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We have a chance, every day, not to rob ourselves of joy.
When people focus on gender as something mandated and immutable, binary, specific, judged, they steal so much joy, not just from other people but from themselves, too. These Iconic cultural gender rules are things you can play with if you like them. Or they can put you in a box and oppress you.
Chivalry is a great example of that. It’s playing with standardized rules of gender. You can also, with the people around you, toss these away in favor of any kind of gender idealization without hurting anyone. To live in a world where gender only exists to give us something fun to play with is to use what we have to make joy.
This goes for so much in our life. We have a shiny bright line- consent. We know that we can play with any human state as long as we acknowledge and respect consent. We can not judge, we can build joy. We can reject cultural ideas about what’s proper, provided we do it consensually.
This is the promise of transhumanism. Its simplest representation—a piercing in an odd place, a tattoo of something that means something to you—is the first step into this place where we can customize our experience in the world and think beyond the stories that we’ve seen into new stories, ones that bring us more joy.
Like the teacher in grade school who refused to call you by a new name that we just came up with, there will always be people who want to invest their energy in standing in between people and their own joy.
Please, try not to be that teacher today, too hung up on how things have always been to see how things could be.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
About Jim Marcus
Jim Marcus is an artist, musician, and typographer from Chicago, Illinois. He was one of the originators of the Industrial music scene as the lead singer of the band Die Warzau, has played in over 30 other projects and currently heads up the band Go Fight.
