The genie bottle

The politics of gender are going to continue to be messy. On the one hand you have the autonomy and freedom of people to live as they will and on the other the weight of religious, social and institutional norms which depend on a tradition and structure.

The bigger the gap is between those two things is, the more difficulty we will encounter living in a society as ourselves.

People have a right to live as they please but the moment someone calls themselves a woman or a man they have automatically stepped into a territory that has been guarded by traditional expectation. No wonder that in the past binary transsexuals would want to disappear into stealth living because fitting in to the existing structure and be left in peace was the point.

By contrast today we have introduced an advocacy which challenges definitions of man and woman that many are not willing to allow to entertain hence the backlash. The reality is that the binary was largely enforced through social pressure and people have naturally much more malleable behavior but it just wasn't allowed to be demonstrated. The pushback from criticals is to put back into the genie bottle something which cannot be undone and it is leading to much frustration for them.

Add to that the malleable definition within the world of gender variance over what 'trans' means and what rights it endows, and we can see how it will take considerably more time for the dust to settle.