The Official Government-Approved Gender Thermostat

There are certain topics that, the moment you mention them online, immediately cause 4,000 people to materialize out of thin air to explain why you’re literally destroying civilization.

This is one of those topics. So naturally, I am going to mention it.

First, let’s establish that there are approximately seven hundred different definitions of the words “sex” “gender” and “gender expression.” depending on which academic paper, political movement, social media platform, or Thanksgiving dinner you’re trapped in.

This has resulted in the average American spending roughly half of every discussion asking: “Wait... which definition are we using?”

My proposal is that we stop trying to redefine English every six months and instead imagine that humanity comes equipped with four separate control knobs.

One knob is biology. It normally has 2 positions, “male” and “female” (Yes, there are edge cases. We’re not talking about those. Edge cases don’t invalidate anything.)

One knob is psychology. It also has 2 positions, “Man” and “Woman”

One knob is expression. It’s an analog knob that has infinite possibilities between “masculine” and “feminine”.

The last knob is whether you’ve had enough coffee to care about the previous three. We should just ignore that one.

The first two are where people have the biggest arguments. The third one is where real life actually happens. Here’s something that seems incredibly obvious to me: people express masculinity and femininity across an enormous spectrum.

Take me, for instance. Some days I’m underneath my truck wearing jeans, steel-toed boots, and enough grease that OSHA would classify me as a petroleum product. If you judged only by appearance, you’d say, “That is a very masculine presentation.” Except... I’m still myself. I’m still a woman.

Regular days if i’m just bumming around the house, it’s in a pair of baggy gym shorts and a random t-shirt.

Other days I’m working from home, dressed sharply and professionally for video meetings because it makes me feel confident and put together. Sometimes I just enjoy looking sharp and pretty.

Same person. Different presentation. Nothing mystical happened overnight.

I didn’t become a different human being because I swapped a socket wrench for earrings and a nice bra. People slide around that presentation spectrum constantly. The guy who spends Saturday rebuilding a carburetor might spend Sunday obsessing over which throw pillows best complement the living room. The woman who dominates the kitchen cooking for her family might spend the evening watching football while yelling things that would embarrass a Marine.

Human beings are weird. This should not surprise us. Where we get ourselves into trouble is insisting that every variation in personality, clothing, hobbies, interests, or mannerisms must correspond to some entirely different category of human being.

Sometimes a woman is just a woman who likes welding.
Sometimes a man is just a man who enjoys musical theater.
Sometimes someone is transgender and wants to live socially as the opposite gender.
Those situations are different from one another.

The internet has somehow decided they’re all exactly the same conversation. (They’re not.) They’re at least four conversations, twelve arguments, and one Reddit thread that should have been locked three years ago.

The other thing we seem to have forgotten is that people are individuals. Most people are perfectly capable of treating another person with ordinary courtesy even when they disagree about philosophy, biology, or which Star Trek captain was best. (It’s Kirk. I will not be taking questions.)

Being polite doesn’t require unanimous agreement about every underlying theory of human existence. It mostly requires remembering that the person in front of you is an actual person and not merely a profile picture specifically engineered to ruin your afternoon. I have no problem being polite until people actually, individually try and ruin my afternoon.

Meanwhile, the rest of us would like to get back to discussing important national issues, such as why every hardware store employee can instantly locate a 3/8-inch left-handed reverse-threaded unobtainium flange but nobody can find the tape measure that was literally in their hand three seconds ago.

I believe that’s the conversation America is finally ready to have.