Good morning, John.
Today we plumb the depths of the marvelously
complex human.
But, first allow me to acknowledge that I am not
a sociologist.
I am also a straight, white man who doesn't have
to worry about a lot of the hate that a lot of other people
do have to worry about.
But, my goal with this video is I want
people to understand, because I think understanding
will lead to less hate.
And also less self-hate.
For a lot of people it is nice to imagine
that humans are simple and that you can know
a person's sex and then you will know all sorts of things
about them deeply and clearly.
And if you don't fit into this nice little box,
people who do can get really confused
and sometimes even angry.
And if you yourself don't fit into one of these nice
little boxes, and you think people should,
then you end up hating yourself.
And that's probably even worse.
I think the best, and maybe only way to solve
this problem is for people to understand that there are
no nice shiny boxes.
Or if there are shiny boxes, there are an infinite
number of them.
Enough to put all of the people who currently exist,
have ever existed, and will ever exist.
So, together, let's understand.
We're gonna start simple:
What's going on down here, in between the legs.
That is your sex.
Your biological sex.
And it tends to be binary, though there are all sorts
of conditions that result in intersex individuals.
And as interesting and complicated as this is,
the rest of it is much more complicated.
So, I'm just gonna move on from here.
'Cause we all kinda get what sex is.
Now we move on up to the top, to the brain,
which is the thing that decides what gender
you identify with:
Whether you feel like a man or a woman
or neither or both.
Because the fascinating thing is,
as much as we try to label things,
there is no way to label every point
on an infinite continuum.
And that's what we're dealing with here.
So, to actually visualize how this works
I've created a graph for you.
On the X-axis we have gender: male to female.
And on the Y-axis we have the intensity
of the identification with that gender.
I would be about here because I identify as a man
though I recognize that there are some woman-y
parts of me.
But, let's also put a hypothetical biological female
on the graph that identifies very strongly as a man.
Now that could be really uncomfortable,
especially when there is a bunch of people in the world
who insist on calling him a woman just because
of the body that he happens to be
very uncomfortable with.
Which is why sex does not determine the pronoun
you should use.
Gender does.
Now, moving on to your heart -
your metaphorical heart, of course.
This is who you are attracted to:
men, women, all genders.
Again, it's a spectrum and that spectrum
includes intensity because there are people who don't
feel strong sexual attraction at all.
That's why asexual is a sexual orientation.
A newer idea that I was happy to be exposed to
yesterday on Tumblr,
is the idea of Romantic Orientation.
These are the people you want to have strong,
intimate relationships with,
but it sorta separates out the idea that sex
has to be the goal or end point or like end all and be all
of every intimate relationship.
Now that we've dealt with how we feel,
let's deal with what happens when other people
actually get involved.
That's sexual behavior which is actually very different
from sexual orientation.
And that might seem a little bit strange at first,
but it's not.
Consider for example, a heterosexual priest.
That priest's orientation is heterosexual,
but because of his religion, his behavior is celibate.
Here we're not talking about the preference,
we're talking about the behavior.
Now, built up of all of this are gender roles
which are built by societies, not by individuals.
The obvious ones are masculine gender roles
and feminine gender roles.
But as all dichotomies are false dichotomies,
this one is a spectrum too.
Now that we've sort of gone over all of this,
it's important to note that every single one of these
categories is independent from each other.
So, a biological female could be a man who only has sex
with woman despite the fact that he's attracted
to both men and woman and kind of, you know,
feels more comfortable in feminine gender roles.
That may not be the most common combination
of these factors, but it's certainly not weird.
And another important point, many people move across
these spectrums; sometimes from year to year,
sometimes hour to hour.
But, what's really important is that we trust ourselves
and we understand ourselves.
And we love and respect ourselves and we grant
that same understanding and respect to the people
around us.
Because when the world becomes one of infinite
continuums and those false dichotomies break down
and those two shiny boxes break apart into seven billion
shiny boxes it's actually pretty beautiful.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.