My older sibling recently made a post on Facebook telling everyone that they no longer identify as a male. They no longer want to be gendered. While the family showed nothing but support, it wasn’t an easy adjustment. I remember at my graduation party having to cringe through family members continuously referring to them as “him”.
But it was the toughest adjustment for my mother. She said she was always used to calling them her son, and now she can’t. I kept reassuring her that they’re still the same person they have always been, and she understood that, but it just wasn’t easy. And admittedly I have been kind of struggling too. I’ve always grown up with a brother, but now I can’t use that word anymore.
But then I started to wonder. Why has this adjustment been so hard? Why are so much more comfortable when someone identifies as a gender? And why do we even care about someone's gender?
I realized that the idea of gender is kind of outdated. For some reason we feel a need to separate humanity into groups and to put labels on them. We can’t just see them as humans. They have to be a certain kind of human. But really, the only label or categorization we need for humans is how different we all are as individuals. We are each our own category of human. We don’t need to conform to a group, because when you do that, the roles set by society are put on you. I admire my sibling for breaking free of roles. They are in a category of their own now, and no one can tell them how they're supposed to act.
So yes, I suppose it's true that I no longer have a brother, and my mother no longer has an older son, but those are just words. The love is the same. Gender doesn't and shouldn't affect who we are as a person.
My father told me that he’s been trying to look at people and not see them as male or female, but just as people. He’s having a hard time, but it’s hard to blame him. He grew up in a society where boys had roles and girls had roles and they were two separate things and that was just how it was. But I am very proud of him for trying, because gender doesn’t need to be a big deal. If people are comfortable identifying as male or female, that's great, but it shouldn’t be that confusing when someone doesn’t choose one or the other.
I think my sibling said it best. They concluded their post with this simple yet profound statement:
You gender me, you limit me.
