Genderweird: azurelunatic

Gender has rarely been an issue of confusion for me. Quite a bit of this is because my parents raised me without a lot of the weird gender hangups and stereotypes that held over from the beginning of the century. I grew up knowing that dishes were for everybody, laundry was for everybody, setting traps for vermin was for Dad because Mama was squeamish, ironing shirts was for Dad because Mama didn't get it right, ironing quilt fabric was for Mama because Dad didn't make quilts, and listening to Tay-Tay's stupid violin tapes was for everybody because Tay-Tay didn't want to wear headphones.

I grew up able to shrug off a lot of gender preconditioning when I hit adolescence and then adulthood. There are no boy chores and girl chores. There are still girl clothes that are not boy clothes, but not a whole lot of boy clothes that are not girl clothes, but that's a societal thing. (It bothers me that some of my co-workers are fundamentally bothered by the thought of Spongebob's dumb friend the starfish wearing fishnet stockings.)

Hard and fast "girls don't" and "boys don't" rules bother me. As a general rule, the only "girls don't" and "boys don't" that I care to take seriously involve the original equipment manufacturer anatomy, except that people who are strongly mentally gendered who are born into a body with the wrong plumbing totally turn those things upside down.

Statistically speaking, there are always people on the fringes. If you set the scope too narrow and hard, no one fits and everyone hurts. If you set it too wide and fuzzy, there are no differences, and the wonderful rainbow of possibility is greyed out in a muddy blur. Best to make generalizations. "Many girls." "Many boys."

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Genderweird