The theme that stands out the most to me about the examples of different people’s arguments about non-gender conforming people or behavior or style etc. is that in several cases, these people are very upset about something that doesn’t involve them in the slightest. Some of them are upset about it being “shoved in their face” when often it’s them that are strangely obsessed with someone else’s appearance to the point that they won’t look away and then get in a stranger’s business. I’ve noticed that some people also tend to see anything that goes outside of an assigned norm for binary genders as a threat to them or their children. When Lil Nas X posted several pictures of himself with prosthetics to make him look as he was pregnant, I noticed a lot of people were upset that this was going to influence their kids somehow. Strange thinking that it would first of all, since I knew plenty of boys who put balloons and soccer balls under their shirts and imagine themselves pregnant. And second of all, it made no sense to me that if it DID influence their kids, how that was in any way a bad thing. I understand the sentiment that if your child wanted to dress or act outside of their assigned gender norm they would probably experience some form of bullying or mistreatment. But if this is what they’re afraid of, why be so concerned with changing your child and not the people that treat them that way? The blame always goes to them that are outside the gender binary and not to the people that actively hate them.

Another thing that often gets to me is how often people will cite “science” as a way to completely discredit different genders. These people are usually unable to provide so much as an article, or a piece of information that goes beyond what they were taught in high school biology if it even goes that far. If people were interested enough in science and they really cared about the subject matter, they would be able to find out that those ideas are completely unfounded and don’t make much sense in the first place. Gender and sex has no norms in the biological norms, there are even several animals that swap sexes within their lifetimes, and I think most people are familiar with the factoid that “male” seahorses give birth to their young. Life on earth has an amazing amount of diversity that completely dances around these ideas of male and female, which is part of what makes life beautiful. Why work so hard to restrict these things and shove them into simple categories when there is so much more to explore, know, and appreciate? 

I hope that the trend of exploring gender and those norms continues to allow more people freedom to express themselves as the more people are honest with themselves and can express themselves publicly without harming anyone, the easier it will be to live together and work on other pressing matters that require people to work together.