I live on the south coast of England, and last night felt scary. The sea is half a mile away, the wind was not, and I could hear stuff moving above my top floor flat ceiling. Rainwater has been leaking since I moved at the start of November, and there hasn’t been enough let-up to get anything properly fixed. I have just discovered this morning that the worse of two leaks let water in and under my laminate flooring. I’m relying on the central heating pipes to dry it out, because I’m not sure about lifting small areas of laminate. It has been an unwelcome start to my new living space, but it has been quite exceptional and sustained bad weather.
It ain’t natural.
Well, of course it is. It’s what the jet stream does when warm and cold sea and air patterns change, and they always do. I need no further convincing that human-released carbon deposits are changing our climate and will continue to do so. And yet I still selected a top-floor flat! This is nature, doing what nature does, and we have fed it the wrong diet. It’s got wind.
Today things will begin to die down, and if it dies down enough, we may see on the news instead, stories of snow and ice in the U.S. Things that are out of our idea of normal are scary, and we wish they would just return to the way we thought they were.
Another small event this week that has nonetheless swept the world was the announcement by Facebook that it is changing its gender markers for personal profiles. It seems not as of today to have reached UK Facebook users, but it will. The tide washes in and people who identify as anything other than male or female are feeling enfranchised and recognised. It can be a huge release not to have to choose between two things that you feel you are not. Imagine if you had to decide between ticking brown hair or blonde? It isn’t dissimilar. People who have traditional ideas of gender and no personal problem with the binary, have also protested.
It ain’t natural.
But just like the weather, of course it is. Nature is what is, not the way we think it should be. This small strike back at the way things actually are has also been forced. We have fed this shift by storing up resistance for too long, with our insistence on the apparent simplicity of labelling people male or female so we can sort the sex thing out and what is allowed and what is not. I am grateful for all that the lesbian, gay and bisexual movement has achieved on rights and social acceptance. They are getting there in a way trans* people are not quite. People used to see LGB couples in the street (they still do), holding hands or kissing, and probably imagining what do they do in bed?!
It ain’t natural!
Really? Two people simply expressing love for each other as they feel most fitting? They probably aren’t doing what most of these observers imagine anyway. Well not like that. Facebook this week has pressed the case once more, whether for commercial advantage or social good hardly matters, that what human kind is, is natural. Offering 56 categories instead of 2 may seem over the top, but when facebook.ru reaches Putin-land (I do hope so!) it will once again be saying that people are what they are, that sex and gender are social constructs as they stand. We are not all they same – but the heteronormative model?
It ain’t natural!
I probably shall not change my marker. I don’t need to say I’m trans, though I don’t hide it. Statistics of incidence of intersex (between 1 and 4 per cent of the population), of male to female transgender (1 in 4500), and of female to male transgender (1 in 8000) may seem surprisingly high. It is only a surprise because of systematic erasure. We don’t like to talk about the anomalies in the standard model. So let’s take the opportunity to feed climate change on LGB and especially the quite different T. Being transgender or transsexual happens.
It’s natural.
- See also: Be careful what you love (poetry)