^^ Dylan Muvaney, transgender / gender fluid pioneer recently attacked by those who think they know her better than she knows herself

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We humans think we know what human nature is about but we don’t know it at all.

As the poet e e cummings wrote, almost 100 years ago, “when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man.”

Thus we come to transgender, or “gender fluidity” if you will, unprepared as always for new revelations, new aspects of the single secret. What are we to think about transgender people, assuming we think at all ?

I would suppose that we might start by asking a transgender person what he or she is about. Because a gender fluid person has had to think a lot about what he or she is or is not. It is just as much a surprise to a trans person to be “trans” as it is to us to merely observe. He or she the gender fluid human confronts his or her fluidity every minute in a society that assumes that gender is written in the DNA. So why not ask a gender fluid person what fluidity is about and how it is to be lived in ?

The responses might shock you.

Acceptance is not a snap, it is worked toward, as the gender fluid human samples, discards, then accepts all the explanations that culminate in the actual.

Gender fluidity, the gendered human will tell you, is NOT a choice. It is a revelation. It is in you whether you accept it or not. It comes to grips with you, not the other way around.

Is that hard for us to accept ? If hard, why ? Why would we reject what a person tells us about herself ? By what basis do we know a person better than the person knows herself ?

I read people – including legislators in “red” States – who insist that a multi-gendered person is wrong about himself, that “gender is” this and not that. I don’t see how such assertion differs from insisting that the Earth is flat. Or that it was created 6000 years ago, as my ancestors’ writings (book of Genesis) told my ancestors. It is well and good to make such assertions, but like most assertions, they are likely mistaken. Same is true about gender. Those who insist they know tell us that biological sex is gender. Yet it isn’t. This we see in the lives of gendered humans.

Biology is not the soul, the self. Biology is the mechanics of the body, but human beings are more than body and system. Human beings perceive; we have feelings, sentiments, insights; we learn stuff. Gender is one of the attributes that we learn more and more about. (There isw nothing new about gender fluidity. Gendered people have existed in all times and all societies.)

This is so no matter what gender learning we get to. For those who figure out that their gender is the same as their biology, no more than for those who perceive their gender to be different from their biology. It’s THE SAME PROCESS ! One figures out who one is.

No one can do it for you.

No one can tell you who you are or how to figure it out. Being a fully created human being, as we all are, each of us has direct, empirical knowledge of only our own self. All that anyone else can say about us is assumption.

Thus we see that some of us are not what we are, even as they are as human as we are.

Many who feel they have a right to impose their assumptions upon us cite my ancestors’ commandments and laws of Torah, as found in “the Bible,” all of which they assert are immutable words of God not vulnerable to emendation because what God declares is permanent. Thereby denying to us who live today equal status, as created beings, with my ancestors of 3000 years ago.

Somehow I do not accept that we today are confined like slaves to the orders of 3000 years old masters. Why are we not just as entitled to make discovery as were they of old ? And so we see that we are as entitled, because gendered people among us are making discovery even as I write.

Thus I embrace gender fluid humans. I welcome their witness, their testimony about their lives.

I welcome whaat they might teach us tomorrow as well.

I welcome revelation, new knowledge, new perception, just as I welcome my own readiness to perceive anew every day.

We learn that humans are discoverers in an infinity of the unknown, the as yet unnoticed. I say, cherish the discoverers and incorporate their discoveries into your book of learning.

Thank goodness for transgendered people. They are our vanguard, our pioneers exploring what e e cummings so well prophesied :

“…the single secret will still be man.”

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere