I am Human
“What are your pronouns?”
I’ve been asked this multiple times, as you do these days. And my answer remains the same, “It doesn’t matter to me. Use whichever pronoun you want.”
This isn’t meant to project an indifference, rather it’s meant as a statement, a rather passionate belief that gender is arbitrary.
Like, I get how maybe it was useful before we understood anything about science and biology. But now that we do, it makes no sense.
It’s the same reason I feel incapable of adopting such a lovely title as “hippie”. I’m a lot of things hippies are. I love to travel, experience new things, trip on psychedelics, be one with Nature, etc. But also, I don’t like wearing tight clothing, dancing in public, smoking weed, or mysticism. I’m free-spirited but not. I’m open-minded but judgy. I’m a pacifist but not. I’m a lot of things hippies aren’t, and I don’t believe in a lot of things hippies do. We might say that there isn’t any one way to define a hippie and they exist on a spectrum. One might even say that hippies aren’t even hippies because of how the definition might change depending on who you ask.
This means that what makes or doesn’t make a hippie is subjective. We know this because the definition varies. It’s inconsistent. The same goes for gender.
Let’s say, for example, you believe that a female is someone who has XX chromosomes and a male is someone who has XY chromosomes. If there is even one person who is a female who has XY chromosomes or one male who has XX chromosomes, then you have contradicted yourself. You have literally spouted nonsense. You have said A = ~A. Do you understand how completely detrimental that is? Indeed, there are people with XX chromosomes who have testes and a penis (46,XX (note, they can have male genitalia or it can be ambiguous) and there are people with XY chromosomes who have vaginas (Swyer syndrome). Some of these people can go their whole lives not knowing about their chromosomes and simply live their lives according to their genitalia.
So then, let’s say you believe that a female is someone with a vagina and a male is someone with a penis. Again, if there is even one person who is a female who has a penis or a male who has a vagina, who was born that way, then you have uttered nonsense! And of course there are people who fit this description of ambiguous genitalia in which they can have neither or both of these characteristics.
Like, I honestly don’t think I’m doing a good job of iterating how completely that obliterates any argument you have for gender. That would be like me saying, “I have a dog; I don’t have a dog” or “I am a robot; I am not a robot” like what are you even sayinggg?!!? Like seriously try to comprehend those two sentences. It’s infuriating, right? Because it doesn’t.make.sense. Like, if I were to describe nonsense in analogy, nonsense would be like trying to walk on air. It’d be like trying to swim without a liquid medium to swim through. It’d be like trying to put a roof on a building without putting up the walls first. Like… at some point there has to be a foundation that we start from, and making sense is it. Without a foundation, you can’t go anywhere. You can’t progress the conversation. You’re just existing in space.
Anyway. Here is where we get to the opinion side of things.
I don’t think anyone thinks there are two genders, not really. It seems evidenced by their insults of “not man enough” or “act like a lady” or “man up” or “alpha woman/man” or any other use people have for gender. Calling a woman a slut, bitch, or cunt are all ways of saying that she isn’t acting like a woman. All of these insinuate a degree of manliness or womanliness. If you were either a man or a woman, then there would never be any room for questioning someone’s manliness or womanliness; they either would be or wouldn’t be. There are no ways in which a person can become more or less of a man or woman if there is only one way or the other to be. This is why I think literally everyone is pangender… or agender.
I understand that pangenderism is controversial because of its underlying assumption through being all genders. All genders means literally all of them, even ones that they don’t know of which is to include those from other cultures that they don’t belong to. So, you can see the problem. However, if you think that gender is an arbitrary social concept, as I do, then that necessarily includes the genders of cultures. The thing is, I think everyone is all genders for the simple fact that gender is just a category of human. I am human. And if I am human, then I am woman and man because woman and man are human which share all categories of human. To quote Maya Angelou quoting Terence, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.” I believe this truly and whole-heartedly. Of course that doesn’t mean I know your experiences or anyone else’s. But I do know what it means to have a short temper, to be aggressive, to be violent, to be insecure, to be caring, to be loving, to have hair on my arms and legs, to look at my fingernails one way rather than another, to have a thick neck, to feel pain, to act impulsively, to yell, to cry, etc.
I find agender an interesting category for sure. I like it a lot and think agender is the goal for humanity. But as society is today, pangender makes the most sense to me simply because saying agender seems to say not human, even though I can also see how it might actually be saying, “Gender is so dumb, I refuse to even play this game”, but even by having that category, they are in fact playing the game.
Distinguishing between two genders in a non-activist sense doesn’t make sense to me, whether that be who you love or how you identify, saying definitively “I am a man” or “I am a woman” is like saying “I am a human” or “I am a human.” Aren’t we all.
The only reason, I believe, that there is a need to distinguish between genders is sexism and transphobia. We need a way to organize – labels for which to identify injustices and define our needs, which if these discriminatory practices didn’t exist, we’d have no need for. So (how I view it), we’re basically saying, “Yeah, these categories are dumb, but you’re the ones who made them up and decided to oppress us using them, therefore, just so we can communicate with you, we’ll use them until you too realize they’re dumb and then hopefully we can drop them.”
When it comes to medicine, I honestly think it would be more beneficial to separate people by their hormone levels. This is an extremely tentative suggestion in that I don’t know enough about hormones, the extent to which they affect the body, or how realistic that suggestion is in that there may just be too many variances or we may just not know enough about them to be able to reliably categorize people using them at the moment. I think that this is actually what gender and age are, medically. They’re generalized ideas of hormonal patterns and states that one who falls under “female” or “male” category at whatever age may be. I think this also accounts for such a huge disparity within these groups (in that female and male are inadequate categories that lead to confusion in why one disorder or disease may vary significantly in one category – an example might be period cramps in the female category), and just going straight to the source (measuring hormones) would be much more useful. But, again, I don’t know. Ask me again in 8 years when I have more knowledges.
