WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR BABY BOOTIES?
Several forces have destroyed the gestalt of certainty around the believed (sometimes beloved) duality of male/female. Spectrums extend in different directions according to intensity, fertility, size, shape, fittingness to cultural desiderata.
The secrecy is removed from anomalies like infants born both genders or indeterminate. They turn out to be more common than we thought and possibly increasing. We see now the determination is dependent on one specific pair of chromosomes dubbed X and Y which control the different developmental paths and can glitch as XXY or XYY but never as YY because the X has the code for the cell and the Y does not. You can’t have an infant without the code for the cell.
These are tiny chemical reactions that follow a code, mostly, but can get confused, esp. in a time of chemical inventions, persistences, that are unavoidable. The world is full of submicro plastic and polyester, invented chemicals.
Beyond that, sex is confused by gender which is derived from culture which comes from socioeconomics and the ecologies from which they in turn derive. These are powerful enough to affect bimorphism — that is, when males are bigger and stronger as a general rule than females, but the two are overlapping bell curves so that some males are smaller and more vulnerable than females.
Social genders that were based on dimorphism are no longer applicable to the extent that they were. I still can’t always get the lids off jars but my place in the biggest dimorphism is still a question: could I have brought a baby to term?. I evaded it, knowing it would eliminate social choices about education, etc. It was an unused and therefore untested potential.
The next confounder is that the culture that approves bi-gender develops opinions about nonconformity, so that “gay” men are supposed to speak certain ways, dress and gesture like the opposite gender, and so on. But these are not necessarily physical at all. There may be no obvious clues to others as long as we keep our pants on.
In fact, now that gay is a “thing” and not a stereotype, I can look back through my life and realize that I’ve always known gays. Probably the earliest was a playmate’s uncle who treated the two of us to the ballet. We were in elementary school. He was a courtly gentleman.
Most of the gays I’ve known have been educated, employed, popular, and often gifted. Some married, some divorced, some floaters. In this small town where most men are part of a man-culture of workmen, they spend their days with men only — except for the woman in the office and whoever cooks their dinner and claims part of their paycheck or takes a parallel job to augment it. The socioeconomics are determined by the children. Recreation is all men: hunting, rodeo, big cars. In a city this is not so true. But necessity presses hard enough in rural places that men cook, raise children, scrub floors.
Psychiatric diagnoses are always conceiving of “things” that are considered real until they aren’t. Aren’t convenient, that is. Like hysterical women or Nancy-boys. But now all that is erased while old white men go on pontificating but no one pays attention. White old controlling white men are a disappearing “thing.” Too fragile. Too dysfunctional.
We live in a market world where sex is used to sell everything, including sex. The implication is that a skillful sexual person will be able to buy anything. Even little gizmos for sexual stimulation, which are constantly being invented anew. In the mail order catalogues for health and aging, the pink plastic anatomy parts imitating genitalia are hilarious, esp. the ones for fantasy blow jobs.
But “real” sex is much more than stimulating certain parts or buying blow-up dolls. The forebrain that lifted neanderthals into dreams, art, stories, communities, science and everything else, also expanded what was mere mammal breeding compelled by obsessive pleasure into something far grander and more persistent.
If the ecology changes it compels change in socioeconomics. When making a living requires big strong guys but — for instance — military personnel no longer have to ride a Clydesdale while wearing armor and aiming a long lance, then soldiers no longer have to be men. If marriage no longer means one big strong wage earner and one smaller but fertile home-maintainer, then there is no need to be dimorphic, so no need to require marriage to be XY.
Now we can drop the fantasies about who loves whom and why. There are many ways. Harder for me to accept is that “love” is process-based, eco-vulnerable, and will change. Doesn’t have to, but to me that’s more of a problem than which gender is presented. Adjusting to another human being, investing in their well-being and accepting as well as providing emotional and economic support — working all the time to understand it all — is just simply too much work if it has to be repeated.
When David Quammen was writing a column in Outside magazine, he spent a lot of time explaining species in terms of their lifelong terms of energy use, since essentially “life” IS the passing along of energy through a specific strategy. Salmon and birds allotted so much time and effort to food, to reproduction, to climate adjustment through migration. Humans must do that as well, but have more chances to individuate or invent, change the circumstances. When looked at from this angle, more becomes understandable.
When I was a child during WWII, it was accepted and enforced by government that men went to war and women had babies. Both could end life for the young adult. Now both are optional and we can live for a century. If a person neither fights nor fucks, what else is there to do but eat, so we’re fat and diabetic. Our energy is hoarded.
The shift now will be (I hope) to a kind of community that depends on variousness and the ecology of time and place. We’ve got to mesh individuals with the radical unified community that’s hurtling through space on a planet. I just watched “Behind the Curve” which is about the Flat Earth Society stuck in old science, which is funnier than societies stuck in old government/religion.
But it’s sort of touching that they defend something now believed only by outlier cultures. Or are they so atypical? We can’t feel the gyring of the solar system. Defending “god-given” male and female dimorphism is sort of like that in the experience of most people. I’m grateful that my own life has been various to the point of chaos.
