Society is dealing with many things now, from COVID to racial tensions to on going issues in the middle east to plastic trash to energy sources to.......... well everything.
One of the things we have recently come to face is gender and its differences. Gender is not a new topic, but the notion that gender is a construct is a very new idea. I both agree and disagree with the idea that gender is a social construct. I think that this is an easy idea to wrap your head around, but starts with separating the physical and the psychological. To start from the physical, there are only two genders, with a very small slice of people being stuck with a body that has both. There are significant differences between these two genders and trying to say there are not would lead to medical disasters and needless death. The fact that for a long period of time medical research ignored the female sex is a major mistake and one that still carries errors in our medical data as a result. The differences between the sexes in sports is readily apparent and leads to dividing the two genders into different groups for competitions. It makes sense.
But.
We now enter a time when we are trying to address the systemic problems in out social system. The notion that we should all be equal is very much a great and valuable part of a modern society. Any group that attains an advantage in law or practise is a group that will both tenaciously hold on to that privilege and do all it can to ensure that it continues, as can be seen in all modern societies that are now being slapped in the face with how women and minorities are treated in their society.
And now we have individuals who are struggling with sexual orientation and how that fits into society as a whole. Especially as we as a society need to come to grips with the long standing prejudice against such people. The language that we use has no differentiation between physical gender and mental gender, and it has no delineation when dealing the fact that although physical gender is a very real and solid thing, mental gender orientation for some is a very fluid thing. And there are many people who refuse to understand this.
We need a way to make a division between these two things. That they strongly influence each other is very true and I see no way to sever that relationship, but likewise, there needs to be an acknowledgement that for some of us there is a difference in that relationship.
We already see echoes of this, in people using the words 'I identify as .......', or calling it your sexual orientation. And then trying to have the mental orientation align with our language by using either gender neutral or flipping the gendered words. And for the mental health of that individual, using those pronouns is a way to help them fit into a world that has not yet come to full grips with the idea that mentally there is a fluidity to gender that is not matched physically.
The English language has evolved to handle many concepts, and evolving to handle a way of stating that mental or sexual gender is different from physical is not a difficult task. And it looks like it is something that we need.
I lack the imagination to come up with a word that fits or allows us this differentiation, but perhaps it is something that will happen soon.
