In search of the true self

The "gender debate" is a sham. This becomes clear if one simply looks at the terms and their meanings instead of forging an agenda out of the "debate" partly on purpose through linguistic confusion. With this meme we would like to point out and hopefully dispel the biggest misconceptions that surround the "gender debate". One can see very well in this topic how mere ignorance about a subject leads to a misjudgment about that very thing. 

We would first like to clear up the basic linguistic misunderstanding that repeatedly leads to not-so-funny jokes, in order to then devote ourselves to the question of the true self. We can already say this much, that the topic does not only concern a small group of people, but every individual as well as society as a whole.

At first glance, things would actually be simple if we didn't mix up the terms we have in English to distinguish sex and gender. But not every language has this exact distinction and therefore sometimes terms like "social sex" have to be used.

Nearly every living being is born with a sex. The exceptions are hermaphrodites (sometimes known as intersex) or sexless beings, but these are not the focus here. Biological and genetic factors determine affiliation, with many examples of animals changing sex during their life cycle.

Gender, on the other hand, describes people's gender identity as a social category (e.g., in terms of their self-perception, self-esteem, or role behavior). For many people, their gender corresponds to their sex, but it is also apparent that more and more people are conceiving of their gender as non-binary and enacting it accordingly on a spectrum. However, this is exactly what is exploited politically when people who see themselves as non-binary are equated with transgender people. The latter are to be defined as persons whose sex, which was defined at birth, deviates in the course of their lives from that as which they perceive themselves.

Gender science is by no means an ideology, it is just a relatively new science. It does not endanger anyone in the process. Instead, it is important to remember that science does nothing other than describe the facts of the world as precisely as possible, and that this is to be understood as a continuous approximation. It is also not wrong to reject outdated findings. The earth does not stand still in the center of the universe, is also not a disk and brains of women are not less efficient than those of men, only because they have less mass on average. Maybe one day it will be natural for us to think gender in a non-binary way.

At the same time, certain characteristics that we assign to one of the two binary ends of the spectrum for social, media, and educational reasons are obviously found in everyone as "not belonging." If we say that a beard is a typically male characteristic, are all men who shave every morning to be classified towards the female end of the spectrum? Are women who participate in weight training to be considered in the opposite way? What about hair length? At what point should this be clearly understood as male or female? We only see very clearly in such examples that it is precisely not unambiguous.

Now what to relate to the meme: we can even say that we are all always moving in one direction, so we are actually always in a transition. We could even understand this biologically. You think drinking beer is more masculine? Then why don't you check how much estrogen is actually contained in your men's juice?

Traces of our true self can always be identified. When we categorize ourselves as non-binary, it does not mean that we are struggling with our gender identity. This actually follows logically from locating our self on a spectrum.

A peaceful society follows from acknowledging each other's differences. However, to achieve this, we must first know ourselves and subtract from our self all that marketing, education and the opinions of others impose on us. We lose nothing by this, but can only gain ourselves. It is also revealed by this that populist opinion makers are using this debate to spread completely unrelated agendas. All of this is relatively easy to expose by resolving linguistic confusion.

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