What accounts for the growing number of young people who don’t identify as either male or female? My friends and I floated various theories in a recent conversation. Some thought there are too many freaky deaky chemicals in the water supply, and it’s messing with our hormones. Some thought it’s nothing new, and that people simply feel more free to accept and announce what they’ve always felt inside. Some think it’s the result of cultural pressure, and calling oneself “non-binary” or “asexual” or “gender fluid” are merely the newest way of irritating one’s parents and asserting one’s individuality, like growing hair long in the early 60’s, or wearing pants backwards in the 80’s.
And some, including me, thought it’s not only a combination of the above, but also sometimes a sign of good psychological health. Let me explain.
Some of the folks I see calling themselves neither male nor female present in such an aggressively counter-cultural way, they appear to set themselves irredeemably apart from anyone who values ordinary, bedrock principles like fidelity or monogamy. But under the strident “I’m not like you” exterior, most aren’t looking for anarchy or even libertinism. Many of them are saying something true and valuable. They are saying: “I reject the idea that you have to chose between being a girly girl or a macho man. I hate the notion that I have to sign on to spending my time obsessing over either makeup or sports. I don’t see myself primarily as always passive or as always aggressive. I reject both silly, simpering, bubbleheaded femininity and slavering, swaggering, manhandling masculinity.”
In other words, they’re not rejecting masculinity or femininity, so much as they are rejecting what 2017 is telling them it means to be male or female. 2017, in case you haven’t noticed, doesn’t know its ass from its elbow. So if people are opting out of a binary system that’s pure caricature, then opting out is the right thing to do. Certainly, it goes too far to say, “I’m not male or female,” but at very least, it’s a sign that folks are embracing the idea that who we are is more than just an assemblage of clothing and hobbies. They are rejecting constrictive, reductive, dehumanizing stereotypes, and that’s a good thing.
Okay! So this conversation came back to me this morning, as I listened to the talking heads on the news chatting about the Roy Moore election. Now that our president has openly endorsed Moore, the GOP has decided to go ahead and fund his campaign after all.
This move has left a good many voters in the lurch. A lot of folks who call themselves “republican” have lost their damn minds — but a lot haven’t. They hoped (because man is, at heart, irrationally optimistic) that the party of God, family, responsibility, and values would somehow find their way to saying, “Maybe let’s not rush to elect a likely sexual predator.”
A lot of voters, like me, are basically conservative. We reject abortion. We think marriage should be between one man and one woman. We only reluctantly accept divorce as a necessary evil. We think immigration should be approached with care and caution. We think gun ownership should be protected. We believe freedom of religion exists outside the walls of actual church buildings. We think America is special, and has something to offer the rest of the world.
But we reject the caricature of American conservatism, which says that you have a moral obligation to anyone who yammers about being “pro-life” when he wants a vote, but who has no qualms about crushing single mothers and their kids, the poor, the disabled, and the uninsured.
We reject the caricature of American conservatism that says marriage is holy and sacred when you’re selling cake, but if you’re a politician, then you can swing your dick wherever you like.
We reject the caricature of American conservatism that says it’s a crime against nature to have too much melanin in your skin or too much of an accent in your voice.
We reject the caricature of American conservatism that says the Bill of Rights is mainly about not getting in the way of evil men with an arsenal and a grievance.
We reject the caricature of American conservatism that believes in a young, flat earth populated by Muslim lizard people masquerading as secret Kenyans who hate Christmas.
We reject the caricature of American conservatism that says anything America does is good, right, and just, and we can teach the rest of the world to be like us by alienating our allies and nuking everyone else.
Oh, and we reject Nazis and rapists, that kind of thing.
Since I reject all of these things, does that make me a liberal or a progressive? Not unless you’re insane.
But listen. Progressives are suffering their own descent into grotesque caricature. My progressive friends don’t have any friends in the white house right now, but they’re also not thrilled when they think of the backlash that’s likely to come next.
Remember, Americans love that pendulum swing. The moment Donald Trump is gone, a reactive voting populace will ram through some equal but opposite horror, who’ll undo all Trump’s bad deeds and replace them with a whole new set of equally bad deeds, but different ones. Read your history. This is what happens when a country allows something terrible to happen. It makes amends by lurching toward something even more terrible, but opposite.
When there’s a natural calamity — say, an earthquake or a tidal wave — there are the initial casualties, and then thousands more are left homeless in the aftermath. This is what’s happened politically. Trump vs. Clinton was an earthquake setting off a volcano, or a tidal wave triggering a mudslide, or Mothra vs.King Ghidorah, or whatever. There was no good guy to root for, but there sure were a lot of innocent bystanders left with nowhere to go after the monsters moved along.
So that’s me. I’m homeless. I’m a non-binary voter. I’m politiqueer, or something. I reject all the petty caricatures. I care about the Ten Commandments, and that’s why I reject Roy Moore. I care about women, and that’s why I reject [Margaret Sanger’s reanimated corpse, or whoever the dems will put up next].
You can’t make me say I’m on one grotesque side or the other grotesque side, and you can’t make me say that if I’m not one, I must be the other. As currently presented, neither one of them is anything worth being. There’s more to me than an assemblage of cruelty, extremism, and reflexive ideological posturing. Show me something good, and maybe I’ll vote for it. I’m a citizen of the United States of America, and I reject all the monsters.
***
Images: Destoroyah: Bandai Namco Entertainment America, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48781603
Gigan: Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
ballot: Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/elections-vote-sheet-paper-pen-536656/
Just a small correction here – “asexual” means someone who is not interested in sexual intercourse, not someone who does not have a gender identity (although there may be some overlap between the two, I guess).
Yep.
Some random things that happened here this week:
I gave in and let my middle school kid do the PP staffed sex-ed course. This year they stuck the boys and the girls in the same room just in case someone identified as somewhere in between. My kid says he felt uncomfortable learning how a vagina works with a girl sitting next to him. I said “oh well, sweat the big stuff”. I also told him to cram the question box with pointy questions that would make them squirm, like: “is it true that abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy?” and “Is it true that Planned Parenthood sells the brains, hearts and lugs of the babies they harvest?”
In other news, 14 of the fifth grade boys at one of our primary schools got in huge trouble for chanting S- M- D!– over and over again at the lunch tables (D–k). They thought nobody would figure out what the acronym stood for. I wrote the principal a letter about why a bunch of boys might want to shout aggressive slogans in a crowd –or think sexual harassment was acceptable.
The kids’ restroom in the foyer no longer has a boy AND girl symbol on it –it now says: “Gender Neutral”. Heh.
That made my husband unspecifically mad.
I used to call myself a liberal Democrat, and I still feel like one, but that party has left me. It’s supposed to stick up for the voiceless, like the unborn. It’s supposed to be all about “live and let live.” No more. So I guess God is telling me that I have to be a Christian first and everything else second. I have more in common with people of goodwill like you, Simcha, than I do with those who always vote for candidates in their own particular party no matter what.
And while we’re on the subject, whatever happened to consensus and bilateral support? ::sigh::
THANK YOU. I have been saying this for months…even though I am probably seen as a conservative, I do identify as a moderate, which makes voting, how do I put this…nearly impossible. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for a politician who embodies your “basically conservative” paragraph values, and I’m confused as to why we can’t find anyone who can. Same goes for the other side- isn’t there any one who is “basically liberal” but not a RABID LIBERAL? Sigh. Anyway. Thanks for putting into words what I’ve been feeling for over a year now.
Thank you for writing this.