My fingertips are sore and red

Nails ripped too close to the root

I swallow and still it's stuck there

A phantom piece of hard, rough bread

Grating between my sternum and heart flesh

Every swallow is a reminder

Something lurks in the shadows I cannot see

My limbs begin to tingle

Spiderwebs of electric current running running running

From the crooks of my arms to the center of my palms

It hovers in the space above my hands

Generating heat only I can feel

And we cannot forget the breathing, the breathing!

In this moment

It's the most complex task of all

I'm not sure what kind of story this excerpt could be the start of, but I think there's something there...wrote it on a whim and putting it out into the universe as I think of where to go with it next.

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Paige McCrea did not need saving. Not by boys or from her parents or anyone else. She had learned early on that if anyone was going to do the saving, she would do it herself.

**

On a winter’s day when Paige McCrea was seven years old, she eagerly made her way to the front entrance of school after yet another tedious day at as first grader at Thomas Culpepper Elementary. When she reached those familiar glass doors, she noticed a large group of classmates gathered around Ms. Shivone, the school's librarian whose resemblance to Ursula the sea witch - in both appearance and manner - was simply uncanny as far as Paige was concerned. She could not understand why anyone would want to be close to that woman, let alone her fellow children!

Why spend the first precious minutes away from the confines of the school day to keep talking to a teacher? And such a cruel one at that? If there was one thing that Paige McCrea loved, it was the first moment after the last bell when she knew freedom was just around the corner and came, quite literally, in the shape of a yellow school bus. I dare you to find a happier child than one Paige McCrea, comfortably collapsed into the first cracked leather seat of the number 5 bus, knowing that in just a few short minutes, she would be home with her best friend and consummate companion, Mo (who also happened to be the family dog).

But alas, today a curious group of pint-sized brown-nosers both literally and figuratively stood between her and sweet escape. So, Paige McCrea contemplated her options.

She had already said “excuse me” multiple times, but as the tiniest child in the class, her voice had a way of getting lost in the space between her mouth and other people’s ears. She wondered if she should scream “help!” or “fire!” and make a break for it as the children scattered, but she calculated that such a commotion might cause the buses to be delayed in their departure, and that would defeat the purpose altogether.

Just as she began to feel the prickling sensation of tears forming at the edges of her eyes, she spotted it. Paige McCrea saw an opportunity to squeeze into a gap that had presented itself between the oafy John Lemon and his ghoulish sidekick Kyle Henry. Normally, she would not have willingly put herself in such close proximity to these playground menaces who most often smelled of what could best be described as a mix of peanut butter, sweat and pennies, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Paige McCrea saw her opening and took it.

She crouched and ran, tucking her head as she made her way beneath the bottoms of their backpacks and narrowly missed getting walloped by John’s metal soccer ball keychain. And that’s when she spied it. The beautiful shine of the slick black number five painted on familiar yellow metal. It called to her like the siren's song called to many a weary sea captain.

Paige McCrea raised her head and fist in celebration. “Yes!” she hissed, just three short seconds before her Keds gave way on a patch of black ice, and she fell to the sidewalk with a sickening thump.

I sleep best in the car or on the train

I can't rest unless I'm moving

When I lie in bed, I'm only comfortable

If it looks like I'm running away

I leave every bottle open just a little

All the lids unscrewed

Endings and final things bring panic

I prefer to leave room for what ifs

My friends make fun of me

Call me a narcissist

For always stopping at my reflection

In mirrors and windows and puddles

They think I'm looking at myself

But I'm looking for what they see

In me

These are just some funny things; queer thoughts

The most mundane of little pieces

That show you who I am

If you only take a look

My God is the ground, the grass, the dirt

She does not ask for money to wash away my sins

Because there is no such thing, just perfectly imperfect

And glory is not a for-profit scheme

My God is the air, the wind, the wing

She envelops my body in an easy embrace

And does not touch me behind the dark, musty pews

Of a so-called holy place

My God needs no organization or LLC

She is everywhere, in everything and calls for nothing

Not for wars or plagues, nor rape or murder

Not for chains that bind because of the flesh between my legs

To My God, nothing is unholy

She is Me, she is the World

Oh god

Inside my body

Resides a deep dark hole

Like a hollow tree stump

where my guts should be

And there are spindly roots

that creep through every crevice

Beneath my muscles, through my bones

Like gnarled fingers

Of banshees in black shrouds

They claw at all my insides

So I am filled with blood

Every day that passes

Seems more pointless than the last

Ears and eyes shut, but mouths wide open

The noise!

that comes from these monkeys

You wouldn’t believe it

They don’t even know they’re in a cage

At a zoo, mere spectacles

Shouting to the delight of onlookers

Whose pockets are lined, and fists are clenched

I must admit…

This zoo has always made me feel

Terribly Sad

In the gray of winter

It is easy to wish for sleep

A rest so long that when you wake

You are tickled

By green blades between your toes

And the sunlight rouses you

Bright and warm against heavy eyelids

But there is something to be said

For the silence that embraces us

After a fresh snow when the sound

- Try as it might -

Seems to vanish with little more

Than a whisper on the wind

In the quiet I am reminded of the end

The world is not an hourglass

That you can simply turn over and start again

Without the noise I am able to focus

On every grain of sand I have left

Any Prosers who know a bit about me will be unsurprised that I've been driven back to Prose after a short hiatus to debate social issues. I believe there's value in creating awareness around topics that folks might otherwise ignore out of complacency or selfishness. It's also a worthwhile pursuit to question and critique EVERYTHING - especially today, when so many people's perspectives are based on misinformation and biases (unconscious or not). Plus, I'm a Gemini, and I've never met an argument I didn't like. :)

**Before we begin, a disclaimer - I'm happy to provide any and all links to the research I reference throughout this piece. As far as I'm aware, the current Prose UI doesn't support hyperlinking, and I simply don't want to clunk up my writing with lengthy URLs. Feel free to reach out in the comments or via direct message for more information.**

#

When I came across this thoughtful writing challenge on gender, I was excited to read about folks' experiences. As Baldwin says, "'You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." I find that even when I read about someone with a vastly different human experience than mine, I'm able to find connection in the emotion - and it helps me better understand certain people and communities with whom I might never have the opportunity to interact with otherwise.

But as I read one particular post by @EstherFlowers1, I must admit I'm having trouble empathizing with her perspective, mostly because I think it serves to invalidate the experiences of trans, non-binary and gender fluid folks, which is not only demoralizing, but dangerous. Also, there's a fair amount expressed in her piece that simply isn't based on an accurate understanding of gender and sex, which are two distinct concepts. While I can agree to disagree with all sorts of folks, it becomes an issue when their opinions are rooted in or contribute to the oppression, marginalization or brutalization of others. That said, I doubt there is a purposeful attempt to do harm here, but outcomes matter regardless of intention. Hopefully, this can be a good learning experience for anyone who engages with both of our pieces.

To start, I want to note that I have a Master's degree in Communication, with a research focus on gender and politics, and I've taught a host of undergraduate courses on gender representation and the intersection of gender and labor, among other things. I tell you all this not to toot my own horn (although, I worked hard and published some great work, so why not?), but because of this: Since the Trump presidency, there has been a troubling trend of anti-intellectualism where folks think all opinions are created equal. The reality is, however, if someone is an expert in their field, their educated opinion should and does hold more weight than a random person you pluck off the street who doesn't have the same working knowledge. That's why we go to doctors when we're sick and not our neighbor who is an accountant. In terms of this discussion, I have no insight into Esther's background, so I am not asserting that she doesn't have any authority or experience with which to speak on the matter. I only state this to let folks know what academic and professional experience I am pulling from when I lay out my thoughts in this piece.

To start, Esther makes the point that gender, though a generalization, is not a completely useless way to categorize people, because it helps us identify who to have sex and reproduce with. There are a couple of issues here. The first is that it is sex, not gender, that has served as the basis for humans to determine who to mate with for reproductive purposes. The term is "sexual dimorphism" not "gender dimorphism," and for good reason. Early neanderthals, for example, were often nude - they could see the biological differences in others - breasts and vaginas versus penises - and that is how they determined who to reproduce with. And you better believe that everyone was hairy as fuck - so it's not like they were confused by a woman with a mustache because there's something innately unfeminine about body hair. Furthermore, having sex to reproduce is different from having sex for pleasure, and, as a result, we've see homosexual and bisexual activity across different species and periods throughout time.

Additionally, it's worth noting that there is a growing pool of research about "postgenderism"that examines the potential for advanced assistive reproductive options to render all humans capable of both carrying a pregnancy to term and impregnating someone, which would eliminate the need for gender identification in society to its benefit - individuals would no longer be constrained or oppressed by gender role expectations. So, to say that this or other interrogations of gender as a social construct is making a "mockery of sex and gender and reproduction" that will contribute to natural selection weeding out such folks is not only false, but also seems to suggest that those who do not ascribe to a binary interpretation of gender don't have legitimate reasons for doing so. If we're mocking anything, it should be a binary understanding of gender that doesn't adequately represent the breadth of human experience and largely only serves to pigeonhole people. But much more effective than mocking is dismantling and reimagining.

In early civilizations, expectations as to behaviors for women and men varied from community to community based on the environment and population size, not because they recognized some innate characteristics of women to be more gentle and men to be more assertive, for example. The research continues to show that there is no sex-based evidence for behavioral traits. Rather, modern day women and men in the U.S. have been socialized to believe in and ascribe to traditional gender roles because they are rewarded with social capital. In fact, we've seen societies - both throughout history and in contemporary contexts - that have completely different conceptions of gender than we do in the U.S. or other industrialized Western nations. Certain Native American tribes, Indigenous Australian populations, South Asian and Samoan communities (just to name a few) have recognized gender fluid or non-binary folks, others have five or six gender categories, and some have none at all. Similarly, they have different expectations of those gender roles, or are largely egalitarian - because, put simply, gender is what a society makes it.

A great example of an egalitarian-minded society exists in Sweden. In certain schools in modern-day Stockholm, teachers try not to use terms like “boys” or “girls” or gender-specific pronouns. In an effort to reach a greater level of gender equality, they push for gender neutrality. Pronouns like “he and she” are replaced with “hen,” and children’s books have protagonists who are not clearly male or female. This effort helps teachers interrogate and counteract impulses to behave in certain ways with students of certain genders that disadvantage them - Like telling little boys to suck it up when they get hurt versus taking time to console and communicate with them like they do with little girls. The model has been so successful that they've continued to expand it to new schools every year.

The bottom line is that the gender binary assigns different roles, status, expectations and power to humans with male and female genitals, without any biological need to do so - it's a way to exercise cultural control that puts a population of humans who have all sorts of preferences and traits into a binary prison that not only forces them to deny their authentic selves to the detriment of their mental health, but also renders them vulnerable to discrimination and violence based on a conception of how folks "should be" that ignores the reality of how they actually are. In this case, a world with no gender or a broader understanding of it, at least, would mean that your biological sex would have no social meaning, just as being right-or left-handed has no inherent meaning. (Although people actually used to think left-handed folks were less capable, so parents forced their kids to use their right hands. See how sociocultural attitudes can shift over time when we encounter new evidence?) To me, genderlessness doesn't sound too bad at all.

With that, there are a few tangential points left that I would be remiss if I didn't also address. In her piece, Esther goes on to assert that "children need fathers and they need mothers," hence why maintaining a gender binary is important - but there's no factual basis for this claim. In fact, the research suggests the opposite. In these contemporary studies, we see that children in same-sex-parented families outperform children in different-sex-parented families on multiple indicators of academic performance, including standardized tests scores, high school graduation rates and college enrollment. Adolescents of same-sex parents also experience fewer social problems than a nationally representative age-matched sample of American youths. Even after controlling for a range of socioeconomic factors, this positive association does not disappear. What this research may suggest is that same-sex couples who are more open-minded and understanding of varying representations of sexuality and gender, based on their own experience, are more likely to produce thriving offspring than heterosexual couples who may be constrained by traditional gender role stereotyping.

This segues into her discussion of "anti-breeding" sentiments, which she dismisses as a selfish trend. The observable reality, however, is that there are a myriad of substantive, material obstacles to childrearing in 21st century Western capitalist societies like we have in the U.S. Without living wages, affordable healthcare or childcare, less and less folks have the practical ability to raise children, even if they want to. And from an environmental perspective, we also must consider that the planet is overpopulated, climate change is an existential threat to humanity, and people do not want to raise children in a world where there is so much uncertainty about food and other resources, natural disasters and what have you. All this is not to say that as our understanding of gender roles evolves, that personal choice is not also a factor here - women no longer feel the same level of societal pressure to marry or reproduce - and why shouldn't both women and men feel empowered to make the best decisions for themselves? It seems that this should be the most fundamental of human rights, especially given that we are not facing an extinction crisis from lack of childrearing (although from all the other stuff, sure - we're on our way out.)

I'll conclude by saying this - someone expressing their gender identity outside of the binary conceptualization we've been taught does not hurt individuals, nor collective society. The only folks being hurt are the ones that are being denied the right to do so - whether it's through legislation that bans gender affirming care, restricts access to public restrooms, allows businesses to refuse service etc. or through hostile communities that ridicule and endanger them both physically and mentally. Even for cisgender folks, traditional gender roles are often the cause of great strife, whether it's through the restriction of bodily autonomy, a lack of career opportunities, discrimination in the workplace, abuse at the hands of others who deem themselves more powerful on the basis of gender alone, or simply mental anguish over not "fitting the mold." As long as they're not hurting anyone, how hard is it to just let people live their lives how they wish?

I recently watched a viral TikTok that posed the question, “why would any man listen to a feminist when all they do is villainize men?” The creator blames “angry feminists” for the popularity of social media “stars” and podcasters like Andrew Tate. We make men feel bad, and apparently the logical choice that follows is to flock to any misogynist with a microphone.

Aside from the fact that the hateful and factually inaccurate rhetoric these “men” spew is dangerous because it incites violence against women, it also oozes male privilege and entitlement. We are calling you out for abusing us, raping us, killing us, and taking away our bodily autonomy — to name just a few of the many injustices perpetrated against us — but you don’t want to listen because it makes you uncomfortable? God forbid a man feel discomfort. Discomfort and fear are for women only — we must simply get on with things, adapt, carry our keys as weapons and exercise only in daylight — but men? Men deserve to be made comfortable.

Hopefully it’s obvious to many (or women, at least) that the video’s creator fails to acknowledge that the actual cause of both women’s anger and the rise of toxic masculinity is the patriarchy, but there’s much more to unpack here. The creator calls for feminists to present their arguments in a way that are palatable to men —in other words, don’t be so meeaaannn. He fails to see that this directive is emblematic of living in a patriarchal society where women are expected to be meek and empathetic, and only men get to be angry. It’s also a classic case of tone policing — men dismiss the ideas being communicated by feminists because they don’t like the way the way in which those ideas are delivered. I’d argue that this man, though supposedly trying to “help” feminists by encouraging a “kinder” approach to men, is unaware that he holds an unconscious bias against women because he grew up in a patriarchal society that tells him female rage is wrong. Women telling men what to do is wrong. Men must not be made to feel less than. Subservience is a space for women.

The thing is, our whole way of life — this society that we must exist in — has been designed for men. Everything is made with them in mind, as if being a man is simply the default. Our language shows us this. Our businesses show us this. Our government and institutions show us this. And now, some other male creators are posting responses to this video about “what’s in it for men” if they become feminists and help dismantle the patriarchy. Unsurprisingly, they’ve even managed to make feminism about them. Apparently it’s not a good enough reason that women are dying as the result of the patriarchy to care about it, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t give a flying f*ck about how I make you feel. The work of writer and radical feminist Audre Lorde also comes to mind here:

“Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them…The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”It’s not the job of the oppressed to teach the oppressors. I will not ask nicely to be treated as a fully-fledged human worthy of dignity and respect, deserving all of the same rights as men. Men act as if feminist scholars have not dedicated decades of work to the topics of feminism, misogyny and the patriarchy for them to understand these nuanced issues by reading objective quantitative and qualitative studies — divorced of those pesky emotions that make them feel icky. Not only can men no longer be allowed to feign ignorance in the modern age where we have access to the world’s knowledge at the flick of key on a keyboard, but they must also not be allowed to demand even MORE of our emotional labor. We already do the lionshare of this work in our everyday relationships, and this leaves men in the same position of power they have always occupied and never earned — they get a free education on their terms, and all we get is the hope that they might finally decide to understand the plight of women.

Thanks, but no thanks. Afterall, do mice concern themselves with the feelings of cats?

If you’re a man and you actually want to do better, support the women in your life and dismantle the system that hurts us all, why don’t you start acting like it? Call out overt misogyny and abuse from other men like the Andrew Tates of the world. Call out more insidious biases perpetuated by men like the aforementioned TikTok creator, who fail to see the proverbial forest through the trees. Do your own work — go to therapy, read a book, attend a gender studies course. Listen to women, and if their anger and accusations make you uncomfortable — don’t run from it. Instead, interrogate it; ask yourself why that might be. Sometimes, we have to be uncomfortable to grow, and I will not put my feminism in a spoonful of sugar. It’s a jagged little pill I want you to feel going all the way down.

It feels like fall

I sit outside in the cool air

And smoke, inhaling deeply

It's the only time I feel young again

I miss the feeling of possibility

Of strangers and dark streets

Like anything could happen

When the night was young at 11 PM

They say it's bad for you, I know

But when I breathe in

I feel the buzz of youth and infinity

The feeling like I'm untouchable