Perturbing

Slowly but surely I am coming to a cohesive understanding of this topic after many years of reflection, reading and observation. This includes studying myself which I try to do in the most dispassionate way possible. We do not have all the answers and yet for me the data points are more aligned in my mind than ever.

As a starting point we take it as a given that human beings are extremely complex creatures with such a wide range of behaviour that categorization is never going to be perfect. Anything to do with the human psyche is going to complicate analysis especially when our understanding of sexuality and gender only touches upon part of subjects inherently full of subtlety.

In essence what we do is identify anomalies except that these are often marked against restrictive and imposed social norms which themselves are not innate to human beings. Given this reality, adding bad faith actors who deliberately look for or outright invent pathology only adds another unnecessary layer. To make matters more complex yet again, the particular combination of expression and identity residing in each person can be very unique and the best we can hope to do is identify rough groupings. But even then to what end?

When I strip it all down to essentials, this is about the right to self-determination set against the weight of a mostly well-meaning but largely uneducated society which can be easily manipulated by opinion. Since gender variance touches upon a previously thought untouchable tenet of our existence, many are not going to allow its rules to be contravened.

It was fine when it was a largely an underground phenomenon of closets and stealth transitions, but now it has surpassed the tolerance level of those who would see all go back to how it was. They aren't going to give up without a fight and, given that there are highly crafted power structures tied to gender, one can readily understand why knowing that both malevolence and stupidity are not going to disappear any time soon.