At a basic level, to be human is to be a non-physical mind that collaborates with a physical body in order to find happiness in ways that are both non-physical and physical. A body – being the physical aspect of our humanity – moves and acts as instructed by the mind, which is the non-physical aspect of our beings as well as the primary aspect of being human from which all our reality is determined. Our humanity would be incomplete if either the mind or body were to be excluded from who we regard ourselves to be.
What is a man? What is a woman? What makes a man different from a woman? Are those differences real or just made up and shifting, depending on who we are talking to? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a man is an adult male human being, and a woman is an adult female human being. We may then ask further what an adult is, and where to draw a line that separates a child from an adult. The answers would be as varied as each of the people asked because adulthood – just like gender – is only a perspective among the many.
From a fetus to a new-born child; a toddler, a moron, a teenager, an adult, middle and old age; all these are some of the various stages in a human life cycle. In between them are others which we have not yet named for the sake of making life a bit less complicated. The same way we have simplified gender by labeling it – male and female.
There is nothing that says we should draw a line at one point or another to delineate between one stage of human growth and another. We did this by simply deciding on a characteristic that we would use to emphasis what seems like a difference as well as the point we want to make. Any of the names we use to refer to these differences are themselves only for convenience in our discourse, the same way we decide on what an average value of anything would be and then use that to decide on matters of normality and abnormality. No person could truly be regarded as average or standard, simply because of the uniqueness of the situations in which we live, to which we adjust ourselves and become as unique.
The terms we use to refer to people and the meaning we attach to them are merely points of view from which a human being could be viewed. We choose each one according to how we think it would be helpful for whatever goal we may want to achieve in a specific situation of life. None of them are absolute, and all of them are simply helpful opinions.
If we say a woman is a female adult and adulthood comes either with the age of eighteen or legal emancipation, then the difference between a woman and a girl are only a perspective because various nations and cultures have different ages and criteria for emancipation. The reason for these differences is solely because of what each nation or culture deems to be suitable with regard to their own interests whether economic, religious or otherwise. Even though people grow older with the passing of time, the adultness of each person is not a naturally occurring thing, but a social construct that is decided upon, based on what makes sense in a situation. Hence the differences in what is regarded as the best age for starting school or going on pension.
It is a fact that every human being that we refer to as a man, also has certain characteristics they have in common with any woman. What then is the difference between a man and a woman if they have the same qualities as the other person that we say they are not? The difference is not of essence and is only situational. We use situational qualities to draw a distinction between two things that are essentially similar in all respects.
Imagine three cans on a table. The first one is full of black paint; the second is full of white paint while the third is empty. We then pour half of the contents of the paint cans into the empty one and begin to mix them, which then creates a new colour, grey. Grey is the colour label that we gave to mixtures of black and white colours. Of course, we could refer to the new mixture as being white and that would be true simply because white paint is one of the ingredients, but would not be entirely true because we would have failed to recognise the effect of black paint that is also in the mixture. It is in recognition of both colours that we need to give the mixture a third name that gives it a unique identity – grey.
Every time we refer to any person as a man or woman, we are choosing to overlook certain qualities that are also integral to who they are, which if considered would make that person the same as the other person that we say they are not. Every child is a product of a male and female parents. As a result of the contributions of the two, every child would always have the characteristics of both their parents – male and female. To then refer to a person as a man would be to seek to make them different by ignoring those qualities that they have in common with their mother.
Regardless of a child’s physical gender at birth, they already have within themselves qualities of both a man and a woman, and for them to become a man or woman, would depend on which qualities the person would like to side with and accentuate more. What we see of them being either as a man or woman should then be a result of what they believe themselves to be more comfortable with by embracing more of the qualities of their mother or father or strike a delicate balanced between the two. Gender should therefore be the extent to which each person embraces the duality of which they are born.
Sometimes a child is born with the same physical gender as their mother, while on the inside they may embrace that of their father; or born with a physical gender of their father while on the inside they feel more comfortable being like their mother. The inner preference may be a result of socialisation that may have convinced the child that their physical gender is the right one to embrace or not, or the child themselves may make this decision based on their own regard of what is right or wrong and then decide on the side of what they deem to be right, such as assimilating more with the gender of the parent they are more exposed to or whom they admire more. What we regard as the LGBTQ+ gender issues are then a reflection of a degree to which a person’s personal gender preference is in keeping with the social contract definition of gender as based on physical gender at birth.
Heterosexual people are those who have been raised to embrace and prefer the physical gender that they were born with. A parent would then raise their child as a girl, because the child has the physical gender of a woman. The parent does so as a result of their own socialisation that emphasises physical gender as the right gender of a child; a likely mistake when the child is still too young and unable to express their own preference.
The gender that most people live by the time they become adults, is one that their parents – and by extension, society – chose for them when they were young, with the hope that they would grow to embrace it. It is more like raising a child to believe in certain cultural norms or a religion, who on growing up reassesses their beliefs and then decides whether to continue to embrace them or to replace them with whatever they find more relevant to their own happiness.
Gay people are a natural result of a person – who inherently has both essential qualities of their parent – preferring the qualities of a parent who is the opposite of their physical gender. To call that person a woman or man, solely based on their physical gender without considering their own preference, would then be to impose a gender on them, which they would then rebel against if it is not in keeping with how they define themselves. This would often result in them deciding to live in accord with the gender of their preference and then direct the body accordingly.
We live in situations of life where we each play various roles which socially would be categorised as ranging between the female and male. A man could play roles that are usually regarded as female and so could a woman play roles associated to men. These are only possible because each of us has both a man and a woman in our beings, because that is what nature has made possible. The abilities that this mix gives to each person are necessary for each person to respond accordingly in the various situations in which these abilities are required. To embrace them is to embrace the balance they are able to bring to an individual and to the wider situations of life.
However, this embrace of our natural qualities makes it difficult to live in a social contract that recognises people only according to their appearances as physical male and physical female, while excluding personal choice from that identity – forcing people to take sides even when within their nature they are created to be both.
A world in which the matters of gender and the abilities associated to them are dictated by the state, results in the suppression of part of our humanity, in which we cannot harness the full power of what nature has created us to be, and become only what the state decides we should be, according to the currently designated gender duality of man and woman.
By embracing both the man and woman qualities inherent in our beings, we would begin to heal the suffering that has for years been created by denying our true nature in favour of the persona created by the social contract. In the end, life demands that each person is both a man and a woman, and that is simply because each of us is a result of the union of both a man and woman.