By Ande Jacobson
Everyone should be able to be comfortable in their own skin. They shouldn’t have to justify who they are. They should just be able to be. They should be free to live their life without fear because of who they are, or what they look like. As I’ve written many times before, humans, all of us, are a single species. We all have the same basic needs for clean air, safe food and water, shelter, clothing, companionship, and in the modern world, transportation, education, health care, and so much more. Today in the U.S., we have a federal government working hard to turn us against one another. It is working to make us hate one another for myriad superficial reasons. It is working to make us afraid to leave our homes, to express our views, and in far too many cases, to even exist. It is pulling at visceral emotions to make us fear one another when we should instead be supporting each other.
Last week, I saw a new dentist that I really like. I like the office staff and the dental assistant who aided the dentist and helped me through the visit. Everyone was very nice, and very patient focused. At the end of my visit since I was establishing as a new patient, the very friendly and kind assistant asked me what my preferred pronouns were. My knee jerk reaction was that I didn’t care. I told the assistant that I tended not to use gender-specific pronouns with respect to myself. I instead tend to use my name. Readers can see that in my bio, and the same is true anytime I’ve had to submit a biography. I try very hard to write them without using gender-specific pronouns because for the purposes of those biographies, my gender shouldn’t matter. I guess my preference for their files was to leave that entry blank, though I didn’t say that, and on the forms I had correctly checked the box for the question asking me to identify my sex which has never changed throughout my life.
In an intimate relationship, gender and sex can matter, though not always. For medical care where specific hormonal or anatomical considerations are a focus, sure, the presence or absence of biological sex-specific tissue matters. For me though, for most things, I don’t really identify myself based on gender. I think of myself as a person, a human being, and as such, I am comfortable in my own skin. I was an engineer professionally, and I had side careers as a musician and as a writer. None of that was related to gender in any way. It was related to specific skill sets that I developed through study and practice.
I often wonder if our society wasn’t so focused on identifying every possible difference between people, if gender would be such a controversial and volatile thing. We’ve all seen the reports on the fluidity of gender and gender norms, and if not pressured by societal expectations, children would develop very differently. There wouldn’t be prohibitions on studying certain subjects based on one’s anatomy, or apparent anatomy. It could be based instead on what excites us, and what motivates us. It shouldn’t matter whether somebody is female, male, intersex, or any combination. We know genetically there are countless variations that go far beyond one’s visible anatomy. And even so, any visible anatomy shouldn’t be a limiting factor in what anybody is allowed to do.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some careers or jobs that require physical abilities that not everyone could undertake. They just aren’t gender specific. For instance, I’m rather small and slight. Regardless of my sex or gender, I couldn’t be a firefighter. I’m too small and couldn’t perform the necessary physical requirements of the job. By the same token, if somebody has the stature and strength to meet realistic physical requirements for that work, their sex and gender shouldn’t matter.
As a child, I was fascinated by science, and math, and music, and language. I was lucky. I got to pursue them all. I spent many years in college first as an undergraduate exploring a wide range of subjects, and later as a graduate student pursuing a more focused curriculum. I wasn’t indoctrinated in anything. I got to explore and satisfy my intellectual curiosity at time when education was both accessible and encouraged. It was an exciting time. It was also before the decades long political assault on education pushed that pursuit beyond the reach of the vast majority of Americans partly because of cost and partly because of ideological stratification.
During my career, although I was a technical, individual contributor and tech lead, I also was part of the university relations recruiting team from time to time. My employer liked to bring some of the technical folks on those visits as the students enjoyed talking with people closer to the work they’d actually be hired to do rather than just talking with managers and human resources representatives. When we gave presentations at various universities, I stressed that the most important thing the students could get from college was to learn how to learn, a skill that would be needed throughout their careers. I told them that their major wasn’t the most important thing. Because so much of what they would need to do the work was domain specific to a given project, if they knew how to learn, they could thrive. They were surprised by that, but it was true.
Today, our society needs to relearn how to learn, and not just for our career pursuits. It seems that we need to relearn how to interact with one another on a societal level. We need to relearn how to accept one another, no matter our sex, gender, color, stature, religion, etc. We need to relearn how to see one another as fellow humans, not as somebody to fear or hate.
That song from the musical South Pacific, You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught, comes to mind. We should all heed the lesson it teaches:
“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taughtYou’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taughtYou’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taughtYou’ve got to be carefully taught”
We need to be taught not to do this yet again.
A Good Reed Review 