Gender is Complicatedly Simple

All words are made up. This isn’t to say that they have no worth. But it does mean that they can change and evolve and new words can come in to explain old concepts. This includes the dictionary of words regarding gender identity. I know I’m going to put a damper on all y’all planning a gender reveal party, but also, gender reveal parties are kind of stupid. They just allow the parents to put a slew of expectations and personality and traits onto their unborn ball of squish. I think it reveals so much about us when it comes to how much shit we give about two basic colors and the arbitrary meanings we’ve assigned to them. 
I recently watched Mulan, the good one, not the new piece of shit, with my friends and I already know how much I love that movie, but oh my gods I fucking love this movie. I related so hard to that kid and I never even knew why because I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Mulan showcased so much of how I felt internally and it makes all the more sense now. She was a girl, but not a hyper feminine girl, but also not really a masculine girl. She was just an average everyday girl. And then she pretended to be a boy, and she was a completely average boy too. She fought as a boy and as a girl and both those times, she had her own unique strategy. She was completely herself, personality wise throughout all the appearances she had. Whether she be presenting as a potential bride or a soldier. 
The concept of interchangeable gender had always been a desire of mine. When I played made up games with my sister as children, my characters would constantly flip flop between genders. I would play a boy as much as I would play a girl because I liked both. In real life, I would sometimes dress masculine and sometimes I would be feminine because I liked both. I wanted to be Peter Pan from the 2007 Peter Pan. I wanted to be Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann, and Tia Dalma/Calypso from Pirates of the Caribbean. It oftentimes went beyond expressing myself through clothing because I wanted to be the gender that my clothes portrayed. It was a two in one sort of thing. When I played Fritz in The Nutcracker, I felt so comfortable as a little lad. Yet, I also felt beautiful and accomplished when I was dolled up in the dresses for the snow scene and Spanish dance. With my look for prom, I felt like an absolute goddess and I loved it. I’ve often felt a certain power with being able to pass myself off as a guy and a gal. I have a whole list on my phone of all the times people thought I was a dude and it’s great. 
All this is to say that when I announced myself as genderfluid, ultimately it really isn’t shocking. I’ve always been like this and if I had that label from the beginning, I would have used it. Nothing about me is different just because I no longer identify as a girl. So, what I’m trying to explain here in a very long winded way is that different gender terms shouldn’t cause any uproar. People are people. That’s it. We’re so diverse and unique and strange that we get separated and recognized by our personalities, habits, and quirks. When I think of my friends, I don’t think of girl 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and boy 1. I think of them as the amalgamation of their passions, interests, styles, mannerisms. I think of the things that make them similar to me or each other and what makes us different. Gender is just another thing that is thrown into the mix of their individuality-ness. It’s a basic piece of info that really only matters because it couples with the pronouns a person uses. 
If we were all taught the gender spectrum and the different identities that exist within, from a young age, the same way we were taught boy and girl, all those other terms would be just as familiar. They wouldn’t have such an insane impact. Especially if we would just fuck off with the gender reveal parties and all the stereotypes that haunt the two outcomes. Gender only means as much as it does to us because of what we associate with it. If we stopped looking at boys and girls through a tiny ass window, then all the other identities that are present wouldn’t cause so many people to have an aneurysm. I know learning is hard, believe me, I went through school with undiagnosed ADHD. However, you are never too old to intake information. That whole “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is bullshit because firstly, we aren’t dogs, and secondly, our brains don’t just close off after a certain age. It just takes repetition. You need to gradually get used to the change, process it. A name change will take some time to remember. A label for gender identity and a switch up of pronouns will feel weird for a little bit. The more we open our noggins to it though, the shorter this societal transition period will be. 
Look, how we express ourselves and how we identify don’t always go hand in hand. Knowing that will really help first and foremost. Style has evolved a thousand times over the centuries. Men used to wear dresses and heels. Children used to all be clothed in the same styles regardless of gender because small children are all bean shaped. We have masculine women, feminine men, androgynous men and women, and we have people who don’t identify as either of those who wear any of that. Assumption isn’t the problem. Not respecting the information you’ve been given is the problem. We assume things all the time based on how people look. We guess that they’re rich, poor, businessperson, artist, unemployed, have a cat, have a girlfriend, don’t shower. We guess until somebody presents a confirmation. If we chuck out as many stereotypes from our brains as possible, life will be significantly less complicated. Because we’ll just have words. Instead of hearing boy and having a flood of images of all the things you associate with that consume you, boy will just mean boy. “Boy” will just mean what that particular individual considers themself. It will just be a word. “They/them” is just another pronoun. “Nonbinary” is just another gender. These words, like all others, mean slightly different things to each of us. “Tree” won’t invoke identical images for all of us, but I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong about what a tree is because you thought of pine and I thought of oak. Someone who uses “he/they” pronouns may consider themselves genderqueer, whilst another who uses the same pronouns identifies as nonbinary. Both of those genders fall under the same umbrella, the same way both those trees fall under the same general plant category. 
We as a society are able to recognize different kinds of trees are still all trees, despite there being hundreds of different, what are they, species? So why can we not do the same with genders and pronouns? There are a variety of genders, some will be less heard of, others far more common, but we can get familiar with the basic ones as a start and go from there. The internet too is a beautiful place, sometimes, where you can look up lists of all the “trees” that are known so you can expand your knowledge. I don’t know all the genders. The only time I did any research was when I was trying to figure out what I personally identified with. I’m still getting used to the fact that the definitions I associate with some of the genders aren’t the same as other people’s. But again, I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong because they see pine and I see oak. Yes, sometimes people get the definition completely wrong. A cactus isn’t a tree. A woman who was assigned female at birth isn’t trans. We can learn that though, we can learn when the definitions don’t match up with gender the same way we learned what counts as a tree and what doesn't. 
As the title says, this is a confusingly simple topic. Simple because we just have more words to describe more things more specifically. Complicated because we have difficulty reworking a system that has been in place for a long ass time where the rules are pretty concrete and rigid. But we are wholly capable of rebuilding things and we can rebuild our societal structure one rainbow brick at a time.