My middle of the road theory on sexual morality and gender labels
If an American turned on their television in the 1950’s, they’d see women cooking and cleaning the house, and men going to work in business suits. Boys played with toy guns, and girls played with dolls. There were only two choices for sex and gender, but it wasn’t really a choice, because the genitals you were born with determined how society expected you to behave. If you were born with a penis, you acted like Ward Clever, and if you were born with a vagina, you acted like June Clever.
In the 1950’s, American television culture was so prudish, sitcoms weren’t allowed to show married heterosexual couples in the same bed. So husbands and wives were always portrayed sleeping in separate twin-sized beds, fully clothed. When the children who grew up watching “Leave it to Beaver” became adults, they considered the sitcom, “Three’s Company” obscene, because it showed a single man living with two single females. To the old timers’ dismay, “Three’s Company” was popular enough with the younger generation to last eight seasons.
In 2004, the Baby Boomers who grew up on “Three’s Company” considered “The L Word” obscene because it showed promiscuous lesbians living together and getting married. The only reason “The L Word” was allowed on television at all, was because it aired on late night cable, far from the impressionable eyes of children.
It didn’t take another twenty years for society to accept the next next jump in which sexual norms are allowed to be shown on television. In less than a decade, the bonds of tradition loosened to the point that NBC (a family-oriented channel) produced, “The New Normal,” a sitcom in which two gay men hire a woman to be a surrogate mother for their child.
If that wasn’t enough to give Baby Boomers heart attacks, they also had to come to terms with shows like “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” and “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” in which transsexuals openly demand to be celebrated. To the old timers’ dismay, both of those shows are so popular with young people, they’ve already lasted more seasons than “Three’s Company.”
In the history of mankind, society has never changed this fast. The reason this is happening now, is because technology is spreading information to people, who are learning more, faster than ever. Radio and TV were unprecedented, but the invention of the internet sped up communication exponentially, and its pace is still compounding. If things are changing so fast right now your head is spinning, it’s going to have spun completely off your body in twenty years, because this whirlwind of change is only going to get faster.
Sexual orientation and gender norms have always been debated, but the conversation has never been this polarized or violent. The reason the national dialogue on sex and gender isn’t as calm as it was in the 1990’s is because we’re all in uncharted territory. The young, progressive liberals leading the charge are as lost as the elderly conservative curmudgeons who are holding onto tradition. Moderates in the middle are wondering who is less wrong.
For example, you used to be considered a liberal progressive if you believed in women’s right to work or homosexuals’ right to marry, but if the progressive social justice warriors get their way in 2017, when you fill out a job application that asks your gender, it will have to include 50-80 different types of gender pronouns your coworkers will have to address you by, according to your choice.
Don’t ask me to explain this chart. I don’t know.
To some of America’s social justice warriors, those pronouns aren’t enough to accurately label everyone. So they invented a chart explaining how sex and gender are part of a spectrum, which children can use to determine the nature of their gender and sexuality. Every American agrees freedom of choice is a good thing, but even moderate liberals laugh and cringe at The Gender Unicorn.
There actually is a degree of truth to the fluidity of sex and gender, but it’s more nuanced than social justice warriors or Christians are ready to admit. For starters, the traditional way of thinking about sex and gender is that there are only two possibilities. You're either a boy with a penis or a girl with a vagina. Life isn't that simple. Sex organs are determined by chromosomes. If you have an XY chromosome, you’ll be born with a penis and all the hormones that make you think and act masculine. If you have XX chromosomes, you’ll be born with a vagina and all the chromosomes that make you think and act feminine.
However, people are often born with a mismatched combination of chromosomes like XXY, XXXY, or just X. These genetic codes create mixed signals within people’s body. Some combinations will cause someone to have the body of one sex, but the mental wiring of the other. This makes them feel like they’re living in the wrong body, and no amount of will-power or philosophizing is going to change that. In these cases, getting a sex change is a drastic, but legitimate, choice.
Some conservatives argue this saying, “You may have the choice to cut your dick off, but how is that not insane?” Well, insanity is defined as “a pattern of mental or behavioral patterns that may be abnormal to social norms and definitely causes someone to be a danger to themselves or others.”
Chopping your dick off is definitely abnormal. It’s probably not going to cause you to harm other people, but the suicide rate among transsexuals is above average. So technically, being a transsexual fits the definition of insanity, but so does autism and ADHD. Down syndrome and neurofibromatosis are caused by abnormal chromosomes. If you’re going to hate transsexuals for being born with a more difficult genetic makeup to manage than the average person, then you need to hate almost everybody and spend the rest of your life beating everyone up for not having the exact same biology as you.
Some transsexuals don’t have abnormal chromosomes, but their life experiences convinced them to seek a new identity. For example, I once met a man who got a sex change and lived as a woman. He was molested repeatedly by his father as a child, and he told me that at one point, when he was being raped, it was like a switch went off in his head. He remembered thinking, “Daddy has sex with mommy, and daddy is having sex with me. So I must be a mommy.” The rest of his life was a downward spiral into confusion and self-destructive behavior. Technically, this person’s thoughts and behavior fit the definition of insanity, but if you’re going to hate him for that, you’re not trying to understand anything, and you’re one of the bad guys. Even if he made the wrong decision, that doesn’t mean he deserves to be hated.
On a lighter note, I once met a teenage girl who identified as a man, but she spent her evenings shopping for shoes on her smart phone and doing everything girls do, including dating guys. She got swept up in the social movement for sexual equality before she was old enough to understand genetics and found a niche that gave her an identity even though it didn’t truly fit her. She’ll undoubtedly grow out of it, like I grew out of my heavy metal phase. Does this make her an insane piece of shit who deserves to be spat on? No. She’s just a naive kid trying to find herself, like the rest of us. That doesn’t change the fact that there are more than two types of chromosome patterns humans can be born with. Transsexuals are real. If you can’t accept that, then you don’t believe in reality, which fits the definition of insanity. At the same time though, you don’t get to decide you’re a real transsexual just because it’s trendy.
If the poser transsexual I mentioned above wants to wear pants instead of dresses, and get a job instead of raising children, her decision is amoral, not immoral. Scottish men wear kilts. Arab men wear a long, flowing garb called a thawb, which looks dress-like to Westerners. Different cultures all over the world, and throughout history, have assigned different gender roles to men and women, including how they dress, act and work. These kind of gender differences are social constructs that we have social pressure to follow but no moral obligation. Anyone can dress however they want. Clothing patterns are a non-issue. If you believe you have a divine duty to enforce your parents’ dress code on everyone else, you’re intellectually lazy at best, and insane at worst.
Granted, telling a preschooler they get to choose how to define their sexuality and gender role for the rest of their life is setting them up for failure. If you tell a five year old boy he can be whatever he wants, he’s more likely to choose to be a dinosaur than a girl. Kids don’t know what the hell is going on, and this is all the more reason we shouldn’t encourage girls to wear dresses and play with Barbies, and boys to wear pants and play with action figures. We’re indoctrinating kids with gender roles that wouldn’t matter if they were broken. In the cosmic scale of things, the clothes you wear don’t matter. They’re useful, but it’s unnecessary to force people to wear clothes that fit your fleeting cultural upbringing.
Another unnecessary social construct is the idea that everyone under the age of eighteen is going to be traumatized by seeing genitals. No other animal on the planet gets worked up over seeing genitals, and children who grow up in nudist colonies don’t leave traumatized. Their curse is having to live the rest of their lives wondering why everyone else is so uptight. The solution to whether or not trans men should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms is to remove all gender segregation and let men and women piss, shit and shower together. This sounds outrageous if you’ve never experienced it, but that’s not because it’s crazy. It’s because you’ve been indoctrinated with your society’s cultural norms. If everyone walked around naked together, like in the shower scene in “Starship Troopers,” we would all just get on with our lives and not worry about other people’s bodies.
At some point, someone may get raped by sharing bathrooms, but I sincerely believe there will be less rapes overall because society’s sexual frustration level will be lower across the board. If we’re going to segregate the sexes and force people to hide their bodies, then we can’t condemn cultures that force women to cover their entire bodies. They’re doing the same thing as you. They’ve just taken your moderate style of oppression and ran with it to its inevitable conclusion.
Who you choose to have sex with is just as much of a non-issue as what clothes you choose to wear or who sees your genitals. Sexual attraction is partly determined by hormones and partly by choice. Either way, if you get stranded on a deserted island for the rest of your life, eventually, you’re going to fuck whatever is there, even if your only companion is a sheep.
It’s an understatement to say everyone is bi-sexual. Humans are omni-sexual. The most accurate way to define humans isn’t man-fucker or woman-fucker. We’re all just fuck bots. When you remove the social pressure to only have one type of sex, people will fuck just about anything. This isn’t immoral. It’s amoral. It doesn’t matter where you stick your dick, what you stick inside of you, or what orifice you stick it in… as long as nobody gets hurt or is forced to do something against their will.
Everyone over the age of thirty has thought, even just for a second, about fucking something that isn’t a member of the opposite sex. Most of us have fucked our hand or a toy, but we don’t have a special name for that, because we don’t care. Imagine if we told people that if you ever think about having sex with a pocket pussy, it makes you a latex-ophile, which is how you must have been born and thus how you have to identify yourself and behave.
There are undoubtedly millions of men and women who had a passing thought that they might like to have intercourse with someone of their own sex. But because society says only gay people think about that, people often assume their one-off fantasy must mean they’re gay and therefore have to wear rainbow flags and act flamboyant. If we’d all grown up believing humans are just horny fuck bots and it doesn’t matter how you achieve orgasm, we’d all get on with our lives and not end up basing our personality on our sexual fantasies.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to identify as gay. Some people just have the right cocktail of hormones that predispose them to wanting to have gay sex. However, they’re not going to burst into flames if they decide to have heterosexual intercourse. So all I’m saying is it’s unnecessary to force people into conforming to a social group that fits their fantasies. Many militant homosexuals and heterosexuals alike are guilty of forcing this dichotomy on others.
In conclusion, progressives are correct that there are more than two choices for how to live. However, forcing people to pick one of eighty labels, and then demonizing people who don’t, is oppressive in exactly the same way as forcing people to pick between one of two labels and demonizing those who don’t fit your expectations. The left has become guilty of enforcing too many labels, and the right has been guilty of enforcing too few. The solution is to get rid of the need for any labels by not giving a fuck about other people.
Most people who read this probably won’t agree with half of what I’ve said, but I believe history will vindicate me. I believe the future will look like Star Trek, where everyone wears gender neutral onesies because people will have stopped worrying about socially constructed gender differences. There will also be men who wear dresses and women who wear combat boots. Everyone will be showering with each other and having casual sex. The world won’t end. Life will go on, and everyone will get more of what they want.
Most people alive today will be glad they won’t live to see the new world, because they can’t let go of their traditions, which are based on archaic and intellectually lazy labels for sex and gender. The good news is, our children won’t have to pick their gender identity on a unicorn chart, and adults won’t have to pick between eighty different labels when they fill out employment applications, because nobody will care enough to make that distinction.
Video and image source 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
