What did Pogo say? "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
I know that a lot of people are heavily invested in the binary. It's that wonderful either/or. Boy or girl? Liberal or Conservative? Republican or Democrat? Straight or gay? What? I can't have some other choice? Are there no other possible alternatives?
Of course there are, but you have to be able to count to three first, and you're dealing with people who can only count to two. If that, most of them can't even count to 'potato.'
I've come to feel that in a lot of things, gender only being one of them, that you have these two sides lining up, rank and file, against each other and they really - and I mean really - hate those of us who are just wandering away from the entire mess. They worry that if enough people wander off then they might be in that place where they are giving a war and nobody came. And boy O boy, are they going to be looking stupid then. Hell, most of this looks pretty silly to me most of the time as it is - as well as seeming highly artificial to me - which is why I'm wandering.
Mostly I think it's a limited - if not retarded - imagination, exacerbated by a limited - and highly trivial - education (or perhaps the other way round). They want to know if it's pink or blue (not even realizing that those colors switched about the 1940s) and give no thought to the reds, greens, yellows, and the purples - as if those colors didn't exist.
I think at root they have such a desperate need to belong that they cling to this ancient cultural flotsam and jetsam as their only salvation. As is said in Firth Of Fifth: The sheep remain inside their pen, though many times they've seen the way to leave.
I don't need to say anything to be deliberately irritating, my very existence is irritating enough to them on a casual basis. And, on the higher plain, being ruthlessly polite turns out to be even more annoying. I've always like to use the two quotes from the original La Femme Nikita and the American version. "How nice for you" or "I never did mind about the little things."
The wise words of my martial arts teacher for two decades ring in my ears too: Never get into a fight with someone who is too stupid to know when they have lost.
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As for, Another member had a milder though still critical response, saying that "now is not the time" for people to be genderqueer in public I would respond with the following two quotes:
"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?"
Rabbi Hillel
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, April 16, 1963, A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.
