gender fictions carved in stone

gender is like an ancient god: both real and unreal

recently i was reading a book about architecture. there were several sections about these winged ginis (large masculine figures with wings and long beards) who looked after the ancient assyrians. the assyrians fancied themselves to be a special race under the ginis’ divine protection while their armies conquered, destroyed, and enslaved their neighbors. the enslaved people built massive stone reliefs of… yes, winged ginis

i started thinking about how at first these things were built en masse: not just winged ginis but gigantic stone reliefs of immensely muscular bulls with gryffin wings and bearded human heads. we laugh at ancient people for being so gullible, but we forget that after these things were first built, everyone from ruler to ruled simply grew up with these ginis and bulls all around them. even the rulers who used these stone creatures to justify their rule could hardly have known the bulls were mere inventions: the rulers themselves grew up amongst the ginis. for them, their wings were reality

as i thought more about these ginis and bulls, i also started thinking about how cultural monuments are not only physical: we grow up with cultural monuments all around us, not always physical but always demonstrating “reality” for our minds. these weren’t constructed today but they were still constructed once, and with foundations to last millennia. among these monuments are socially constructed concepts like “man” and “woman”: yes, they are made up, but they are just as real as those stone statues in ancient assyria. they’re just as real as any temple or bible

we think we are smarter than ancient people were because they worshiped statues and we believe in science: but we have our own unquestioned, invented, empty concepts that we stick to as closely as fundamentalists stick to the literal letter of scripture. we just don’t recognize that we are following a script because we believe, even through a sense of discomfort, that the script is simply our natural behavior, or the “right thing to do,” or “biology.” the most supposedly “scientific” among us still cling religiously to the empty categories and made up concepts that give their lives meaning: they consider these fictitious concepts to be essential to reality. but the truth is that we don’t know anything at all about reality

in some ways gender is real: in other ways and in certain settings gender is a work of fiction as precisely sculpted as an assyrian statue, as much a product of our own deluded view of reality as any prophecy was to an ancient person (though of course i don’t mean to discount all prophecies)

made up concepts about gender are even more real to us than any magical bull was to any assyrian. that is why it is important to recognize our power to dismantle these statues and build our own: idols that empower rather than control us, identities that we adopt through knowing ourselves rather than being assigned something by others

even as i say that gender is made up, i also say that gender is real: clearly the concept of gender is trying to get at something real inside of us. i know i have a gender! i feel my gender inside, but i don’t yet know what it’s called, because we have refused to build new structures for navigating a reality which we know to be inside us but hardly understand and lack the tools to analyze. yes, gender… is real… in the sense that a soul or a spirit is real… in the sense that astrology and magic and spirituality are real… and these are real!… but gender is not real in the way a rock or a finger is real… gender is not a thing… gender is a multifaceted force inside us… gender is a part of our souls that only we can know and that no one else can rightly assign us

sadly, despite the obvious complexity of gender, the predominance of binary thinking means most of us enter adulthood having never even thought about one of the most personal, most important forces inside us. we have yet to invent the variety of words required by the swirling spherical spectrum which is gender. we are too swayed by the concepts we take as real and solid and boxy: we make fun of new words to talk about ourselves. but if the gender inside us seriously conflicts with the manufactured gender imposed upon us, and we are held down by a gender identity with which we feel no true alignment: then we feel a deep sense of discomfort until we gain the analytical tools to understand what is happening inside us. many never do: they live with a sense of discomfort and dysphoria, they know something isn’t right, they know something they think is real isn’t actually real, but they’re so convinced by the understanding of reality they’ve absorbed from their environment that they are never able to know their true selves: they are never able to break free from the phantom self forced upon them

parents fear their children will be confused by new language: i was confused anyway: I wish I’d had the chance to be more confused. as many others have said in many other places and many other times: reality is not real: reality is not objective: reality is constructed by our extremely limited senses: reality emerges from our consciousness: if we cannot handle the confusion of facing the contradictory mysteries of reality then we cannot ever hope to understand the true reality inside ourselves

in any case, most certainly, we cannot pretend to know what this internal and true reality is on behalf of our children. we cannot seriously look at a baby’s genitals and say “that is a boy” with all the sociological, behavioral, and cultural connotations that go alongside that empty concept, that stone relief, that made up word: that word is not real, that word is only real like a sculpture is real, like a gini or magical bull is real. the truth: our own internal truth is more real than the fabricated models of reality we have all grown up absorbing: and only *we* can know this true reality within ourselves

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andrew

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