Being binary is so simple. You either are something or you aren’t.
Too easy.
You’re either left-handed, or you’re right-handed, right?
Well, yes, and no.
What if you write with your right hand, but turn a screwdriver with your left hand?
What if you pour milk from a carton with your left hand, but throw a ball with your right hand?
What if you one day realise you can also write with your left hand?
How do you define your handedness? Is it by the hand you predominantly write with, or the one you predominantly use in day-to-day life (especially seeing you don’t pick up a pen very much these days)?
Handedness used to be so simple. You were right-handed, or you were broken. You might have received the strap at school if you were caught writing with your left hand, and then forced to use your right hand.
One day we realised being left-handed was ok and all of a sudden no one cared which hand you wrote with, or did anything else with for that matter.
Just like handedness, some people are still hung up on what a person’s gender is. For some reason birth registries want to record whether you’re a girl or a boy. They are less interested in whether you might have something resembling a penis or something resembling a vagina between your legs when you first enter this world. If you must register a baby’s genitalia at birth, why not just record “born with penis” or “born with vagina”? And why do we insist of putting gender on birth certificates? Why is it anyone else’s business what might be between your legs?
And wouldn’t it be simple if you could just write “boy” if you saw a penis thing, or “girl” if you saw a vagina thing on the baby, and that would be the end of the story. Simples.
Yet just like handedness, what might seem simple turns out to be anything but. For one, the penis you thought your baby had might not turn out to be a penis, and similarly with the vagina. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia, and may have an intersex variation.
Other people may not conform to the gender assigned at birth, and may feel like the opposite gender, or both, or neither, or more like one than the other, or it may be fluid (perhaps like handedness). But, penis means boy and vagina means girl, doesn’t it?
No. It doesn’t.
We used to be taught that if you had XY chromosomes you were a boy and if you had XX chromosomes you were a girl. That is so simple.
But it’s not, because some people don’t have XX or XY chromosomes. Some have XXY, or XYY, or XXYY, and so on. It’s quite complex. But it’s nature doing what nature does. And yet we try to put everyone in the “XY means boy” and “XX means girl” box.
Most things in nature exist on a spectrum, whether it’s your handedness, colouring, sexual orientation, ability to perform some task, or other natural variation.
But seemingly gender is not on a spectrum, according to some. Why would everything else be on a spectrum but not gender?
Why should girls be encouraged to dress in fancy clothes, given toys that prepare them for parenthood, and be told it’s ok to be emotional, while boys are discouraged from being fancy, given toys that promote violence and power (and not ones that promote parenthood), and be told if they cry they’re weak like a girl?
Who thought this nonsense up?
Your genitalia will probably inform the most efficient way to deal with your urinary waste and sexual mechanics, but it probably won’t inform very much else in your life, let alone your fashion sense, who you fall in love with, or the career path you might aspire to have.
It’s no one’s place to limit your possibilities because of what’s between your legs, and what’s between your legs is ultimately a matter of privacy.
In the end, few things in nature are totally binary, perhaps the exception being some people’s ability to think outside the box.