We humans like words. They help us to
think critically about factors in the world around us and our own
personal traits (especially traits that people haven't always
bothered to examine very much like gender and sexuality), and give us
the power to explain ourselves to people who are too different from
us to understand why they should tolerate us on their own.
However, they can also be a pain in the
ass. For example, I've been reading a bit on postmodernism lately for
my classes, and while it can be fascinating and good for clarifying
and putting words to cultural mechanisms I notice but have difficulty
describing or thinking of concretely, it's also kind of fucking dense
because of how complicated it is as a concept (like that last
sentence =D). Then there are also situations where there are a
multiple definitions for a label (stuff like "goth" or
"transgender"), all of which basically hold equal weight.
The passage of time only makes these sorts of labels even more
unwieldy--is it even possible to be a punk in the subcultural sense
anymore? Is there even a point in having some universal way of
describing the sex of (especially non-op/pre-op) transgender people
when a bunch of them use "female-" or "male-bodied"
as a way of differentiating their sex from their gender and another
bunch of them find referring to their body in a way that doesn't line
up with their gender painful and invalidating regardless of the
hormonal/anatomical status of said body?
When is it worth it to put words to our
experiences, and when does it become a potentially counterproductive
waste of effort? When I look at the monstrosities known as the
American government and the global economy, I start to think that
question applies to government and economy as well. Why try to
account for everything everywhere instead of just sticking to the
people around you and figuring out everything you can by yourselves,
and only working in conjunction with other groups of people when it's
distinctly necessary or beneficial? Especially when, in doing so, it
becomes more possible to live based on consensus rather than some
sort of democratic vote where most of the participants are, at some
point or another, stuck with policy that is exactly what they DON'T
want? Why do that to people if it can be avoided?
Back to language. Handy as words are
for getting our point across and really THINKING about our
surroundings, it's still nowhere near a perfect method of
communicating. We like to think of language itself as communication,
I think, just because that's what we have to use to talk to people
(or at least, consciously.) But really, everything we say is a
translation of what we think and feel, and sometimes what we mean
gets tangled up in what we say. It would seem that there are times
when it's better to just keep our mouths shut and not question the
differences we see in other people.
Instead of asking why
some people like foods we don't or think differently or work
differently, or have different capabilities, or why some people don't
have the anatomy you'd expect based off their gender (or vice versa),
or why some people don't see their biological sex as this thing that
determines who they're attracted to and what social group we blong
to, or even getting worked up about it all, why can't we just see and
accept and, if we can't stop ourselves getting hung up over it right
away, avoid until we've accepted it?
Granted, all this
talk of not questioning things or talking about them is kind of
antithetical to just about everything I do best. Not to mention kind
of a weird thing to post on the internet for the sake of maybe
possibly hopefully finding people who think the same way so we can
talk about it even more. Oh well.
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