When I was 4, Mom brought home my first pet, a girl cat we named Boots. Bootsie was an adorable little tuxedo, and I readily accepted she was a girl because Mom told me so. She might as well have been God for all I believed whatever she told me.
Later, when I was trying to puzzle out how adults figured out which animals were male or female, I came to the conclusion after rigorous scientific research - I mean, I must have checked out the eyes of literally fives of neighborhood pets - that one must be able to tell from their eyelashes. Females would have long, pretty eyelashes, and boy animals’ lashes were much shorter. It worked with Boots. It would be a number of years before I realized my biological error.
I didn’t grow up learning about a gender spectrum. As far as I knew, there were only two, apart from the occasional biological oddity that blended male and female sex characteristics. I didn’t learn for a long time that “gender” isn’t really the same thing as “biological identity.”
You can understand why people mix the two up. Humans love to categorize things, including people. I suppose it’s because there’s so much to keep up with and process in the world, that this makes keeping up with it all easier. So if someone is born biologically female, it’s just easier for socialization to say “that’s a girl” than to wait and see what that person might want to be considered when they’re old enough to have an opinion and sense of self years later.
And this wouldn’t be so much a problem except that some people take it really personally if that girl decides later on that she doesn’t feel particularly feminine. We’re not talking unfeminine like when I was ten years old and adults referred to me as a “tomboy” because I liked to ride a bike and not wear frilly clothes. I still identified as a girl … whatever that means. The point is, I didn’t feel like a boy and I didn’t want to be a boy. What I didn’t care for were some of the preset expectations and limitations that came with being a girl, and how some people reacted if you didn’t uphold these - after all, they weren’t the rules I made, and some of them are pretty stupid and arbitrary.
The world is trying to catch up. A few years ago, Facebook created the option for people to choose from something like 51 different genders to identify themselves closest to how they felt themselves to BE. More recently, even LGBTQ-averse Mike Pence’s old stomping grounds, Indiana, elected to start letting people choose no gender at all on their state-issued identification if that’s what they desire. In the comments on an online news story about it, there was the predictable mocking and little angry emoji faces expressing dissatisfaction with the policy - but why?
Gender fluidity is hardly new. Ancient mythology had god-figures that could change gender at will (and before you too make some smart remark about the fiction of mythology, keep in mind that the people who were current to those times didn’t see it as “mythology,” but instead as “religion”). And the United States isn’t exactly “new” on this; I grew up in a rural town in the Midwest and went to a small school, and even I learned about Renee Richards, a tennis player in the 1970s who’d had gender reassignment surgery, and Christine Jorgensen, who did so even earlier, in the 1950s, ages before Bruce announced she was actually Caitlyn.
Not being able to readily identify someone’s pronouns or assignation makes a lot of people extremely uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable in 2000 when I moved to Knoxville and started moving in the same journalistic circles as a reporter from another news outlet who was in the middle of undergoing the transition from a longtime identity as a man to that of a woman. She didn’t frighten or antagonize me against her, but I was confused how to react because I didn’t understand much about it (19 years later, at least now I know what I don’t know). I listened to the guys in my newsroom make fun of her, struggled with whether to use “her” or “him” or if it was okay to do interchangeably (Tip: It is in fact not okay - you wouldn’t enjoy it), and even theorized for a short time that she - he? - was engaging in this process for a little while to get a big story ot of it. I’m not proud of this last one, but I had to figure out in time how to pull my head out of my own ass.
As we all do.
Which I eventually did, and she ended up being a good colleague I had the chance to work with from time to time. But, she was just a person like any other, and I liked her because she didn’t look down on me for working for a smaller media outlet like some big-news reporters did, and the small talk with her wasn’t painful - always a consideration for an introvert like me.
Unless you’ve committed an unprovoked violent felony, changing your identity shouldn’t be something to be looked upon with fear or suspicion. After all, none of us start life on our terms; some random sperm decides your biological gender, someone gives birth to you, people name you, raise you with a certain set of values, and relate you to a bunch of people who might just as likely be Nazis as decent folk. It’s a long number of years before you figure out what you like about all this, and what things you’d just as soon throw off a cliff. Wanting to change your gender identity - with or without a name and/or hormonal/surgical change - shouldn’t be any more of a prosecutable action than dyeing your hair or piercing your ears.
And if you’re of the mind that God made you, consider even if that’s true, They didn’t make the rules of gender. Only humans are capable of coming up with something that convoluted.
-March 20, 2019