The Complexity of Woke Identity

With the awareness that identity is currently a highly sensitive subject for a highly sensitive main stream audience—whose views and expressions of opinion have taken on more of a deadly flash flood type current than a meandering, giving stream—there is always some trepidation when tackling such a topic.

Yet, from my perspective, everyone’s opinions—despite their unpopularity, absurdity, or stupidity—can and should be voiced, even if it upsets the upset-ables.

A Necessary, but Long-Winded, Preface

Without being a meme-seeker, I still occasionally stumble across memes that speak to me, and many of the Gen X memes illustrate the superficial feelings I have as I observe the happenings of the world as someone born within that generation.

If you’ve somehow avoided them, I’d love to know your secret. But for the sake of this example, here’s a brief description of one of these memes:

A Gen Xer, depicted as a bored and somewhat smug looking individual, sits casually and quietly, often with a drink in their hand to show how done they are with all of the haters, as Boomers and Millennials (represented as angry, hate-spitting, and trashy prime-time reality TV participants) verbally shred each other to pieces, while Gen Y remains happily anonymous.

Image courtesy of Buzzfeed

As I’ve pondered on the absurdity of these images and their messages, I have to admit that the silly and overly simplistic depictions have an uncanny ability to express how I really feel, as they must for others of my generation who keep perpetuating them.

In some ways, these memes inadvertently remind me of the shame I secretly harbor over my silence and lack of participation in the volatile and hostile world of civil unrest taking place around me; I worry that I have become too apathetic in my desire to say or do anything when social controversies arise.

Conversely, I hardly see the advantage in speaking up and adding more fuel to the drama, as the motley fray is clearly just another battle that can’t be won or subverted with more talking or yelling over one another, and I rarely have the patience to simply sit and politely listen to more oblivious anecdotal nonsense so that the insecure people of the world feel heard.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that just because I, or anyone else for that matter, who all too often choose to sit silently with a drink in their hands—to have something pleasant to focus on while the deafeningly vocal individuals around light the world on fire with their blame and pride—doesn’t mean that our opinions and observations don’t exist, aren’t relevant, or for arguments sake, aren’t as dumb as everyone else’s.

The reason for my taking this silent-observer approach is that I, and perhaps others like me, find the old ecclesiastical adage of not choosing to cast one’s pearls before swine, rings true, especially in our current social climate. Pigs don’t have any use for pearls, and why would someone waste their time trying to convince them otherwise?

But before your panties get all knotted up in a bunch thinking that I’m casting myself as the victimized pearls surrounded by ranting, raving pigs, let me assure you that my meaning is quite the contrary. I’m fine being the pig in this analogy and allowing everyone else the title of pearl, because in this scenario it makes little difference.

Pearls and pigs are so dissimilar it would be a mistake to spend time trying to compare them. The proverbial pigs (those who neither care nor want to be forced to accept outside opinion) do not appreciate the rarity and exceptional quality of pearls (the personal experiences, opinions, and perspectives of those they cannot relate to or those with whom they disagree).

To put it more plainly, it’s absolutely pointless to try and force people who disagree with you, especially fundamentally, to agree with you, even when you think you’re right. That is what casting your pearls before swine means for those who haven’t taken time to analyze the deeper meaning.

So, I often sit too quietly and too casually amidst the hubbub, to avoid adding just another unwanted opinion to the negative social media space packed with so many who simply want to be seen and heard, but who are, simultaneously, so incapable of seeing and hearing.

But because I have benefited from those who have with courage shared unpopular opinions without expectation or agenda, except to satisfy their own conscience, I take up my own torch to slay the apathy and cast my own proverbial pearls of experience out into the fray with little to no expectation that they will be seen or heard.

However, my idealistic hope in adding my unexceptional voice to the many conversations about identity that are taking place is that they’ll be received, understood, and offer a feeling of community to my fellow pigs who, like myself, have felt alone in a sea of contradictory woke-ness I absolutely refuse to participate in, unless I’m being offered a comfortable chair and a delicious drink with which to observe the nonsense.

If not, at least I said my peace and counted to three and I can continue to live in the comfort of my own belief bubble that I haven’t become completely apathetic.

A Brief Disclaimer

Although this case study is an absolutely bias and irrefutably one-sided take on woke identity, I chose this approach carefully so as to avoid culturally appropriating anyone else’s life experience or opinions.

This choice presupposes the fact that I don’t know, don’t care, and have no intention of taking time to understand how they—the ambiguous other—may or may not react to my perspectives on woke identity.

Nor is this case study a means of providing so-called rational solutions for the problems associated with the woke-identity movement. Yet, it could qualify as a baseline for collecting my thoughts prior to considering the ramifications of offering ordinary solutions that such a radical group may conceive of as too boring to consider.

Therefore, I only offer herein, a very real and pointed look at my own character, perspective, and obstinacy with regards to this topic without concern or need for concern for how others may digest my emotionally charged tid-bits, because, as the loud-mouthed, attention-seeking, toddlers have made very clear and certain, my individual opinions formulated from my own experience, and which only exist within my own head, entitle me to criticize the world without in any form of accountability or credibility. For, as the new woke nonsense instructs, if I believe it, think it, or feel it, it must be true.

Although I offer this disclaimer as the only semi-heart-felt excuse for what I am about to say, I do not, however, offer it as a form of apology.

As always, read at your own risk of having a self-righteous heart attack from hearing something that you may or may not agree with.

How Do I Identify? A “Gender Is Identity” Dispute.

How do I identify? Here’s my plain and very politically incorrect answer: it’s none of your business.

I find the notion of gender as a valid method for identifying oneself to be absurd, and not just absurd, but repulsive.

Why is my sexual, mental, or physical orientation anyone’s business? Gender has nothing to do with how I measure my own or another’s value and worth. I’d like people to know the real me, the person behind the flesh-curtain, not some generic, toddler-based identity taxonomy.

My biological makeup and sexual orientation is only relevant if I need a medical procedure or I am interested in having a sexual encounter; therefore, my gender is only the concern of my doctor and my partner alone.

Why do others think that how they choose to orient themselves is something I should know or care about? Knowing how others identify, whether sexually or not, is not going to change how I treat them. I treat people the way I do because that’s how I choose to be. It has nothing to do with them.

I fundamentally and absolutely reject the overtly shallow and infantile identity-by-gender delusion. We are, all of us, so much more than pronouns.

Case Study: A silly example illustrating the absurdity of identifying oneself in such an unsophisticated manner as pronouns

My name is Thalia (Thāy-lee-uh). Hardly anyone can pronounce my name the way my parents decided they would pronounce it, the way I like it to be pronounced. Not even several of my husband’s family members could say it correctly for years after we were married.

My entire life I have had to deal with the same old, “What did you say your name was?” or just blatant mispronunciations because it’s so unusual and it’s too boring for people to care, or because the singer Thalía says it with a Latin twist.

My name, the first form of identification I most often use, although pretty, is an annoyance because it is mispronounced and misrepresenting me, regularly. But it’s my name. I know that if I really wanted to I could change it.

For years, I have answered to all kinds of bastardizations of my name because I recognize that people are people. They don’t care. They aren’t my mommy, and I’m adult.

I know my name, I know how to say it, and I don’t see the point of forcing everyone else on the planet to single me out as of paramount importance to stroke my vulnerable ego by learning the correct pronunciation of my name.

The people I care about most, they say my name the way I like it said. They know me. They took the time to learn how to say my name, and that is good enough for me.

For those of you who are still catching on to this example, let me explain. I see the mispronunciation of my name the same way I view the faddish pronoun nonsense.

If you know who you are and what pronouns and gender properly define you, there is nothing to worry about. If, however, you are insecure and unable to clearly define who you are without the help of others reminding you constantly what pronouns are appropriate, perhaps you’re the one with the problem.

The following questions should help those confused and frustrated by the improper use of their chosen pronouns by others to help them clarify why they need others to remember or use certain pronouns to describe them in the first place:

• Do you know what gender you are? If you do, congratulations! You are ahead of the curve.

• Likewise, if you know your own gender, why do you need everyone around you to get it right? Why do you care? Are you confused?

• Does it help you believe that you are, truly, the gender you’ve chosen if everyone around you helps you out by applying the right pronouns to your obviously uncertain decision?

• Are you worried you might forget what gender you’ve chosen if others use the wrong pronouns?

• If you’re not sure how to answer the above questions consider this, you probably ought to figure out what gender you are before going around making everyone feel bad for not using the right pronouns to describe you.

• Lastly, if you still insist that everyone should know your pronouns no matter your own confusion, you probably just need a hug and to follow the advice below.

A little advice for those with fragile egos:

If you’ve just arrived on planet Earth I’m happy to give you this heads up, you don’t need all of these morons to like you for you to like yourself. It’s nice when others care, but it is not necessary, or even possible.

Woke Identity: My Opinion

I remember when the question of sexual orientation became a mainstream topic, and I thought, “I don’t want to know or place judgment on what adults choose to do behind closed doors and in the privacy of their own homes. Unless there is some form of abuse taking place that the authorities should be made aware of, why do people feel like they need to share their sexuality with me and the whole planet?”

Apart from potential legal questions of marriage, insurance, guardianship, and such, sexuality is, in my opinion, a private and personal matter.

Once sexual preference became a mainstream, mundane topic, identity and gender, and all that’s wrapped up in those complex issues, took on lives of their own.

The conversations went from, “People just want their sexual preferences to be seen as normal and natural and to be awarded equity by virtue of the law,” to “If you don’t accept how people identify themselves sexually and psychologically, even to play along with whatever they believe in their imaginations, you are intolerant, hateful, and in some locals, in danger of legal prosecution.”

For someone who has a rich imagination and inner world, but recognizes it as a psychological space others are not privy to and therefore are not obligated or legally bound to tolerate, these developments have been disconcerting and annoying, at the very least.

We are not simply being asked to tolerate another person’s sexual preferences or to play psychological mind games any more, now, we have to learn how to formulate our sentences properly to protect the egos of all these mouses who asked for a cookie, then a glass of milk, and are now booting us out of our homes so they can watch the game in peace on our couch.

The fact that we are probing everyone (pun intended) to see how each individual on the planet identifies on such a superficial level as gender can only mean one thing:

We are seriously confused toddlers, devoid of reason, and delusional, and because of our infantile perception we have lost touch with who we are as a human species and as sovereign individuals and are now using rudimentary cave-man methods like, I am Tarzan (boy/he/him), you are Jane (girl/she/her), and we are legion (the ambiguous they), to define ourselves, believing, somehow, that these childish distinctions are going to clarify the confusion and help us recover our missing identity.

How do I identify?

You’ve got to be kidding me! If you really want to know who I am, why are you asking me such dumb questions?

I’m sorry to burst the fragile gender-woke bubble with this declaration, but one doesn’t get to know me, or anyone else for that matter, by asking what gender I am, how I enjoy or express my sexuality (unless you are a pervert), what my favorite color is, what is my preferred ice cream flavor, or how strong I am based on holding my arms at right angles and squeezing my muscles really hard.

I must conclude from the stupidity of the question, those who ask it are not, in fact, interested in getting to know anyone and instead are only interested in labeling and organizing humanity into tidy boxes for some other purpose than caring; a purpose which, at the very least, appears ignorant, and at it’s very worst, a frighteningly subversive attack on individual sovereignty.

When you leave the determination of some of the most important aspects of human nature, like identity, character, and the summation of a person’s worth to a toddler’s understanding of what it means to be human and important, you get a toddler-based comprehension of identity.

Case Study: A toddler-based understanding of gender

I am the mother of and gave birth to three beautiful children, a daughter and two sons. When my daughter and oldest son were toddlers we’d often bathe them together to save time.

One day, with great delight my oldest son announced, “I know the difference between boys and girls!” Immediately, my thought was, “I guess it’s time to start bathing them alone.” Then, my son triumphantly—yet naively—declared, “Girls have long hair, boys have short hair.”

At the time, my hair was short just like my husband’s. I couldn’t help but wonder at how he was making that distinction, or more bizarrely, how he saw me. But now that society is being run by toddlers, it makes perfect sense.

What Identity Really Is

How you uniquely and distinctly identify yourself is a complex and evolving growth process. Your identity is made up of millions of choices, moral distinctions, values and beliefs, experiences, desires, preferences, and aesthetics, least of which is your gender. Humans are innately complex and unique.

The mistake in boiling identity down to something as simplistic as gender or sexual orientation is how to answer the serious question of, “Where do we go from here?”

Okay, so now we’ve established something nobody cares all that much about: you are a boy and I am a girl. So what? Those questions only matter to those who are still worrying about whether or not pink can be worn by someone who has a penis or a vagina.

It’s a juvenile and arrogant assumption to consider that because there are a group of adults who haven’t answered that question for themselves as of yet, one must conclude that the entire human race is living in confusion about what colors are neutral enough territory to be worn in public without getting judged by their peers.

Yes, I am metaphorically speaking here, in case you didn’t catch the irony.

When one analyzes and surmises a total identity in such a base and superficial way, like I think I am a boy and you think you are a girl, you run into more important, complex, and alarmingly overlooked identity issues than that of gender identification.

Identity, the very thing that makes each of us distinct and individual, becomes up for grabs or a confusing “whatever is acceptable to others” kind of qualification, not to mention the enormous backwards step infantile genderization will have and is having on all those claiming men and women can coexist peaceably and equitably in a society deluded with such simplistic and ignorant notions.

But woke identity isn’t just proposing we distinguish ourselves separately as men and women, they are suggesting that there is no line and no limit to delusion, and that an apparent dissolving of perceivable lines is just what society needs to heal and be one; a kind of anything goes approach to sovereignty, rather than a serious distinction of values and worth.

However, if one is under the naive assumption that blurring the lines between genders will create more harmony in a world of obvious, naturally-designed, and biological differences, that one can simply turn nature on and off with mutilation or hormone replacement therapy, they are seriously and sadly mistaken.

Ironically, under this guise, science has reduced itself down to an aesthetical practice of plastic surgery with nature, pretending nature to be a foolhardy thing that doesn’t exist and that humans—a paradoxical product of nature—are, in fact, somehow above it.

Gender confusion will not and has not established better communication or understanding or halted the growing and disturbing divide between the sexes. Instead, it has confused a generation of educated simpletons into distracted absorption in playing a sort of gender-finding game of cat and mouse, rather than establishing serious and real grounds for their worth and value in society.

If we continue in this way, we will grow further away from, not closer to, the unity everyone so unanimously claims to champion.

I speak as one who feels this chasm of misunderstanding growing wider by the moment, one who is a sovereign and rightful female in body and mind, and I assert with every fiber of my being that no confused and narcissistic man masquerading as Woman of the Year will ever understand or comprehend on any level what it is to be or grasp—with even the minutest, fraction of a degree—what it is and means to be a woman, and vice versa.

I am heartily ashamed of the misguided pretense and confusing elitism that produced such a fraud, and knowing that this man’s counterfeit illusion of the feminine and his duplicitous acceptance of such an award was perpetrated and gifted by members of my own sex is a further representation that we are, as a species, a viral bench test, not a superior race.

A man will never know what it is to be a biological female, just as a woman, myself included, will never comprehend what it is to be a biological man, and to be fair, only those who struggle with sexual delusions understand the complexity of those feelings.

Genderization does not repair the ever-widening gap between humanity. Accepting each other is not what we need more of. We need to stop worrying so much about what others think of us, learn to love ourselves as we are, and get on living our lives.

When one is robbed of a deeper meaning or estimation of identity by something as superficial as gender, when culture and society give such naive and myopic explanations for autonomy, one is no longer afforded the opportunity of building a unique and personal identity based on something real—experience, choice, integrity, and character.

Instead, one’s authenticity is boiled down and deconstructed into a magician’s trick, a nothingness, and becomes, paradoxically, subject to identity laws, cultural standards, and toddler-based rules.

Legislating Identity

Who gets to decide what a boy or a girl is, or what it means to be either? and, how does that determination affect and distinguish identity?

With the multiplicity of complex and controversial answers, these questions should not, in my estimation, be determined by law. As we’ve seen time and time again, one law is never enough. If given power to regulate one aspect of identity, eventually it will become necessary to regulate all aspects of identity.

Law presupposes that people are just too stupid to figure it out for and govern themselves, and if we become too stupid to govern ourselves and too afraid of facing the natural consequences of our individual actions, law will become the parental guardian of individual identity.

As gender has slowly become the most important indicator of human distinction and individuality among the masses of raging idealists, the legal system is being given undue power to make such determinations and gender is now being wrongly defined and regulated by the courts.

A Major Reason Why We Are Legislating Gender

People like legislation, specifically people who want to make courageous and difficult, individualistic choices, like assuming another gender, but can’t stomach or handle the waves of consequences that often can and do come in the many different forms of social rejection and negative distinction, or worse, alienation.

People think legislation will protect them from consequences, and people who are afraid of the consequences of their own choices—not enough to stop making those choices but enough to complain about them—feel justified in condemning and controlling the human environment to protect the glass houses accommodating their fragile egos and irresponsible actions with legal rights.

Laws are meant to protect the vulnerable, and they should. However, properly distinguishing the vulnerable from the entitled, the reckless, and the insecure is an important part of due process.

Is it vulnerability when a legal adult naively makes lifestyle choices they decide they don’t like the consequences of, consequences that may include alienation from one’s family, social or peer group, and criticism and judgment that causes them to lose credibility or their job?

For some reason, gender-based consequences from lifestyle changes are seen as more harmful than religious-based consequences from lifestyle changes, even though the effects are similar—alienation, judgment, loss of work, and credibility.

For example, I’ve known people who changed their religion and lost everything, and were persecuted for their new-found faith. Yet, their choices are not and have never been viewed with the same seriousness as those who make gender-based transitions, although the reasoning for choosing either is the same—knowing the truth in one’s mind.

People should have the right to choose to identify as this or that but, like an adult, face the consequences of their choices in society.

Protecting people from harm, not natural social consequences, is the aim of law. Law should not seek to control, manipulate, and forfeit the rights of those who disagree with or dislike the decisions of others or who may judge and criticize them.

Ego-centrism and the fear of alienation, not vulnerability and harm, is now the hand, veiled in human rights, pressurizing the legal system to nullify choice to protect groups of insecure, confused, and vulnerable toddlers masquerading as grown-up champions of authenticity.

Legislating Identity Won’t Solve the Problem

Knowing or not knowing one’s gender clearly does not establish psychological or emotional confidence, make one more self-aware and therefore a competent member of society, or add to one’s identity and self-worth.

If it did, those steeped in deep-woke presumptions, fundamentalism, and campaigning for gender-based identity rights wouldn’t constantly need society to pet them and tell them what good little non-binaries they are.

For some reason, these proponents of legislating gender rights outside of protecting one from death or bodily harm believe that if Joe-Shmoe, the proverbial plumber who lives down the road, acknowledges and accepts by law the so-called underdogs of humanity—the gendered-disenfranchised—his (if I can be so bold as to use “his” to identify said proverbial man) careless, thoughtless, and impersonal acceptance makes one’s identity and gender more relevant, and even more protected.

With this faith-based belief that legally protecting one from social misrepresentation will improve one’s identity and self-worth, I suppose I should have gone to court or ranted and raved on the street corner for all to hear every time someone mispronounced my name, or even better, changed my gender when my son thought my haircut established serious grounds for my being a boy.

Next time it happens, I’ll be sure to get an attorney or see what Joe-Shmoe thinks.

One Last Thought on Legislating Identity

As many have pointed out before me, the problem with allowing the legal system to write the identity and gender checklist is that when you give the power to sort out identity in any of its forms to the lawmakers—even driven, as it may seem, by basic human rights—identity becomes an unpredictable, fluid, and manipulative resource instead of an individual, synergistic, and interdependent choice.

Today, it will be this, tomorrow it will be that, whatever the lawmakers and leaders need to get the vote, keep the power, and control the money, that is what will dictate human identity.

(Human identity represented as social credit. Sounds like a good solid idea for a movie. Oh, wait! China is already cashing in on it. Sorry, Spielberg.)

Despite the reductionistic over simplicity of that statement, constitutionally defining or protecting a universal understanding of gender or human identity will never favor or establish human worth, or lend proper distinction and protection for individuals within the system, as we have so clearly witnessed over the course of our country’s history concerning other examples of important human rights issues.

Identity by due process or gender by popular vote is just another Ponzi scheme in disguise.

Yes, of course, gender matters

However, in declaring my frustration with the current approach to individual identity, I am not so naive or so far removed from it all not to recognize that there are much more serious and fundamental issues and discrepancies regarding gender in society that have existed for thousands of years, and are relevant to this topic.

Certainly, harmful gender biases exist and, as a subject matter, are worthy of serious consideration and further explanation which will have to be explored here another day.

Yet, woke-ness, and all that is tied up in these new “gender is the most important indicator of identity” disputes, has not proven that this so-called new identity, pronoun policing, and gender check-listing is the answer to thousands of years of human behavior and struggle.

Although the Anthropologist in me finds all of these developments fascinating, the me I most identify with, the one that can’t be boiled down to simply being or not being genderized, is disgusted by most of it.

In my years of exploration and analysis of identity, both individually and collectively, I have been searching for authentic solutions that fortify an individual’s sense of self-worth, instead of, as woke-ness prescribes and pursues, a universal formula for a cult-like improvement in the so-called likability practices that promote the need for greater acceptance within this finicky, confused, and demanding structure we call the human family.

This now widely accepted pursuit of identity by acceptance is, on the whole, statistically known to diminish a sense of value, not support it. Yet, it is still being pursued at a suicidal rate.

Mistaken Sense of Unity

One of the biggest arguments I hear regularly for justifying federal or legal claims on identity is that legislating kindness and peer acceptance, even when one’s heart cannot be willfully controlled by law, will unify society.

Somehow, the notion goes, if we all surrender our individual sovereignty and start playing dress up and make-believe, world peace will be what everyone naturally imagines, and by imagining it, that alone will make it a reality—like how unicorns are real.

Doesn’t anyone remember what playing with friends down the block or what surviving grade school was like? Did living in a rule-based, yet make-believe, world keep us from stealing each others toys, bopping each other on the head, shaming others into social submission, or misidentifying people?

There were rules at school that said bullying was bad, but that didn’t stop bullies from acting out the terror in their hearts. Our parents and the parents of the neighbor kids had rules for how we should treat each other, yet when their backs were turned stuff happened, and I think we all know what that stuff was.

Oh, right? We were just kids back then. Now we are all adults. That makes us much more prone to following the rules and being kind, and besides, we’re not like all the previous morons who’ve tried this sort of utopian nonsense. We’re smarter. We’re more rational. We won’t count the cost in lives. Instead, whatever it takes, we’ll make our perfect world happen.

Despite my solemn inclination, I’ll do my readers, who have made it thus far, a major favor and spare you my endless rantings and ravings on the ironic nature of legislating something so ethereal and ephemeral as kindness or individual identity when people in the States can’t even figure out how to manage themselves in the four-way stop!

Yes, unbeknownst to almost the entire population of our country, there are laws that govern how to manage the four-way stop and they do not include a wave of the hand or being the jerk with the douche-bag tinted windows that zooms up and zooms through as quickly as possible.

There are, already, laws in place that govern human interaction that are much more straightforward than legislating kindness or identity, and those laws are constantly being broken.

What makes anyone believe that more legislation is the answer to complex social problems when simple traffic laws are so difficult to learn or comprehend, is beyond me. In the not too distant future we’re all going to need to keep a lawyer on retainer, or worse, become lawyers ourselves so that we all know how to maneuver through the eggshell laden social order safely.

As far as I can tell, human evolution, or devolution as the case may be, has parked itself firmly in the lot of a six-grade social intelligence.

To believe that dictating human value by law will turn humans into anything other than commercial commodities, is, again, a toddler-based make-believe reality that simply isn’t true.

In fact, in my own experience with these moronic approaches to regulating human nature, I find I dislike people more, not less, who think they are doing me and everyone else a favor by controlling the amount of potential choices I, or anyone else, have.

I become more angry, more socially suspicious, and less inclined toward unity when I see manipulation and control masked like a super hero in “greater good” idealistic hogwash, not less.

Has anyone met another human who is delighted with tyrannical control trying to dramatically impersonate a fairy godmother? And, if you have, those people are the real monsters.

Can we all agree that Professor Umbridge’s character in Harry Potter is a million times scarier than whiny, erratic, and back-stabbing Lord Voldemort?

Where Lord Voldemort failed at every turn to control, even with fear, somehow people bought into Umbridge’s nonsense, at least for a time.

Humans love options that skirt the truth with a dose of collective reason and “we’ll take our medicine like good little automatons” when it almost makes perfect sense to do so.

Fred and George Weasley are the real heroes! Who didn’t want to ride out of that school with them, fireworks a blazing to the tune of “I don’t care what everyone else thinks and the educational system has failed us for the last time so we’ll go it on our own!”

Seriously, though, Professor Umbridge is the worst.

Unity is a product of common understanding, common interest, and interdependent choice none of which can be taught or enforced through legislation and mass behavioral control.

Conclusion

Here’s the truth: If you’re going to act like a toddler by touting juvenile gender check-listing as a realistic method for summing up the worth and identity of humanity or claiming a legal need for social protection when someone calls you a mean name or doesn’t like your decisions, more than likely, you’re going to be treated like a toddler.

Having raised three children, I can rightly say that I’m an authority on what it’s like to deal with toddlers. Babysitters could say that! Anyone who has watched a toddler bolt away from their parents or scream bloody murder over not getting the toy or treat they wanted while their stressed out mother tries to deal with their nonsense for all to see and judge in the supermarket, could also say that.

Toddlers have no business running the world or dictating the rules or standards of identity, because they still need someone to wipe their butts and keep them from carelessly bolting into a busy street, not to mention the fact that they need mommy and daddy, or whoever, to pat them on the head and say, “You are very good at art,” even though we all know their pathetic scribbles need years and years of refinement to be called good.

Yet, here they are trying to run the world and arrogantly attempting to establish their imaginary notions as facts and rules to live by, and because they are so obnoxious when they don’t get their way, everyone is looking to the guy to their left (yes, that would be Joe-Shmoe) to do something about it, to pacify, coddle, and stroke their sad little egos back to right-thinking so that one day they can be accountable and rational adults.

I reject the toddler-based notion that unity is only possible in a society that turns a blind eye to or excuses only certain kinds of bad behavior, ignoring the tantrums and pettishness of those who have deceived themselves into believing they are somehow justified in their whims and hysterics—in the name of tolerance—regardless of what side of the fence one is sitting on; and I equally reject the dismantling and disillusionment of true decency in the form of liberty-driven societal values and principles veiled in the counterfeit ideologies of “Mein (poor) Kampf!”.

My response to it all is a simple motherly entreaty, because I have had enough: grow up and choose to eat your gross canned spinach like the adults do because it’s good for you, not because mommy and daddy are desperately using every bribery tactic known to man to entreat you to be a good little non-bianary and swallow it so you can grow up healthy and strong. That’s what ketchup is for.

As one of the silent masses of Gen Xers who have allowed the bewildering babble of ill-contented toddlers to fill the social spaces for long enough, I apologize. Perhaps remaining quiet has been the wrong tactic. I blame myself. I should have said, “Enough is enough!” a long time ago.

Identity is not legislate-able. It is not universal. And, it is certainly not based on some childish notion of gender fluidity.

If you want to reduce identity down to such Wonderland nonsense of a caucus ruckus, dancing around in a circle, and idiotically singing, “Forward, backward, outward, inward. Here we go again. No one ever loses and no one can ever win” (Fain & Hillard), be my guest. But that doesn’t mean that I, or any other accountability-driven adult, will ever support this toddler-based nonsense.

Despite the awareness that reality is becoming more and more like sand slipping through fingers than something we humans have a grip on, my reality, the one which I am entitled to because it is in my head and therefore the most real and most important, has taught me that perfect equality and fairness is idealistic utopian rubbish, the pursuit of which will only disappoint and destroy the possibility for a true liberty for all.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when taking personal accountability for one’s identity or one’s choices, whether good or bad, is categorized and coupled with conspiratorial fanaticism, as if big foot and saying, “I was wrong,” and “I’m responsible for the consequences I’m experiencing” are equally incredible.

Yet, here we are, and that is why Gen Xers, like me, sit apathetically with their drinks in hand, while the world burns around them, shaking their heads in utter disbelief.

Reference:

Fain, S. & Hilliard, B. (n.d.) The Caucus Race. Retrieved from https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Caucus_Race

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