How did Gender Identity Become Such a Battlefield?

I wasn’t expecting to wade into the forum of gender identity this morning when I sat in meditation and deep Earth listening. What came, though, was that beautiful deep feminine presence – the quiet, hopeful, persistent voice – intensely powerful and enduring, but not forceful.

How is it that the waves of the Ocean rise and crash against the shore and yet there is nothing controlling or aggressive behind it? Merely energy building and releasing. The hugely destructive energy of the hurricane, the shuddering, shattering power of the earthquake. Feeling into these, they are all just a building of pressure and a release. And so it was with this energy this morning. I felt anger. Deep rising anger. Not forceful, but insistent that something was wrong. And this article is my earthquake; The storm waves crashing on the shore.

There is so much I could say on this topic, but I am going to stick to what I know for sure and that is that not one of us knows very much of anything and we certainly do not know what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

Does it not strike you as strange that from the time we enter this world as Human beings, one of the first obsessions about us is the label of gender? Almost immediately we are reduced to a story about our identity and all of the cultural implications that come with it. We are so keen to know the possible life paths of our children and, in our attempts to discern this, we bind them in the chains of expectation – the colours they will wear, the nature of their clothing, the toys that they will play with, the career and earning opportunities, activities, interests and education that will be available to them, the sports and games they will play and even whom they will marry. Along with these, expectations of their behaviour and temperament. Many of us dutifully play out these stories and many of us don’t – either way, there is often a tension, a deep unease,  between who we truly are and the stories that we carry with us.  

In reality, masculinity and femininity are far more than anatomical attributes and both are something we all have to varying degrees. But, it seems, we are constantly wanting to categorise, polarise, compare and place every aspect of our existence into some kind of hierarchical order. Our constant desire to understand, predict and control things appears to know no limits. We find it hard to deal with the spectrum of existence or with our own uniqueness. In a bid to crown one person the strongest, fastest, fittest, most powerful, most attractive (or indeed the opposite), we dismiss so much of ourselves and one another.

What made me feel angry is our certainty and righteousness as we bully and dismiss the feelings of others as invalid, we tell other people how they should see themselves and we use some aspects of their physicality to determine how they are allowed to participate in society. And we are conditioned to do the same thing to ourselves. For what it is worth, I strongly believe that our true nature is not the roles we play, the beliefs we have, our likes and dislikes, thoughts, feelings, bodies, nor our minds.

So I challenge each one of us first of all to be kind above all else and to recognise our common humanity and also to say  “See me as you will, but I refuse to define and limit myself with labels. I am so much more than a gender or a race or my physical or mental abilities, the way I vote or any other identity label that you would have me wear. I am complex and wonderful and unique, indefinable, indescribable and perfect.”