There are more than two genders.
For those who have only used the naked eye, it might seem that there are only males and females, sometimes called a binary condition (one or the other). Most people are binary - females are XX, males are XY - that’s just a fact.
But the microscope reveals complexity in chromosome construction. There are more combinations than just XX-XY. That’s also just a fact. When people talk about “identifying” as something other than male or female, they are speaking about more than just emotions or preferences, it’s about internal forces so powerful they are often rooted right in genetic structure.
However, many who experience gender dysphoria or the feeling they do not identify with the body they were born into do not necessarily have known genetic anomalies to account for these realizations, though perhaps there may be differences in gene expression in these persons. And that’s ok, too. If the reasons show up under the microscope or not, it doesn’t change the validity of the forces at work. Whether the house has indoor plumbing or outdoor plumbing, or both, has nothing to do with the engineering inside the home.
(None of this touches on character. Destroyers and builders, givers and takers, sinners and saints, are made from behavioural ingredients.)
If you’re binary, think about how you are directed by your instincts. The two most powerful forces in the human subconscious can be summarized as the avoidance of death and the having of sex, forces so powerful they can be triggered by a look, a word, just a thought, and always in mental motion. You didn’t choose to be attracted to men/women, or “feel” male/female, it was a condition of birth. It shapes even our dreams. It is built into us like the spawning beacon of a salmon. Advertisers, religious leaders, corporations, governments, our prom date (or wished), all flow through this binary predominance.
So imagine, based on your own inner engines, that identically concrete forces are at work inside the genetic existence of someone with different chromosome structure. Like yours, those forces aren’t wrong, or even essentially different. They are just unexpected, if you only thought in binary terms.
Now imagine further that all those non-binary forces are constantly criticized, threatened, and all the constructs of society (bathrooms, sports events, television shows, teen clusters along the walls of high school dances, SOGI protesters, etc., etc.) shout at you that you are incredibly wrong. That might crush the will to live, for some non-binary and/or non-heterosexual people, or at least impact their pursuit of a free and open life. How could it not?
But non-binary is non-wrong; in fact it is naturally inevitable. We binary people now have the tools to understand that. And you know what?, it’s fine. No one is hurt by accommodating non-binary existence; many are hurt by obstructing it. It’s so simple, even a child can understand.
Sexual orientation and gender identity get conflated, for example in the term SOGI, but to be clear, the way one experiences sexual attraction and the way one experiences their sense of gender are not the same thing, they are not related, they are discussed together here only because of the instinctual places those come from, and to illustrate that both are perfectly natural, completely normal, but unexpected if only viewed through the socially constructed binary, and especially heterosexual (based on statistics) lens.
And there is nothing wrong with being heterosexual or binary or both, those are not behaviours, but the same applies to all others.
The faster we can reshape our society to let people pee in peace (and by pee, I mean all facets of life, in case the metaphor wasn’t plain), the healthier and safer we will all be. Happy, informed, self-actualizing people are better for the economy, if that’s the only reason we need.
And when the protests stop over the simple, harmless facts of natural gender and sexual diversity, the foundations of freedom will be sturdier.
READ MORE: EDITOR’s COLUMN: Time to extinguish government’s false fire entitlement
READ MORE: EDITORIAL: Taking a seat at an editorial desk with a long history in Quesnel
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Frank Peebles