FTFY:
What if we forgot about gender? What if we were totally agnostic about gender? Reject gender and there's no need to question why certain people don’t fit into gendered expectations, and we can all learn to grow. Be angry that our acceptance of people's differences have been so reduced in the last few years, that some people think your identity depends on your pronouns, or that there may be terms or labels for you that you don’t get a say in.
How about we challenge the idea that “sex is less significant than gender identity and gender identity is just fact”? Because gender is actually as socially constructed as anything we do. Boy and girl are just the human versions of the same two sexes that almost all living things have. Sure, bodies are different, but sorting everyone into two sharply different boy/girl boxes based on personality: that’s on us! There could be 10 categories based on our jobs, not outmoded sexist ideas, or seven categories based on heights. And while we’re at it, could we reconsider the idea that people with DSDs have anything to do with gender? Acknowledging that some people don’t fit into our neat categories: some people have a vulva but internal testicles, some people have a penis and XX chromosomes, some have a vagina and breasts but more testosterone than oestrogen. Did you know that some ignorant people would label a woman with PCOS as intersex, and based on that and similar ignorant misunderstandings claim there’s a similar number of people with as redheaded people? That’s 1-2% of the population being told a minor difference in their hormones or genitalia makes then not actually male or feamle! But did you also know that there are thousands of so-called “gender normalising surgeries” that happen each year, usually not necessary for the health of the child and sometimes leading to physical and psychological pain? International courts have condemned these surgeries, so why are we telling people who feel confused about their gender later in life that surgeries like these are a good and healing thing?
What if we forgot about sorting kids into blue and pink boxes full of pirates and princesses, anger and empathy, beer and wine, lust and romance, football and housework, right from birth. Because this actually impacts their development. Kids who are encouraged to play with toy building blocks develop different parts of their brains than children encouraged to play with dolls.
What if we recognised that there’s nothing natural about the gender roles our society has for men and women. Otherwise, how do we explain countless past and present examples showing our binary as just one of many options? Surely, if gender was real, it would have remained the same throughout human history and continue to be identical all over the world?
What would society look like if definitions of masculinity and femininity were flexible and liberating? If things like rocking nail polish and wearing sexy lingerie and lifting weights and being romantic (or not romantic) and crying and parenting and leading were free from stigma and open to everybody? What could happen if we recognise that non-binary and gender-fluid and intersex and agender are ways that people are trying to express their own knowledge of who they are into an ideology that wants everyone to pick their label, and told them they could just throw the labels away altogether, and unlock cages not reinforce them? That those labels aren’t necessary for anyone’s identity and instead of wasting our energy demanding others respect them, just realise we are free to self-define and forge our own paths, to throw away gender labels and be free.
Whether we’ve meant to or not, we’ve all internalised the gender binary. We often judge how intelligent a person is, how empathetic they are, how much money they earn, who or how they should love, before we’ve even got to know them, just based on their gender. And that sucks. Let’s fix it.
What if we we forgot about gender on an individual level? No gender identity is more “natural” or “real” than any other. What if we recognise that no-one's gender identity aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth because no one is assigned a gender at birth, and no-one's gender identity aligns or unaligns with their sex either, because your sex doesn't have a gender. People are cool! But crucially, noone has a gender identity, and that includes “man” and “woman”. Could we, as a society, be mindful that folk whose gender doesn't match their sex at birth are the norm in education, medicine, and media because there is no such thing as a gender that matches anyone's sex? That noone should feel they need to come out or get medical statements or constantly have to convince strangers that their identities are real? What have we understood that things are hard for people of colour, disabled people, female people, people who live in poverty? People who have so often been on the front lines in challenging and redefining expectations, but have so often been overlooked in the narrative and left to struggle alone? What if we worked towards fixing these struggles together instead of obsessing over whether people we don't know have correctly recognised gender labels we chose to assign to ourselves? And how about we listened - properly listened - to those around us? Made an empathetic space so our friends and co-workers or children can talk to us about who they truly are: let them know that they’ll receive love and support. What if we fought for a world in which people can be joyous and beautiful and hopeful and powerful and free and without having to pick a label to explain themselves? What if we forgot about gender? What if we started now?
(thank you @StripeySuperNova for the transcript)