No-one ought to feel ashamed of being their real selves.
Unfortunately, social conditioning and false notions of what is ethical (according to norms & rules) and what is moral (according to conscience), together with a patently flawed dependence on religions to inform those concepts, has promoted a narrow and misguided understanding of gender based solely on sex, i.e. biologically male or female.
Procreation is a natural process and its result produces unique individuals with unique characteristics as well as universal ones. Unfortunately, humanity is wary of difference and seeks to avoid it, abuse it or eliminate it.
Genders are a human construct and often have been and still often are confused with sex, i.e. the requirement for natural procreation being binary and any variation therefore being abnormal but just as natural.
So much of conditioning is insidious and the need, as a social animal, for human beings to 'fit in', have had and do have the effect of causing even the non-binary individual to often feel and try to reject their very difference to the accepted 'norm', hence the tendency, often, to hide their difference = along with all the accompanying stress, feelings of inadequacy or 'less than' and other damaging mental effects.
However, it is 2024. Humanity's knowledge has grown and grows in leaps and bounds. We now know so much more about how life comes about, develops, adapts and flourishes or not.
We ought now to know better than to follow the purported dictates of human beings who have the arrogance to claim justification for norms which they claim are the word of a never evidenced deity who, in any case, is supposed to have created us all. The contradictions in the arguments of those demagogues are evident to anyone who uses their intellect intelligently.
Humanity needs to stop fearing difference and, instead, relish the variety and opportunity it brings. Despite the superficial appearance, acceptance is a mindset still of a minority of the human race. Yet, acceptance of all under the inclusion of all being natural beings, ought to be - at leat I think so - one of the easiest and yet most important understandings of human beings. That we are so far from achieving such is a sad indictment on our race and many of its institutions, for it is, in my view and on so many levels, the cause of the vast majority of human induced pain and suffering in our World.
I no longer believe in concepts such as 'love' and 'hope' and 'wishes' but I do believe in empathy, to the extent that I believe it is not only what is most lacking between human beings but what is most necessary for harmony, peace and an absence of abuse, distrust and conflict.
Perhaps if all our schools taught and modelled the notion of 'walk a mile in my shoes', humanity would achieve as great an advance in the affective domain as it has in the effective one, i.e. as much in human relations as in science and technology. However, at the moment we appear to be continuing to favour the latter rather than the former. The result can only be a deterioration in people's ability to think critically and recognise context and holistic views of issues, rather than simplistic, populist and insular ones.
That doesn't hark well for humanity.
Take care. Stay safe. ☮️
#borc
