Gender Revisited

We all have read the recent wealth of news stories about transpeople and the transcommunity. Or you may have just passed over it, scanned the article, half-listened to the tv or radio story, or simply turned to something else. Many people find the issue of individual gender difficult to understand, so they use some belief or dogma, often called religion or faith, to decide our sex and gender are fixed at birth and it's our lot in life to accept it, right or wrong.

I saw this image for a story in the Denver Magazine. it is probably one of the best articles about a transperson. It's only in recent years we're being informed that gender is a few people isn't what it seems at birth and at a young age, but then expresses its true self about age 5-6. It's always been there, because it's about being human and human diversity, but it's only now being in the public spotlight.

And it's only in recent times the professionals are coming our of the professional cloud and standing up to say it's not only there but normal, and not abnormal as has been taught in schools and portrayed in the media. It is lived by the ~1% of people in this country. Yes, one in a hundred, not the one in thousands or more as described before. And why has it been hidden and misportrayed?

Morality. Pure and simple professional morality. Those very same professional who have taken an oath to help and heal were excercising their personal morality which disagreed with the reality of transpeople. They haven't even tried to understand, let alone help and heal. It's never been a mental problem. It's been about finding affirmation in being oneself as you know and want to be. The mind isn't the problem, the body is.

It is that simple. Children haven't learned to know anything but themselves. But finding themselves at odds, and the rest of the world telling them they're diviant or abnorma. But they do learn to hide and disguise themselves. And they begin the long journey of self-hate. They're not the cause, the rest are the cause. They simply want the freedom to be. Is that so hard to understand? Is that so hard to accept? Is it so hard to see it in the child? Or the adults?

And that's the whole issue. It is what it is, not much else to say about it. So, please, read the story. And thank you Lucia and your parents.

Peas and Carrots

We've all eaten the traditional meal of meat, potatoes, and a vegetable, usually some vegetable we wouldn't eat otherwise. The meal sits on a plate, often white or some off-white color with a pattern to look pretty. The meat usually takes up about half the plate, potatoes a third and the lowly, often disliked vegetable the last third if not less space, sometimes spilling into the space for the meat and/or potatoes or being pushed to the outer edge of the plate.

And one common vegetable dish served is peas and carrots, usually more peas than carrots, but still a mixture of small round balls green and small squared sections of orange. Complimenting each other in color and taste, and occasionally with a little butter and/or salt, usually some type of cheese or cream sauce to disguise them. Why I don't know, but some recipes do that, and the lowly peas and carrots sit hated and neglected in their corner of the plate and often hidden under a carpet of sauce.

My point here? Well, we're not much different in some respects than that meal. We have three basic identities of our being. Our physical identity, our birth sex. The plate in the meal of ourselves. Our whole physical body and being is the plate which holds us together and makes us a person. We're composed of other parts and pieces which makes up or body and mind, the stuff of the meal on the plate.

The other two identities are our sexual identity or orientation, and our gender identity or our sense of being a man, women or some combination thereof. These are the peas and carrots in our mind of our identity. And while many people like to consider them distinct and separate, they aren't. They're a part of your whole being, interconnected and intermixing with your whole body and being, and with each other.

Our own sense of sexual identity involves our physical and mental sense of ourselves and what is sexually attractive to us both in and with ourselves and in and with other people. We feel alive sexually as a person, our body, and as our being, our gender, and we use the same to know who we find sexually attractive and what of their body and being we are attracted to. And the same for them with us.

This is why our sexual identity and gender identity aren't that distinct or separate, and they're only used to distinguish different aspect of our being. We feel alive and sexual as men and/or women and we find other men and/or women sexually alive and attractive. We can't tell the difference between our identities, and only use it when we want to make a distinction or distinguish it in or with others.

They've yet, and most likely never really will, find our sexual identity and gender identity centers in our brain, because while it's generally controlled by some distinct parts, it's so incorporated in all our senses and our whole sense of being that it's not something unique in our mind, but part of it all. We use all our senses in our sexual identity and gender identity, because it's who we are as a being.

And so while there are those who argue for the separateness of our sexual and gender identity, it's still just the peas and carrots in our mind.