Urgent and insistent claims about gender, made especially by very young people, are making it ever more apparent that ideas like “binary” and even “spectrum” entrap us in images which are far too rigid - and which may also be harmfully misleading in a vast number of cases. Conflicts and consternations about terminology are only part of the current upset. Out of the many alternatives now being offered, perhaps the term “fluid” is an essential key to understanding and grappling with these claims and the quandaries they pose. And maybe the term will also be useful in understanding other perplexing complications in dimensions extending far beyond mere gender.
A bigger problem, however, might actually spring from the term “identity”. Think about gender (whether physically, psychologically, socially or “whateverly”) as it is expressed in so many ways by so many different people - AND as it is expressed in so many ways by the same person over the course of a lifetime, a day, or a moment. Thinking like this makes it hard to avoid the notion we are ALL somewhat “gender fluid” in different ways and to different extents in the multiple fashions we express and see ourselves.
Some individuals are cursedly blessed with a compulsion to act out unfamiliar ways of being. One such way might be in helping us all come to an understanding of “fluidity” (in terms NOW of gender) whether or not we value this insight which could be liberatory, disruptive, or even catastrophic to so many inherited forms, roles, responsibilities, and “identities”.
The roles and responsibilities of any society involve a myriad of pressures, some of which can indeed be quite oppressive. Roles and responsibilities rarely fail to involve various levels of personal discomfort and challenge. One method of coping is to internalize into our “identities” what might have originally been felt to be imposed. But not all that gets crustified into our self-image is truly crucial to fulfilling necessary responsibilities.
An additional sense of the term “identity” involves affiliation or even tribalism. Fluidity reminds us how some of our limitations are also constructs which are subject to alterations. The last half century or so has demonstrated how gender roles involving work, property, family, and sexuality can be rapidly reconfigured. Homosexuality, for instance, is still sometimes associated with deviance and criminality invoking the power to ignore, strip away, or deny certain rights to certain individuals who see the types of sexuality involved as part of their identity: an affiliation essential to claiming and defending an entire set of rights which are still being codified - and erased.
It might be hard to conceive, or even sometimes hard to remember (for those who have lived long enough especially if we've never been seen as female), but women who were nominally U.S. citizens were not generally afforded the full rights of personhood unproblematically granted to men until the 1970s. This did not happen without some persistent "nudging", and today's "Me Too" movement is only one demonstration that U.S. women continue to struggle to achieve recognition of their "rightful" parity with men. It is notable that some of the ideas related to "gender fluidity" were and are resisted by contingents of feminists and gay activists who worry (not without cause) that such innovations could endanger recently won (and still precarious) gains. The most potent resistance still comes from tribes who identify with more "traditional" roles concerning gender and sexuality. And change, even when it does not involve issues of power and intimacy, is always met with varying levels of acceptance and resistance.
Fluidity might be an essential key to grappling with many present and future challenges, but fluidity is often a state difficult to achieve or maintain. We may only yet be beginning to build structures for ourselves that permit the type of flow we may need as much as the types of safe containers and boundaries we also require for safety, wellbeing, and liberty.
The viscosity of history preserves old injustices, but it also serves to protect (to an extent) hard-won properties such as "rights". The need for structure will always generate tensions against urges for fluidity, a concept both more specialized and somewhat distinct from "freedom".
We will always struggle to determine how much fluidity is too slippery and how much viscosity is too rigid - or vicious.
Ongoing changes in the structures of jobs and the expectations associated with careers are likely to benefit those ablest to incorporate more fluidity into self-perceptions while also maintaining a certain sense of continuity, depth, and "identity". Convulsions associated with automation portend opportunities and threats to what are now seen as essential components of "identity" in even more visceral ways which may soon make sticky preoccupations with gender seem rather quaint.
If fluidity regarding human identities is indeed a magical key for dealing with inevitable future challenges, guidance and inspiration for its use might be found in the types of myths, folklore, and fairytales associated with childhood where transformation and multiple identities are taken for granted. Though we encrudge our children with horribly mixed legacies, they may find the resources for more than an unenviable survival.
Strummer and Jones sang out “He who will die is he who will kill”. Not largely true in the actual practical working out of this wild world, but still resonant with a deep type of truth.
In the actual practical working out of this wild world indiscriminate access to guns leads to suicide and accidents far more than it leads to mass shootings whether in schools, mosques, synagogues, workplaces or random assemblies in parking lots or campgrounds.
The more we understand how guns are used, misused, and made available, the more important it is for serious people to demand sensible restrictions and regulations using laws, market interventions, education, and all the tools available for social change.
The unserious, dishonorable, and lame minded who say nothing can or should be done need to be recognized for what they are - and their ”opinions” should be discounted appropriately.
(It seems like an interesting story how this young woman was able to purchase a shotgun.)
Is it so difficult to understand the difference between making college AVAILABLE for all v. requiring people to go to college, perhaps because we don’t offer enough viable alternatives?
“Traditional” college education should certainly be affordable and available to all - which will mean it would have to be subjected to much more oversight.
But, regardless of where people receive formal education, what we value about college and education should also be available to everyone. I am talking about:
- A good liberal education for citizenship,
- Opportunities to develop specialized skills, and
- Opportunities to join and cultivate mutually supportive networks.
These opportunities can be provided in traditional college settings for traditional college-aged students, but just as young people develop on widely varying and eccentric schedules, the needs of adult learners evolve and change based on thousands of semi-predictable variables. That’s why educational opportunities in a wide range of formal, informal, and blended settings must be supported for individuals of all ages. Lifelong education should also a wide range of opportunities for skills training and self-enrichment.
By necessity, this means we need to work towards a culturally supported system of lifelong education where informal values and practices normalize the occasional resort to formal structures of learning for all based on individual needs and inclinations just as much as on the dubious dictates of the so-called “labor market”.
BF Skinner famously noted that "the evolution of culture is a gigantic effort in self-control." Notions of transcending "freedom and dignity" remain quite as disturbing on their own even when not linked to the idea of "cultural engineering". Still, narrow and fragile notions of "freedom" and "dignity" are being whipped into a toxic melange of ideas regarding "identity", "race", and "nation" with this process driven, in part, by dangerously reckless and irresponsible provocateurs. Skinner's challenge, "We have not yet seen what man can make of man" leaves no one off the hook. To not self consciously participate in creating culture may be the most bitter form of irresponsibility. This can be done in a way that avoids heavy-handed “centralized” control.
The role of formal education in creating and recreating culture can easily be exaggerated, but it's just as facile to minimize its role. Certainly, this role is limited by the more informal mechanisms of education wafting through popular culture (online and off). These include family, religion, and everyday interactions of participation, domination, resistance, diversion, and mutual appreciation, all of which are powerfully influenced by traditions, history, and the assiduous influence of concentrated wealth.
No doubt we all must invest more effort and intentionality in building a culture that supports everybody's opportunity to realize freedom and dignity in meaningful and responsible ways. And just as surely, this is a Sisyphean endeavor. For even if there was ever no chance for backsliding, the daunting slope would inevitably increase exponentially and asymptotically. Such is the "nature" of insatiable humanity. But like Camus's Sisyphus, we must not be discouraged. To the extent we can, we must work to ensure we all have access to the necessities of food, shelter, meaningful occupation, and dignified leisure.
The role of formal education, another basic human "right" is a considerable factor in how cultures and economies evolve to meet (or fail to meet) these needs. The right to life long educational opportunities is now within our grasp. We can continue to build upon the models of public education inherited from the Puritans, Horace Mann, and industrial magnates with an eye toward humaneness as we balance challenge and support for all learners. We can learn from models provided by free online resources such as DuoLingo and Kahn Academy. There are also lessons to be learned from (and about) the Massive Open Online Courses offered now by so many major universities. Schools and colleges all around the world are experimenting with distance and blended learning models of all stripes. All manner of experimentation should be encouraged and supported with a wide range of funding and accreditations backed up with pervasive mechanisms of informal attention and scrutiny.
We are all culture creators even as we are all constantly being shaped (or distorted) by vaster cultural currents. We can responsibly open the institutions of higher learning to all regardless of class, race, or age. And then let's see what we make of ourselves.
Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)
Whenever there’s a buzzing new social panic (now it’s “not ENOUGH sex” . . . ) conservatives blame “liberals” by which they mean leftists and socialists. (Of course sometimes they blame “leftists and socialists” when they really mean liberals.)
And no matter the social problem, we liberals, leftists, and socialists blame capitalism - or the excess of it.
But the term “capitalism”, as used in general discourse, is a vaguely looming label draped over a dynamic complex of relationships, institutions, technologies, conditions, laws, and beliefs.
No wonder we’re so often befuddled and overwhelmed!
It’s only somewhat clarifying to focus on the core elements of capitalism. These center around the ability of a tiny few to make inordinate profits from wage labor by the rest of us. But, as obnoxious as that may sound, capitalism with wage labor is indisputably an improvement over slavery and has allowed for an infinity of progress and freedom compared to other forms of domination.
Meaningful human relationships which promote productive creativity ought to be what we are striving for, but we have so little claim to understanding the actual forces driving us whether they are dynamics of our cultural political economy or somehow intrinsic to our biological existence.
