Who laughs last

I probably started thinking about gender identity in the early 90s when I was a middle schooler and saw a transgender man on Oprah. My initial reaction was “I support everyone’s right to be who they want to be, but…. Facts are facts and you can’t just decide that you’re a man or a woman. You’re born with one body or the other and that makes you a man or a woman. That’s just the way things are. You can’t just change that because you feel like you’re different. If I decided that I feel black, that doesn’t make me black.”

But something about that way of thinking nagged at me, and I came back to it over and over throughout the years to examine why I felt that way.

I asked myself if a man needs a penis and testicles to be a man. But I decided that wasn’t true: maybe he’s a soldier who was injured in war, or someone who had an illness. I’d never say a man like that isn’t a man because he doesn’t have the right equipment. That would be ignorant and cruel.

But that’s injury or illness. Men who lose their genitals because of a injury or illness were still BORN male, right? So is it the body you’re born with that determines if you’re a man or a woman? 

I decided that wasn’t true either. If a kid born without hands really loved playing baseball, I’d think “Great for him!” and support every effort he made to play the sport he loved. I’d NEVER say “You’re not a baseball player. That’s not the body you were born with.” The very idea of saying something like that sounds ridiculous, ignorant, and cruel.

Gradually, I realized that my opinion about gender identity didn’t hold up. Even the argument I made up that “feeling black” doesn’t make me black didn’t hold up, because one day, I realized that I choose my own race. My ancestry is mixed with Native American on both sides not that far back, but I self identify as white. And that’s how people see me and how society treats me. 

People feel that gender is somehow “different,“ not up for debate; an unchangeable quality directly tied to the bodies we’re born with. I think it’s because it’s such a fundamental (maybe the MOST fundamental) way we organize and make sense of people, society, and our place in it, and the idea of something so fundamental being editable is deeply disturbing. It rocks our worlds. If you can’t even rely on knowing, with certainty, the most basic thing you think you know about the world, then what the hell CAN you know with confidence?

And if you lose the ability to see gender in stark, easily classifiable terms (penis=man, vagina=woman) it can create awkward, inconvenient moments where you don’t know what pronouns to use, or how to refer to someone, or you have to share a locker room with a transgender woman and that makes you uncomfortable. 

But guess what? Another person’s life and identity should never be dictated by your comfort. Your convenience does not trump their right to be who they are. 

I don’t condemn, hate, or look down on the people who believe you’re a man or woman based solely on the equipment you’re born with, and that’s the end of the story. I don’t think they’re bad people. I don’t think they’re ignorant idiots or hateful bigots. Because that was me!

But I took the time (years) to really examine my position, and I put in the effort to argue with myself about why I thought the way I did. It’s an exhausting process. Who wants to rehash the same argument with themselves over and over again, year after year, especially about something I thought was an immutable and basic fact?

But I made the effort. And one by one I overcame all my own hollow arguments about gender identity. 

Bodies are just bodies, y’all. And social constructs—any opinion that begins or ends with the phrase "that’s just the way things are"—are just that: constructs. They are things we build. And like anything built, they can be torn down or rebuilt, and they definitely need to be examined and repaired from time to time. 

That’s just the way things are.

Point A) So an actor in a film you really love doesn’t like the film. Get over it. He’s entitled to his opinion.

Point B) Yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read, but God who’d wanna be such an asshole?

His sense of entitlement is being encroached upon. He’s angry that social opinion has evolved in such a way that it will no longer let a white man get away with saying whatever he wants about other races. He derides it as political correctness, and uses examples of minorities using racial slurs to illustrate why it’s not fair. Which is both wrong and ironic, and here’s why:

It’s wrong because taking someone to task for using angry slurs isn’t political correctness run amok, it’s just civility and common courtesy. No one should do it, everyone should be dressed down for using hate speech. Only white men seem to think there is some reverse racism bleeding heart liberal conspiracy of oppression being enacted when they’re asked not to use hate speech.

And it’s ironic for a white man to use minorities to illustrate his frustration with being forced to live by a double standard, to act and speak in a way other than he’d prefer because it’s being dictated by hypocrites with power. Ironic because, well, that’s pretty much what white men have done to every other color of skin in most of the world for a great part of recorded history.

Clinging to that sort of “Why can’t I do and say whatever I want with impunity anymore?” juvenile fantasy is bitter, pathetic, and sad for any adult, of any color.

And I think he knows that. I think he knows that if he was his best self, if he listened to his better angels, he wouldn’t think and feel that way. He asks the writer to edit his remarks out, and while that could be viewed as cover your ass behavior, regret founded in fear of slumping box office sales, it could also be viewed as shame– shame that he feels that way, that he said those things and put them out into the world.

He should know better, and he probably does.