The way we talk about sexuality and gender has changed dramatically in the last decade. Hank Green offers a friendly primer.
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Good morning, John! Today we plumb the depths of the marvelously complex human.
But first allow me to acknowledge that I’m not a sociologist. I’m also a straight white man who doesn’t have to worry about a lot of the hate that a lot of other people do have to worry about. But my goal with this video is I want people to understand because I think understanding will lead to less hate and also less self-hate.
For other people, it’s nice to imagine that humans are simple, and that you can know a person’s sex and then you will know all sorts of things about them deeply and clearly. And if you don’t fit in this nice little box, people who do can get really confused, and sometimes even angry. And if you yourself don’t fit into one of these nice little boxes and you think that people should, then you end up hating yourself and that’s probably even worse.
I think the best and maybe only way to solve this problem is for people to understand that there are no nice, shiny boxes! Or if there are shiny boxes, there are infinite number of them, enough to put all of the people who currently exist, have ever existed, and will ever exist.
So together, let’s understand.
We’re gonna start simple: what’s going on down here, in between the legs. That is your sex, your biological sex. And it tends to be binary, though there are all sorts of conditions that result in intersex individuals.
And as interesting and complicated as this is, the rest of it is much more complicated, so I’m just gonna move on from here, because we all kind of get what sex is.
Now we move on up to the top, to the brain which is the thing that decides what gender you identified with, whether you feel like a man or a woman or neither or both. Because the fascinating thing is, as much as we try to label things, there is no way to label every point on it infinite continuum, and that’s what we’re dealing with here. So, to actually visualize how this works, I’ve created a graph for you.
On the X-axis, we have gender: male to female. And on Y axis, we have the intensity of the identification with that gender. I would be about here because I identified as man, though I recognize that there are some woman-y parts of me.
But let’s also put a hypothetical biological female on the graph that identifies very strongly as man. Now that can be really uncomfortable, especially when there’s a bunch of people in the world who insist on calling him a woman just because of the body that he happens to be very uncomfortable with. Which is why sex not determined the pronoun you should use; genderdoes.
Now moving to your heart (your metaphorical heart, of course). This is who you are to attracted to: men, women, all genders. Again it’s a spectrum, and that spectrum includes intensity because there are people who don’t feel strong sexual attraction at all. That’s why asexual is a sexual orientation.
A newer idea that I was happy to be exposed to yesterday on Tumblr is the idea of romantic orientation. These are the people that you wanna have strong intimate relationships with, but it sort of separates out the idea that sex has to be the goal, or end point, or end-all-and-be-all of every intimate relationship.
Now that we’ve dealt with how we feel, let’s deal with what happens with other people actually get involved. That’s sexual behavior, which is actually very different from sexual orientation. It might a little bit strange at first, but it’s not. Consider, for example, a heterosexual priest. That priest’s orientation is heterosexual, but because of his religion, his behavior is celibate. Here we’re not talking about the preference, were talking about the behavior.
Now, built on top of all of this are gender roles, which are built by societies, not by an individuals. The obvious ones are masculine gender roles and feminine gender roles but, as all dichotomies are false dichotomies, this one is a spectrum too.
Now that we’ve sort gone over all of this, it’s important to note that every single one of these categories is independent from each other.
So a biological female can be a man who only has sex with woman despite the fact that he’s attracted to both men and women and kind of feels more comfortable in feminine gender roles. That may not be the most common combination of these factors, but it’s certainly not weird.
And another important point: many people move across these spectrums, sometimes from year to year, sometimes hour to hour.
But what’s really important is that we trust ourselves, we understand ourselves, we love and respect ourselves, and we grant that same understanding and respect to the people around us.
Because when the world becomes one of the infinite continuums and those false dichotomies breakdown and those two shiny boxes break apart in the 7 billion shiny boxes, it’s actually pretty beautiful.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.
Previously appeared at Everyday Feminism
Hank Green is a video-blogger, musician, and entrepreneur from Missoula, Montana. He is best known for the YouTube channel vlogbrothers, which he shares with his brother John. Hank also works to make educational science videos at SciShow, invented 2D glasses, writes silly songsabout Harry Potter and subatomic particles, and co-founded the independent record labelDFTBA Records. Follow him on Twitter @hankgreen, and check out his website for more information on his many ongoing projects.
“So a biological female can be a man who only has sex with woman despite the fact that he’s attracted to both men and women and kind of feels more comfortable in feminine gender roles. That may not be the most common combination of these factors, but it’s certainly not weird. And another important point: many people move across these spectrums, sometimes from year to year, sometimes hour to hour.” That entire paragragh is the Most Ridiculous Statement I’ve ever heard. Everything before that was Interesting and does have some Vlaid Merit, but C’Mon, is being Heterosexual or any of… Read more »