no gender at all, would I have liked trains as a child? How would you have been different?
Perhaps one day everyone will grow up like Baby Archer able to make their own choices about what they like free of society's preconceived notions. One day perhaps, but not this day. If a child were to have a genderless upbringing it would end when they went to school and were pushed to conform, because that is where a lot of conformity still happens.
If there was one thing I were to add to the list of factors that affect our inherent sexual identity it would be something like an Exclusivity spectrum. I would say that an exclusivity index would have a strong genetic and evolutionary pressure. Women, tend to be exclusive and men tend to be inclusive. Tend is a loaded word. There would be strong evolutionary pressure for a woman to be exclusive, in appearance anyways, to be exclusive, so that their 'mate' would stick around to raise his offspring, but there would be another pressure for a female to mate with stronger males and keep the steady provider to provide stability. On the other hand, given that males do not bear children and thus have no resources tied up for years at a time, it is in their best interest to spread the genetic material around to as many recipients as possible, but there is also strong evolutionary pressure to mate exclusively so that they can keep a make sure that their genetic material reaches sexual maturity. So this thought process provides a strong case for both men and women being anywhere on a spectrum of exclusivity.
Modern birth control has stepped this up a bit, allowing both partners the chance to wander sexually and still keep e same mate partner. So I suggest that we are all a range between exclusive and not exclusive. Certainly younger people are less exclusive than older people, but there is a range there as well. Socially it should be noted that there are social pushes on exclusivity behaviour and sadly the pressures are unbalanced by sex. For example, males are lauded for multiple partners, called 'studs' and females are called 'sluts' for engaging in equal behaviours. One is positive and the other is negative. I do not think this is right, but society does. This means that aberrant sexual behaviour must occur in the shadows of society. Like Swingers, partners that engage in non-procreational sex with multiple partners. Adultery, one partner engaging in sex with someone outside a partnership. In some cultures this includes premarital sex.
I believe that the way the world should work is that of these spectrums and polarities, that only one that is set in stone is the sex that you were born with, it can be changed but if the other spectrums were meaningless so would the need for the change.
For those that really know me, I don't need to put myself on these scales, but for those that know me, but not that well, or don't know me at all here is where I fit: Male, Heterosexual with very slight Bisexual tendencies, gendered probably about half way between men and women, but more on the male side and I am 100% monogamous, but utterly completely open to all variations in a partner and not in any way discriminatory towards any combination. Got it?
As always comments welcome privately or here, and you can comment and request I delete as well, after all, society is not ready for us as we are in reality.
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