Fairfax, VA, USA. Once upon a time when crossdressers were transvestites and transgenders were mostly butch dykes and aging gay queens, men and women, male and female, walked the earth. It was back in those dark ages before Women’s Studies and Gender Theory.

The men were men and the women were not. It was a time when penises and vaginas had meaning and gender declined languages spoken by Dead Greeks and Romans and their Old World Children and Grandchildren.


Ova and semen filled such a world, and everyone knew who owned what before panties were removed on date night. Back before the word for world was rainbow, when therapists had not discovered they could not make a comfortable living off the small number of actual transsexuals in the world, transsexuality was not talked about in polite company and intersex was not discussed at all. Still, we were all men and women, boys and girls, and those of us struggling to make our bodies right. When all we grew older and wiser we learned that male or female, the sexual binary, was a myth perpetuated by the patriarchy and the women who were blindly submissive to it.

This is a column about sex, romance, and what fools these mortals be.

As a close approximation, the human race is either male or female, giving rise to a social generalization called the sex binary (we are one or the other).

In scientific terms, we are sexually dimorphic, based on our generation and possible potential for reproduction.

But, like any generalization, there are many exceptions.

Our transsexual and intersex populations are as ancient as the human race and all of us share the same humanity.

Sex, romance, and foolishness still apply.None of us were either; all of us were both. No one could explain whatever happened to the vaginas and penises but they didn’t seem to exist anymore than did magical unicorns or fire breathing, flying dragons. No one was allowed to ask what might be going on underneath the emperor’s clothes.

That would be hateful. That would be spiteful and irrelevant. That would be elitist, separatist, and possibly Republican. To ask might hurt someone’s feelings and no one is ever allowed to say anything that might possibly make someone, somewhere, somehow feel bad about themselves or what they believe, deep in their heart of hearts, must be true.

Blessed are those who remain silent, for they will upset no one.

And that’s the way it is in the multi-branched rainbow bough where everyone has got to do what everyone has got to do, without rules, without restrictions, without boundaries, and certainly without doctors or scientists, a world where everyone can be anything they want to be except men or women. Blessed are the poor in knowledge, for knowledge only hinders one’s chosen reality.

Blessed are the college bound and gender activists, for they have not been constrained by the necessities of work and family. Their generation demonstrates that males and females can truly be just friends, if one were to admit that they were male and female. Their mixed-gender gangs form easily on the campuses and in movie theaters.

Although they walk in the darkness along mean streets, they fear no evil, no hateful crime, no patriarchal police officer or Emergency Medical Technician who arrives to restore their soul and restore them to their path of righteousness. Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall not be swayed.

But inevitably, particular males and females will be attracted to one another, disrupting the serene serenity of both university and gender theory.

Blessed are those who hunger for sex and a long term partner, for this is good for humans as a species and aging Americans hoping for the continued creation of young workers who will pay for their Social Security benefits.

To be a woman, you don’t need to be a beauty, but you do need to pay more attention to your appearance than the guys do if you expect to get a good job and keep it. If a woman looks like the back of the bus, the woman will not get the job (although a similarly looking man might get the job).

This is called life. ‘Twas ever thus.

None of us will live long enough to see the human animal change its spotty hard wiring. Deep in the warmth of body and genitals, women remain women and the men remain men. To expect otherwise is quite naïve; to believe otherwise is simply foolish and unrealistic.

We are all individuals. Once we leave the world-proofed playgrounds of our universities and academia, there is no great sorority of women and men, any grand sisterhood or brotherhood of fairness, resets, and do-overs. Blessed are the naïve and youthful, for they remind us that we too once were young.

And lest we forget, we are all individuals in a world that not only plays hardball but plays for keeps. You will find it quite willing strip you of your favorite shooter and anything else you might bring to the game.

Life is complex, men and women more than some blurred dimensionless gender. Humanity is not only more complex than you know, we are more complex than you can imagine. As we get older, our knowledge of life’s complexities grows, partly through experience, partly through our determination to learn as much as we can about life before we die.

When we are young, we like to believe that nurture rules over nature, that we are born a blank slate without sin or desires. Whatever we are, whatever we become, we do so because society and our parents made us so. Blessed are the firm and sure of purpose, for they surely are without experience.

When we have our own children we, as feminists, believe that our daughters will grow up exactly as will our sons. We would raise them as equals and they would grow to be adult humans, not women and men. Why wouldn’t they? After all, it’s all nurture and societal constructs.

But it’s not like that, is it?

There are things a mother does with her daughter and not with her son, things most sons would not be caught dead doing at all. Girly things. Perhaps the first trip to the mall to search for hair bands. Perhaps many things and rights of female passage.

There are things a father does with his son and not with his daughter, things most daughters would find inexplicable. Man stuff. Perhaps the first time a father teaches his son to play baseball, run a Y Out, or shoot a jump shot. Perhaps how pain is just your body getting stronger.

Are we really shocked when we discover that our daughters and sons are girls and boys and not some perfect, sexless combination of both? If you believe in equality of opportunity, you raise your daughters to be strong independent women and your sons, strong independent men. But you do not tell them they are not boys or girls, whichever they know they are. In the fullness of their days, you let them grow into men and women who are confident in both their sex and their sexuality. We cannot stop them even if we would.

Blessed are those who know the difference between their physical body and the manner in which they might choose to lead their lives, for it is manifest and evident that there is no sanity clause in Gender Theory.

Blessed is the sexual binary, for without it, the world would be a dull and listless place.

Blessed are the transsexual and intersex for keeping us real.

Blessed are the vagina and the penis, for without them, the world would be quite empty of apes who walk upright and read columns on the internet.

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