#MYLDN (847)

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Gender seems to be a very hot topic at the moment, driven in large, by the hard fought for acceptance of Trans Genders. There are now apparently at least 50-70 different gender options currently being proposed for you to be able to classify yourself (list here – scroll down to read). There is even now a term called gender fluid, which, regardless of its intention to explain that the dividing line between the sexes isn’t quite as rigid as initially thought, it just sounds wrong.

In an attempt to recognise all the potential strains of gender identity and sexual orientation and give them validity they have, in some ways, just ensured that we are creating more barriers between people when we should be using this modern scientific understanding to tear them down.

I have just got back from a trip to Thailand and they are a race that perfectly show that there is a much vaguer and greater crossover between the sexes. There is just not as strong a visible division as in other populations but the reality is the gender border is not the wall they thought it was. Its more like a  giant ellipse encompassing all  variables within it.

What they have learnt about chromosomal combinations is that there is a tiny percentage of the human race who are extreme male and also extreme female, and everyone else, like 98% of us, are somewhere in the middle, on a sliding scale, with varying percentages and always potentially slightly in flux in either direction. So if we are all really just floating around in the XXXY soup does it really matter what the breakdown is? Do we need to be so specific. Does anyone really care anymore? You’re into men, woman, furry mascots, pickled cucumbers, who gives a shit? Good luck with all that…

To breakdown conventional notions of ‘normal’ we should just all call ourselves ‘soup’ (come on, that’s better than gender fluid right?) What the internet has shown in terms of sexual preferences is that there is no such thing as normal other than everything is esssentially normal because it is all happening to some degree somewhere in the world at any given moment.

They don’t even use the term ‘normal’ anymore in psychology, they use the term neuro-typical so that just shows you that ‘normal’ is basically dead.

We cling on to classifications of gender, sex orientation & race as a way to give ourselves a fixed identity, some way to define ourselves as it is reassuring for us and others to know we are just one thing, fixed & set, without deviation, but its just not how we are actually constructed. We are a floating amorphous blob of fluctuating ideas. We never stop changing and our influences, drives and desires are constantly shifting.

We don’t really need to be trapped in these self-made constructs, we can just accept we are whoever we are at any given moment. Why live in a box? We are free range humans. Long live the soup!