On That Damned Gender Binary
The universal acceptance of gender as wide ranging and fluid is coming sooner than you think
Put simply, for generations the gender binary, as framed by man box culture, has been cynically used to manipulate people, to control women, to drive outcomes in the voting booth, and to limit the acceptable boundaries of what it means to be human. Men against women, trans people as targets, masculinity as dominance and so on. And in doing so, we strand the next generation, our own children, in the ugly divisive male/female cage fight this creates. The binary is poison.
Which is why a general acceptance of gender as fluid and ever evolving is the better way of being and allowing others to be. Gender is not a binary. It just isn’t.
The universal acceptance of gender as wide ranging and fluid is coming. Some day we will look back on the gender binary like we would look back on some relic of the dark ages. People will ask, “How did we do that to people? How did we live that way?”
Children today are so much more open. They aren’t so quick to enforce the binary. They are evolving. And when the world shifts for the better, each human being will live according to their truth. Now? We all are still enforcing the collective farce of man box masculinity and traditional femininity.
This male or female performance of gender may be a good fit for many, but it is not a fit for all. And when those who move in the between spaces are free to be who they are, all of us will feel air come into the room. We will feel the freedom to make a few new choices, too, daily, in our lives
Why don’t we move toward freedom? Why do we reinforce our own subjugation under rules of gender that steal our wider ranging expression? These are questions we should be asking every day.
It’s time for a collective jail break. The walls of our jail are weaker than you think.
Mark Greene is the author of The Little #MeToo Book for Men.
