Being Wrong Is Good for You

Learning curves

I was a fairly decisive ten-year-old. Upon seeing that some people were
“girls trapped in a boy’s body,” (or the reverse) I realized something.

“There are five sexes: male, female, girls trapped in boy’s bodies, boys’ trapped in girls’ bodies, and in-between.”

That there were five such sexes, sat there, mostly in my unconscious, for decades, like an outgrown pair of polished Sunday school shoes.

Every once in a while I would trot out the shoes, just to show how smart and shiny they were. But those were closed-toed shoes.

I mean, close-minded.

LGBTQ plus, plus, plus

In popular culture, letters began to appear after the usual “LGBTQ.” Those five letters had been alone for so long, it was a surprise.

What I had learned (or decided) about sex, and gender, was wrong. Now, I can see there is a spectrum.

I do not know if anyone knows how far the spectrum will go, or how many letters added are “correct.”

Like many things in nature, it is easy to see there are long continuums. There is life itself, begun as a single cell, but evolved to complexity. There is light — some light is visible — and most is not.

There is a spectrum of writers, from those who tweet gibberish to those who actually say something.

Binary things exist. Sort of. But they are usually representative of most, not all. Most people are bipedal. Not all. Most skateboarders are boys. Not all. Most things Ted Cruz says are stupid. Not all.

But it’s instructive to look at the bimodal distribution among natural groups. There are usually two groups of people in a height chart. There are some people who rent, and some who own. There are some who watch sports and some who do not.

There are always some who are in-between or neither.

Being right and being wrong

For knowledge to aid the process of learning, we must be able to realize we are wrong sometimes. We have to follow the truth even when it makes us uncomfortable, or even shunned.

Obviously, “right and wrong” is another binary. It’s also useful to note just how often we flawed human beings sort according to what “feels” right, or wrong, and how often we incorporate our implicit bias.

It is very black and white (another binary!) to simplify the world this way. To quickly make categories is how we evolved. It’s how we find belonging in the tribe. However, it’s very important, and crucial, to see there are shades of gray.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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