Everything Is Subjective and Contains Its Opposite

This is not a reason to reject trans people and their language

Pick up any word, and you can perceive how it contains its opposite—necessarily so.

• Bravery means facing your fear. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel any fear. If you weren’t afraid at all, you wouldn’t need to be brave.
• Strength contains the idea of vulnerability. Part of being strong is knowing your weaknesses, leveraging your skills strategically, and letting yourself rest and heal when you’re tired or injured.
• Paying attention to one thing means not paying attention to another. Our attention is finite at any moment. We can’t be equally curious about everything.
• The reason I point down and left is to distinguish it from up and right. The instruction of where to go embeds the instruction of where not to go.
• Liking something implies that I’ve also experienced disliking something else, so I’ve learned to distinguish amusement from boredom, or pleasure from pain. Also, I can like and dislike something at the same time in different ways.
• Verb tenses, and the ways we use them to storytell, connect the parts of our narratives. We talk about what was then, is now, will be later. (Or what we didn’t know then, but know now, and will forget in the future.) If past and future didn’t contain the idea of each other, we couldn’t tell these stories.

And so on.

When someone looks scared and weak, you might find a way to view them as brave and strong. When someone looks like they’re not paying attention to one thing, it might be because they’re extremely attentive to something else. If someone’s pointing firmly in one direction, it’s precisely because they have thoughts about the possible consequences of the other direction. If they’re pleased and happy, that’s on a continuum with less pleasant feelings. If you already know everything in this paragraph, it’s because you learned it in the list above, which one minute ago was still in your present, and a minute before that was still in your future.

For that matter:

Pick up any word, and you can deconstruct it.

Feelings, virtues, ideas, actions — they’re personally subjective, culturally dependent, always shifting through experience and observation. They come from somewhere, and we express them in new and creative ways. When we analyze them, they dissolve in our hands.

Yin and yang: You don’t have light without dark, so fundamentally light and dark are united. You may focus on one or the other, and you can use different words at different times. But when you stare into the opposites deeply, you see the fundamental unity.

Here is What I Find Perplexing and Annoying

We can play this game with any word and any concept.

So: Why are people fascinated with using it as a pretext to reject trans people?

Look here. The concepts of “man” and “woman” are deconstructible like everything else. They can refer to traits that are individually subjective, culturally dependent, and/or institutionally enforced. Those traits, as well as how we interpret them, can change over time, because we—ourselves and our world—are always in dialogue with gendered concepts: upholding them, resisting them, playing with them, letting them go.

Discovering that “man” and “woman” are slippery terms that fall apart upon inspection, or depend on each other in some way, or are temporary, or subjective, does not delegitimize trans people. Trans and nonbinary people are maybe 1% of the population and also constitute only 1% of the population who uses terms like “man” and “woman” to describe themselves and others. If the other 99% of human beings continue to use the words “man” and “woman,” why is the questioner not discussing the legitimacy of their gender?

Why does the headline read: Cis person has brilliant insight that gender maybe is fake; therefore, cis person adds, no one is really trans! Why is that always the headline?

If you try to glue those terms “man” and “woman” more narrowly to the material reality of being “male” and “female,” it solves the problem for like two minutes. It isn’t solved permanently because, now, in your imagination, you can throw out “man” and “woman” (since you’ve made them redundant with terms for physical sex) — and so you have (1) no way to describe many of the gendered phenomena “man” and “woman” typically describe, and (2) the terms for physical sex continue to have their own insufficiencies.

(This is like saying: All the different tools in my toolbox are partly working and each is just slightly broken, so I’ll throw out some of the tools so I have fewer of them. Does not help.)

People who spend a lot of time thinking about the male/female binary have started to see through that binary. It dissolves like any other binary. There are more than two possible sex chromosome arrangements. Sex hormones are on a spectrum and can change. “Long” and “short” are subjective, and, when it comes to urethras, the measurement too can change. Gametes (egg and sperm) each imply the other’s existence. The sex that someone “appears to be” is in the eye of the beholder. If each person only has one sex, do we assess it by their past, present, or future physical traits? Reducing a person’s physical traits to “male” and “female” becomes more difficult the longer you contemplate it, and replacing the language with “man” and “woman” only obscures it.

This type of conundrum is not unique to gender and sex topics. It applies to any topic whatsoever. Are you “young” or “old”? “Short” or “tall”? “Rich” or “poor”? Do you live in the East or West, and before you answer that, are you aware the globe is spinning? Before you say that this is not what we mean by “East” and “West” and that the spinning of the globe is irrelevant, are you aware that sometimes the sun is “up” and sometimes it’s “down”?

The spinning of the globe might be relevant.

It depends why someone is asking.

So: Why is someone asking about gender and sex?

Specifically: Why is a cisgender person asking about gender and sex, very suddenly, only upon discovering the existence of transgender people? Or, if the cisgender person has wanted to ask these questions before, why do they illustrate their philosophy with recently discovered transgender specimens instead of with examples from their own lives? Why does the knowledge of the existence of trans people cause them to doubt what trans people say?

What is the “problem” with transgender and nonbinary people’s lives and language? Just because the language seems different to someone who isn’t described by it doesn’t mean it is wrong. Transgender people use common inherited language — sometimes adapted — to communicate something specific and individual about themselves. If they’re using shared language about sex/gender norms in an off-center way, it’s because the shared language doesn’t center them — and that is not the trans person’s fault. Would you like them to entirely reinvent language? Would you like them to not be trans?

Everything is subjective and contains its opposite.

This is not a reason to reject trans people and their language.

If you’re intrigued by this topic, I’ve written a novel that speaks to it. (And also, appropriately, does not speak to it.) Most Famous Short Film of All Time is coming September 20. You can mark it as “Want to Read” on Goodreads or read an excerpt below. ⬇️