Q: Why do people assign gender to everything?

Q: Why do people assign gender to everything? 

A: An obsession with binary. Like aisles devoted to men’s body wash. As if soap clings to constructed gender. As if scent has genitals. As in a clerk at a clothing store saying the men’s department is downstairs. When I didn’t ask. Always downstairs or upstairs. Never ground floor. Women on the ground. Don’t look. Keep moving. Are you shopping for a wife or a girlfriend or maybe a mother? Never are you shopping for you? A person. Everything gets a gender, like the French language. Which is the first language I ever tried to learn outside of English. Parlez-vous français? Non. Pronounced differently than no. I make my first-year college students read bell hooks. A chapter from her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. The piece begins with Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. They shift in their seats. I ask them what they think. What examples they have from their own lives. Some share. Some don’t. In one class, the men are very uncomfortable. One confronts me. Challenges me. But what else is there? He means besides patriarchy. Can’t fathom another system. Asks what else we would use to determine what people can or can’t do? Their roles? It’s just nature, he says. I suggest we don’t use anything. Especially one’s genitals. Now I’ve just said genitals. Now they are very uncomfortable. He doesn’t see the trap in his own thinking: it’s nature, yet we need so many rules and pressures to make said “nature” happen. Another student (also male) goes to lions. He’s obsessed with lions. Writes about them in every assignment all semester long. I’m impressed by his ability to work them into any prompt. Yet he doesn’t seem to understand lions, as in the females hunt. The males stay back. He doesn’t know this. Yet loves lions. An obsession with rules he’s been told to follow. Told the whole world follows. Nature follows. Yet they don’t. After class, a student stays behind. She’s been quiet. She says, did you notice only the boys talked in class today? I tell her I did. They kind of proved the point, didn’t they? They did, I say. Obsession. Does it all come back to obsession? On the Internet there are men who call themselves Alphas. They have muscles. Grow bushes big and bushy (which I admire). Armpit hair too. They ask, no, demand money. Gifts. Amazon Wishlists. I do not give. It’s called Findom. A kink. Some will even make you videos degrading you. Humiliating you. Using slurs. Sexuality, as in hetero or homo or bi doesn’t seem to matter. Not always fully defined. I’m drawn to the taboo. To understanding it. Investigating it. To our fascination with both bucking societal expectations yet reinforcing them through certain kinks. I fall down rabbit holes of kink. Where gender starts to break apart. Where bodies sometimes just become bodies. Holes holes. Then there are the gays (not queers) who declare their masculinity on apps and demand it in others. Masc for masc. Straight-acting. Bro for bro. Never fully defining what they mean. I am not masc by nearly any definition. I have never called anyone bro. They hate painted nails. I paint my nails. They hate genderfluid clothes. I love genderfluid clothes. Skirts and dresses are the most comfortable. Whatever genitals you got they want air. My parents once told me not to wave my hands a certain way while I ran down the hill in our backyard. I think about this more than I should. It was one comment. One summer. Yet it lingers. Boys’ hands do this. Not this. Again that binary. Again one or two. Pick your poison. And then we have hetero parents having gender reveal parties every single day. Clips on the internet. Pink or blue smoke. Pink or blue cake. Pink or blue explosions. What a strange fascination some have with genitals and colors. With making the world harder for their kids. Gender reveal. What a strange term. And then there was that fire. Started by a gender reveal party. How it burned and burned and burned. Is gender that powerful? A firefighter died. The parents were held accountable. Plead guilty. One went to jail. Imagine growing up and being told your parents killed someone over revealing your gender (or really your genitals) to friends and family before you were even born. Imagine thinking of your gender as fire. The ability to consume. To destroy. To make room for what is next.