Completely different.
Anja Flower wrote…
I find it sad and interesting that we live in a society so thoroughly gender-binary that the first place people go with gender-queer and gender-deviant people, after outright bigotry, is that we must be a “mixture” of woman and man. What if we’re not? What if we’re something completely different?
What’s your experience?
Posted by julian on April 7th, 2009 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice 2 comments »
April 7th, 2009 at 8:01 pm |
I believe most visitors to this site accept the basic premise that we are not all one thing, nor one of just two things.
For me, after a lifetime of assuming I was the gender my anatomy, and my community, assured me I was, I was able to entertain the thought that I was "the other one." It took time for that to sink in, but not long after to realize that the second gender didn't define me any better than the first one. That was when my mind first became receptive to gender variance. It wasn't until I recognized my own that I began to understand others'.
Gender transcendence is a process–people take their blinders off one pair at a time.
Someone accepting they may have elements of both is an encouraging development, not a cause for alarm. They're closer than they've ever been to transcending the gender binary.
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April 8th, 2009 at 12:32 am |
When I was 6 years old, I tried to imagine a new, completely different gender, and failed. It felt like imagining a new color: no matter how hard you try, you end up thinking in terms of black, white, yellow, blue and red blended in different ways.
I think I'm starting to see how "man" and "woman" are just two points in a gender galaxy. It's like knowing only black and white, and starting to see all the other colors.
Like IdentityTBD just said, it isn't that easy to understand completely new genders. But it is worth every effort.
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