Gender is morally neutral

It's okay to share who you are

Hi friends, I’m delighted to announce that this post is a 2024 SmallStack Featured Publication. I’m honored that my message of respect and inclusion resonated with the community. Here’s the post, please enjoy:

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It is not morally better to be a woman than a non-binary person or a man. It is not worse. It simply is who you are. Gender is morally neutral. It is okay to interrogate your gender and change how you think about it and present yourself over your lifetime.

This makes sense to me, but a lot of religious folks, legislators, and other people would tell me I’m completely wrong. They would tell me, for my body, the only correct gender is “woman. “ Then this turns into a “he said, they said” kind of situation.

Like in many physics problems, the frame of reference matters. You solve the problem differently if you’re measuring the movement of a rocketship relative to where you are on Earth or from the Moon.

See, my frame of reference is from within my non-binary body. I have observed that I live a happier, healthier, more confident and productive life when I am allowed to express who I am.

Some people object to me talking about who I am. Most often, I run into people telling me to stop talking about being trans in the comments of my online posts. Even if I post a video about a nature walk, if I tag it #lgtbq or #nonbinary, I will get unrelated, hateful comments from people searching for these topics to discourage visibility.

I’ve filtered out many of the phrases people use when copy pasting their vitriol into posts tagged #lgbtq or #nonbinary. Substack, by the way, does not have a feature to filter phrases in comments. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok do.

Recently, I received this comment:

This comment actually made me smile, not because I appreciate being told I’m attention seeking, but because it was relatively mild.

This commenter didn’t say I’m a woman, didn’t refer to my anatomy, and didn’t tell me to seek help. Why? Because I’ve blocked that language on my social media posts.

They are now resorting to telling me why can’t I just be happy with myself. Hahahahaha. Surprisingly wholesome.

This person gets vaguely near a point, which is that I am seeking attention. I’m actively cultivating an audience for my writing, much of which is about myself and my experiences. If I was writing fantasy instead of memoir, I’d market my writing in a completely different way. But to be interested in reading memoir, an audience needs to be interested in you and your story.

Everyone has a story. But some tellings of our stories fit nicely within the rules and expectations of our society and some don’t.

But my intention is not, actually, to tell you all about myself as the primary goal.

I share my stories because I am the only one who can share this particular perspective. An AI bot cannot write an essay about how I grew up, because that information is not out there.

But more importantly, I share my stories to help people build community and think about inclusion and respectful language. I think it would have really helped me, growing up, to know the stories of happy and successful gay and trans people. I share what I can to be helpful to others.

If you can better relate to a person who’s different from yourself through reading a story, that’s how we build trust, understanding, and a more inclusive and supportive community.

I also write to better understand and support myself. I was just editing something I first wrote several years ago, describing how writing helped me, when I still felt uncomfortable talking about my gender with my partner, Dave:

Writing felt safer and more comfortable than speaking. I started journaling, describing what it felt like to be in my body and who the world had told me to be. I wrote about uncomfortable clothing and sexist people and all the things people said that didn’t feel right.

I typed the sentence, “At 28 years old, I think I might be trans.” I stared at the words, then I held down the backspace key, watching the sentence disappear from my screen but not from my mind. I typed it out again. It was the right thing for my narrator to say.

I shared my essay with Dave, handing him my laptop as we sat on his futon couch together. I fidgeted with my phone while he read it, twice.

“Well?” I asked, finally.

“If you don’t mind a tiny suggestion, I think this sentence has the wrong verb tense.”

I laughed and we looked at the sentence together. He was right about the verb tense, and we did talk about the stories, too.

Once I had written down who I was, I started being able to say the words out loud. I started to believe I could be a storyteller, if I wasn’t suffocated by constantly maintaining lies about who I was. I felt incredibly light and connected, as though a burden I carried for most of my life had been lifted off my shoulders by a community I hadn’t known existed. But I was scared that if changing my gender presentation became important to me, I would no longer be accepted and loved by the people I was closest to.

This is important to me: to express who I am to myself and those who are close to me. And to make new connections with people who resonate with what I say.

So why do I think gender is morally neutral? Because people do not hurt other people simply by being one gender or another, or by their gender expression. Sure, we can look at the statistics showing that people inflict violence on others based on gender, but that’s more about a toxic, patriarchal culture trying to stay in power. Toxic masculinity is not the same thing as gender.

People talk about their gender all the time. Once you start noticing, you’ll spot gender everywhere. Advertising is full of gender stereotypes. People say, “as a woman, I…” or, “as a man, I…” Children are encouraged to act “like a little man” or have “girlfriends” or “boyfriends” from a very young age. Gender is everywhere.

Specifically, the kind of cis-hetero-normative gender that we are trained in from birth is everywhere.

But say one thing to contradict society’s gender rules, and you’re seen as dangerous, violent, morally questionable, and a threat to society.

“Why can’t you just accept and be happy with who you are?” they ask.

What they mean is, “Why can’t you just talk about gender the way we’re all supposed to?”

They don’t want us to realize the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. Because how can you control people when they understand they don’t have to follow your rules?

Maybe you don’t need to control people for them to be good people.

People who are happy, growing in their understanding of themselves, expressing themselves freely, trying to minimize harm to others, these are the people I look up to, regardless of gender.

Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments.

Take care,

Rey