The Gender Binary Is Stupid: Early Childhood

It all starts with the idea that you must be either male or female. The inability to allow for an "other" option (indeed, even the need to ask at all) already alienates people who don't fit into the easy either/or boxes we shove infants into before we even wash the slime off them. It's not common, but it's a lot of people.

Then, society keeps attaching assumptions to those categorizations based on genitalia. If you stray too far from those assumptions, you'll probably be a target for bullying, which is often a way for the gender police to "keep you in line."

Snips and snails and puppy dog's tails. Cooties. Boys don't cry. Girls shouldn't be too tough. Girls get in that line, boys get in the other line. No, no, not defined by how you identify, but by what's between your legs. Let's make it clearer: Vaginas in this line, penises in the other line. That is your primary classification.

It's insane. Actually, it's fucking insane, but I'm trying to curse less these days.


Look, all children need to learn about the birds and the bees at some point. But long before we discuss TEH SECKS with kids, we're already sending them to separate bathrooms and giving them different information and toys and colors and assumptions and opportunities based on their genitalia.

There's absolutely no reason for that. No, really, there's not. We tell kids that Everybody Poops, but then we tell them that it is unfathomable to poop in the same appropriate poop tent as someone with different pee parts.

It's important that kids learn about the birds and the bees (so to speak), but the lesson is not "when a man and a woman love each other very much," it's, "when a penis and a vagina are together in certain situations, pregnancy can result."

There is no reason that children need to be taught that the default relationship is man/woman or even penis/vagina. Or that there is any default relationship at all. They should know that penis/vagina, which often but not always correlates with man/woman, can result in pregnancy. They should also know that, should they desire to have biological children, they will need to access the resources that their own body does not produce. There are various ways to do that and rights and responsibilities associated with each.

And all of this is separate from fundamental principles of respect - the respect that we, as living humans, owe as a default to all other living humans. My dad, who was raised with a pretty traditional patriarchal view of social hierarchy, once asked me, "Why don't you think men should respect women?" I said, "I think people should respect people."

I firmly believe that the gender binary is responsible for many of society's ills, and we must work toward eradicating it. It starts with kids. Tell them what their parts are and how they work, but stop making it the focus of their identity.