I’m a White, privileged, cisgendered person. That is who I am, and it is who I’ve always been. This means that there are certain things I can’t talk about with any authority: words I can’t say, phrases that don’t belong to my culture, and that’s OK. I don’t need to say everything, nor does any one else.

I get in trouble because I am insatiably curious. There are transgendered friends of mine who prefers plural pronouns: they/them. This bothered me, not because I care about how people are identified with respect to gender, but because sometime around senior year of high school an all around excellent English teacher drilled plural and singular pronoun usages into me. He said, “you cannot use ‘their’ to talk about a singular person, instead use ‘his or her'” (for narrative’s sake, imagine that in a British accent). As such, I had gone through my life carefully respecting the sanctity of singular versus plural possessive pronouns. Therefore, trans pronoun identification threw me for a loop, not because it was deeply important that people fall into strict “male” or “female” identifications, but because now one person was identifying as a plural pronoun.

Thankfully, when I approached one of my trans friends with this dilemma, they understood that it was coming from a good place. They explained to me that they would rather identify as a plural pronoun, despite not identifying as a “plural”, than be viewed as a “she” or a “he” or some frivolously invented gender neutral pronoun such as “Ze” or “Spivak”.

(I had a separate conversation with great friend of mine on this topic, one “Tsvi Benson-Tilsen”, where we bemoaned the confusing disconnect between language and its roots. All words are made up, why should words made up yesterday be less than those made up a century ago. Make Language Frivolous Again.)

That one calm, decent conversation between friends put to rest my entire problem with trans people. All it took was an easy going discourse and 20 years of parental indoctrination instructing me to be nice, understanding, and try to have good intentions.

Ultimately, I don’t understand people that are homosexual or transsexual or pansexual BUT that doesn’t really matter. Not understanding a sexual orientation or a gender identification isn’t a good reason to actively campaign against people who live life differently than I do.

Part of my lack of understanding is rooted in linguistics. The English language has yet to evolve to a point where everyone is afforded the same privileges. That sounds strange, but its true, language alienates whole segments of society. Part of it is the difference between Sex, your x and y chromosome, and gender, a social construct. It doesn’t matter what your gender is when you go to the doctor, they are going to want to know if you are male or female (actually, they probably just need to know if you have a uterus, testicles, or neither, but I digress (or both)). However, when you talk to someone on the street, they shouldn’t really need to know that information. However, language doesn’t protect your right to privacy, so at some point you are often asked to make your gender clear, as if not revealing that information is akin to obfuscating criminal activity.

Another aspect of my lack of understanding is I am simply not that. I’m just cisgendered. This is somewhat of a disappointment to me because I genuinely don’t understand what it is like to be something else. I’ve been sexually attracted to the same sort of person my whole life.

I think this is the biggest problem faced by people with an sexual orientation or gender identification which is not straight and cisgender. The straight and cisgendered people just don’t understand it. And since there are so many more SaCs, they control the media and enumerate societal shifts. As such, transgendered people are viewed with condescending eye, a “well you just haven’t figured it out yet.” Maybe, brace yourself, that is just who that person is.

Not understanding someone isn’t an excuse to discriminate against them. At its core, despite decades of indoctrination, I still don’t understand religion. That doesn’t give me an excuse to hate on religious people. And religion is responsibly for way more pain and suffering than trans people are. Imagine if every Thursday trans people got together and read from a book that told them to “Stone the SaCs”.

At its best, the trans bathroom issue is just a case of ignorance leading to fear. This is not an appropriate way to make decisions. The appropriate way to face your ignorance is to recognize it, and then take steps rid yourself of it through education and understanding. Than doesn’t mean go to your gay friend and say “Why are you so weird?” It means asking people, in a polite way, to explain things that you don’t understand. (Of course, at its worst, its a systematic and systemic attempt by a patriarchal and outdated government to continue to impose its phallic, cisgendered, white, and medieval based agenda on an ever-evolving society in the guise of ignorance and family values. It is probably a group of wealthy, privileged, white men deciding that since they are well off clearly their opinion matters more than yours. But at its best it’s just the general ignorance.)

And then, it means accepting things which you don’t understand but don’t affect you. I do not understand homosexuality. That gives me no right to be upset about it. It is frightening how many truly deplorable things there are in the world: disease, famine, etc. as well as how many slightly less deplorable but still important things: poverty, wage gap, etc. and how concerned a state government feigns to be with unproven accounts of trans bathroom molestation of children. It stems from a genuine understanding of those other things, and a lack of willingness to understand about gender identification.

Don’t discriminate against things you don’t understand. Learn about them, acknowledge them, and then accept the things that don’t cause you pain. Save that discrimination for the savages that water down beer in bars.

That is the end of my piece. Here are all the thoughts that I had while writing this that I wanted to jot down but didn’t think were relevant.

Gender Identification is such a bad way to describe it. It makes it sounds so choice based. In the long run, the concept of Gender should probably be eliminated, but in the short term, there needs to be a better way to represent the social construct of Gender. I have decided that it shall be “Gender understanding” as in “I understand my gender to be male”. Of course, I can’t use this with anyone else, so it will just be for my own inner dialogue. Is it crazy that I used dialogue instead of monologue? No.

Also, screw people that cut their orange juice with anything. Orange juice is sacred.

People talk about how minimum wage hasn’t increased with the cost of living. That is true, and a very real concern. A bigger concern is the fact that language hasn’t kept up with the cost of living. As such, some very clever companies have capitalized on the corporatization of language. I’ll give you an example; The Kleenex ™ wasn’t working, so I googled ™ band-aids ™ large enough to deal with my gaping Walmart ™.

Further linguistic queries, whats the one word term for white privileged men that don’t acknowledge their privilege or standing in society? I used SaC but that just stood for Straight and Cisgendered. I’m talking about the person who rants against affirmative action without realizing that “reverse racism” is actually just a world where white people are actually treated fairly. Fairly as in not given special bonuses for being white. We still don’t live in that world. Non-whites make up 48% of the country, so unless you think that 70% of doctors are white because only white people are smart, you should rethink your approach to affirmative action. Also, if you do think that only white people are smart, you should rethink your approach to life.

As much of a problem I had with getting over singular and plural pronoun usage, I imagine my 12th grade English teacher has had an even bigger problem with it. Again, not because I think he refuses to recognize the legitimacy of someone who doesn’t identify as a “he” or a “she”, but because he would hate the plural versus singular pronoun complexities. I miss 12th grade English.

I think we’ve gotten to the point where even sex shouldn’t matter. It just shouldn’t be information you need to know when you meet or talk to someone. Particularly today, when so much is done online, even sex seems… extraneous.