Life As Performance Art 100

I am getting a clearer sense of where I really stand on a couple of, shall we call them, delicate, issues. One is gender binary and identity. The other has to do with abortion and choice, which I will touch on later, maybe much later on. Any regular reader of this blog will already know how opposed I am to any kind of knee jerk, unreflective thinking, which really isn't thinking at all. And this goes to the left as well as the right. I have no time for right wing fascist intolerant racists, misogynists or homophobes. I have a similar distaste for politically correct, four legs good two legs bad kind of thinking that has hijacked both our universities, and to some extent, the anglican Church of Canada. I also have absolutely no time for academic idiots nor for uneducated idiots who want to impose their thinking on others. Concerning binary gender, I have concluded that most of those people who expect everyone to refer to them by the pronoun of their choice are themselves intolerant bigots. With the exception of those who are actually intersex, or hermaphrodite. Even if intersex people are a tiny minority, they do merit the right to identify as male, female or other, with some kind of appropriate neutral pronoun that is more personal than "it". To the rest of you, no one is obligated to buy into your personal little fantasy. I am not going to refer to you as they or them unless there are more than one of you, otherwise I am abusing the English language. We are, of course, limited by the English language. The only gender neutral pronoun we have is "it". If you don't wish to be referred to as he or she, then I shall from now on refer to you as it, especially one particularly disagreeable young woman whom I will not otherwise name or identify on this page. Because I do not fit the gender binary, I shall also accept being referred to as it, though I am still going to refer to myself as he. And really, I don't care what other people call me, just don't call me late for dinner. And for one simple reason. That is how I was born, biologically. I do not fit the traditional male binary, but my body reminds me every day that that is my assigned gender and I have come to accept this, and for one simple reason. My sex, or assigned gender, even if I do not identify with traditional masculinity, is still part, if a minor part, of who and what I am as a complete human being. So, I have made peace with being a male, even if I do not so identify. Life, and the universe, are not always fair. We have to live with this. I think it's a bit easier for me because I have had a lot of time to think and sort through issues of traditional gender identity, only to conclude that my physical gender has very little to do with who I am as a person. However, I am not separate from my body, so this I also must accept. This is why I am usually not in favour of gender reassignment surgery. Even if a man takes on all the acquired female characteristics, he is still not a woman. He does not have ovaries, eggs or a uterus, nor fallopian tubes and certainly no birth canal. Neither do his artificial breasts secrete milk, and of course he is never going to conceive or give birth to a child. By courtesy, I will still refer to him as her, as a woman, even if I don't happen to agree that he is a real woman, rather, a man who identifies as female. But this has more to do with good manners than being accurate, and there are times when kindness and self-preservation get the upper hand. Likewise with women who want to transition to men. They will never have fully functioning testicles or penis. And their chromosomal structure is always going to be X. I will still perceive them as men, because I really don't want to rock the boat. I also tend to think of trans people as being enormously deluded, and that they seem to be so unable to think outside of the box of assigned gender binary, that they have to resort to having their bodies butchered and mutilated in order to feel a little more female or more like a man. But I otherwise don't judge them, and I still welcome and respect them. I just don't completely agree with them. And I am free enough from binary masculinity that I don't feel in any way threatened by them, because to me, it really doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we need to all pull together somehow and focus on the things that unite us. Kindness is important, but equally important is accepting that not everyone is going to see us the way we want to be seen and to learn how to live with that. In other words, Deal with it.