I was listening to the Savage Lovecast - as I am wont to do when a new episode comes out. This week's, #426, was a live Christmas episode recorded at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle with special guests Rachel Lark and Derek Sheen, and it was a lot less serious and more fun than most. Still, they had their typical phone calls, all across the board. One was from a girl talking about her boyfriend and her boyfriend's other girlfriend and what to do at the holidays, which I very well may come back to in the near future for a post... But the one that really struck a nerve and that I'm going to talk about today, however far off my normal beaten path it is, was a mother who called in to ask something about her daughter. The problem was that here daughter is uncertain about her gender identity, and the mother called up the Lovecast to ask what the best way to ask "What gender she was that day". Rachel Lark's advice amounted to "stay gender-neutral and avoid the subject as hard you can".

...Both of these bothered me a great deal, and one of the easiest ways to explain why is to tell you Derek Sheen's answer: that the mother was asking the wrong question... And instead she should be teaching her daughter that gender isn't a binary. The problem here isn't "figuring out what gender the daughter is that day"; the problem is the mindset that there's only two choices... And someone who hasn't chosen one of them isn't okay.

This is a problem all over the spectrum, and it's one I tend to worry about more in my day-to-day life as it applies to sexuality. This directly relates to things like the Kinsey scale - after all, I'm something like a 0 or a 1 but know people all over the range. It's hard enough to convince some people that there's more than one option in sexuality; convincing them there's two - heterosexuality and homosexuality - is impossible with the bigoted. Convincing people there's a whole spectrum including homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, and everything else? It's... An uphill fight, shall we say.

And gender... Gender is harder. Gender is fixed by biology, right? Of course it is! You're assigned a gender at birth and it never changes... Except for all those little differences. Like people born with genetic gender disorders - XXX, XXY, XYY, XXYY, XXXX, XXXXX... But far more subtle and far more insidious are those people whose gender doesn't match their body.

It's not as simple as some people who are born male but identify female or some people who are born female but identify male; it's about people, no matter their biological gender, who don't fit society's rules. It's about people who don't know what they are... They just know they aren't a male or a female.

I know where I fit on these spectrums... Most people really do. But not everyone does. And this poor girl, even with her mother's good intentions, is being set up to be confused and depressed and conflicted and lost.