“For it is always a salutary shock to find that the vision of God is reserved, not for the excessively clever, urbane, or cultivated, for the men of ponderous learning or for those who display sharp singleness of purpose in the world of affairs or research; but quite simply for ‘the pure in heart’—not for the expert but for the initiate, and for the initiate in the discipline of humility, patience, and wholeness.”
—George Whalley, “Introduction” Poetic Process p, xxvii
This is a lid that doesn’t quite fit onto the discussion that follows. At least a third of the words I’ve written have escaped—and a few unwanted words have entered in, too. . . .
Sex is, where in nature it occurs, divided into male and female. Say you don’t believe in ‘false dichotomies’, say that you are ‘non-binary’, get sophisticated about sex and what you say to explode the bedrock under “male and female He created them.” so make up new fairy tales, new words for love and confound your friends and family. All these things reveal your character—not your sex and no, not your gender. “If you try on a character that is beyond your might you’ll play a poor part in that and neglect he one that fits right” (my rewording of a saying by Epictetus). There’s still just us (you and me, male and female as so happens) and the other animals (male and female) who do it and all that results.
Two become one—or if you like, a soliloquy beginning, “To become one.” Such has been known well before the egg and sperm were first discovered through the microscope or audio-visual aids took us into the animated drama of the uterus.
Ah, but there is also the divided! The word Sex is a word like Man: it’s assumed that it includes everyone (and no-one). For division is conceptual—I mean, conceptually speaking, I can cut a string in two indefinitely—yes, but! balancing the division being made is the notion that engenders, in this case, not, uh, string theory or anything but what engenders male and female. From the first cleaving of our cells to the wars within our world, I mean, the wars on this planet, strife, rife! with division, we are forever dividing. And perhaps it is not scientific enough to consider what we are dividing into. We’ve got to be dividing into something—
Som probably best not to divide oneself—best not to be a girl-man or a boy-woman, man-girl or a woman-boy. The best that has been thought of is for adults with enough sense to become husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, or to just leave the whole gender thing alone . . . uh, so, I once read that in ancient America there was a society where the jilted, defamed lover could heave a stone at the interlocutor’s head from a parapet. I can hear the adulteress to her friends, “He couldn’t heave a stone to save his life.”
Unisex bathrooms are all very well—very progressive, but it must be horribly embarrassing for brothers and sisters to share a bathroom with their parents at the same time, don’t you think? I'd like to think that in my country, every family member gets time of their own in the bathroom. That there is an ordinary belief in personal and intimate space. And that this extends into necessary bathroom use throughout the day and in public.
It used to be: “they grow out of it,” and “it’s just a phase”. Compounded words that speak the same people. The fashionable moralists of today say, Fake It Til You Make It, Be The Change You Want To See In This World. Like Superman, change in a telephone booth. Do What You Are Passionate About.
Education, perhaps, should strive for wholeness, self-acceptance, the cheerful, musical, mathematical, athletic and poetic mind. That understands that work is needed and needs time alone with a mirror. And the sex ed curriculum should be limited to mating. It is perhaps the earliest way in which we examine ourselves as a species.
If I can be bold? Perhaps gym class wasn’t the right venue. But gym class was, at the time when schools started teaching hygiene in gym class, the only way to give sex-ed to boy’s classes and girl’s classes—separately. Separately even after the schools here merged the boys and girls, so that kids should be taught all together—but in Phys. Ed. there were still male teachers for the boys, female teachers for the girls for some things. Phys Ed was (used to be?) one of those helpful divides.
It seems inevitable one generation later that sex is now taught as if it was a sort of gymnastics. The first sex-ed teachers might have learned about sex in an English class but deprived of the literature that defines sex most ably, and, deprived of the best that that been thought and written, English teachers now face militant neologisms and Phys Ed teachers brave sexes and genders that they don’t know what to do with.
"Gender is a Social Construct!" Write a few pages on it, says a new teacher to a student. So? What else is a social construct? Law? Architecture? Medicine? Can we say that all of human art is a social construct? That none of it is instinctual? "Gender is a Social Construct!" Is gender then, an art? Okay, but I don't see how this justifies society (of which teachers and students form a small part) being irresponsible with gender. It seems to me, if "Gender is a Social Construct!" society is ultimately responsible for healthy and remarkable gender that does its form of good in the world (gender that isn’t dependant on, say, surgical breakthroughs, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, symbolic breakthroughs in writing, but on life abundant) and so society, and especially teachers, should act responsibly. Or, okay, "Gender is a Social Construct!" What is it constructed of and what is it constructed on? That "is" is a sinkhole of thought. So what if it is? My objection is that that it must be made of something. So what is it made of? Shouldn't it be, Gender is constructed socially? "Gender is a Social Construct!" Yes, but Gender is not made of cloying, hackneyed expressions, is it? “Women can be born with gonads.” Okay, now you're simply making fun.
Why is “social” such a super positive, popular word? Studies? No—Social Studies. Back in elementary school. These days, "Social Democracy" and "Social distancing”. Why say you are going into work when you can say you are going into Social work? Thousands of phrases with the catchy word social in the title.
But let me tell you. They are all Enlightenment with hardly any Renaissance in them. It gets worse though. The student today is forced to "show" how "Gender is a Social Construct”. And so we get confounded young adults who say that "Gender is a Social Construct!" And what's it all for? To solve the dangling taxonomy of species. What Nebuchadnezzar called, "People, Nations, and Languages.”
Gender is the expression of sex. It is traditionally divided into two norms: one of boys and one for girls, one of sons and one of daughters, one for fathers and one for mothers. Say you’ve got to teach the novel, Anne Of Green Gables. A queer couple they say, actually a brother and sister, adopt a precocious young lady. Sex—is what renders that sort of situation normal.
“Surgical and chemical gender reassignment is a very radical thing to do to another human being. The procedure should not be undertaken without a careful assessment for a chronic, complex dissociative disorder. It is not surprising that many transsexuals report a positive outcome from gender reassignment — the positive outcome is experienced by a female identity who has achieved a complete chemical and surgical victory over the male identity of the body.”
(Colin Ross, The Trauma Model. Manitou Publications, Inc. 2007. p. 165)
Less extreme would be to just consider the family and the siblings and the way they grew up. Surely, we know that animal siblings often play-fight. The cries of a toddler become intelligent though. Everyone gets to hear the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”.
Gender dysmorphia? dysphoria? or a boy with an older sister, a girl with an older brother? Etc. Why did I insist on wearing a shirt to swim to the point of hysteria when I was a boy? Is it because I internalized or uh normalized the warnings my parents made to my older sister to keep her top on? And I expect it’s the same way with a girl with an older brother—a challenge to get her to keep her shirt on.
Or--I was a boy who thought he was getting breasts. And my mother took me to a doctor. He assured me that the nodules I was feeling develop behind my nipples were perfectly normal. Now--I'd hate to think what a doctor might have advised and affirmed today. I cannot find it to quote—An Account Of The Things Of Yucatan. But in it I read a story that makes my hair stand on end. The Spanish invaders found an American so beautiful that they crucified her as a lesson to their lusty troops. Don’t underestimate a society’s instinct to destroy that which is beautiful.