birdswg —

Extract from the first draft of my book, The Vibration Of Diversity. While the book remains incomplete and unpublished, I am using extracts, such as this, as material for performance. Performing these texts gives the texts an opportunity to come out in the open, take a stroll, get some fresh air. It also helps me to get out of the frozen states that I experience during the long process of writing a book.

  • The Elephant Question

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    Are you familiar with the elephant question?

    A TV presenter in the UK invites two non-binary people for an interview (true story on you tube) . The TV presenter asks his first question about what it means to be non-binary ? His guests are not even halfway through their answer when he interrupts with his second question, the one, I am sure, he has been rehearsing in his head all day and which was the only question he had been intending to ask all along. A question which also reveals his true agenda.

    So, he interrupts abruptly and asks What if I wanted to be an elephant? Should society start treating me like an elephant? Where will it stop? And this, my friends, is the elephant question.

    I want to attempt to answer this question for him.

    First, why should a non-binary person know what happens when someone feels that they are an elephant? Even if he did want to be an elephant, for real, how should we know in which ways society should respect his existence and create a safe space for him? As a non-binary person I know exactly how others can respect my existence: use my pronouns after I made them known, do not assume my gender, do not pretend I do not exist by using “ladies and gentlemen” as a salutation, use my actual name instead of my dead name, create appropriate choices for toilets and locket rooms, do not attack me in the street because I have a beard and I am wearing a dress. If the TV presenter wanted to know what people who are elephants require in order to feel safe in the world, he should have invited different guests.

    Second, his question is not a question. It is a statement that implies the following: if society grants you permission to defy its gender rules and allows you to be who you claim you are, then it should allow everyone to do the same, and then there will be no end to that, because people will want to be all sorts of weird things and they will begin to break all sorts of rules of nature. You see, he is being clever bringing up the elephant. He is going, as they say, for the jugular. He is bringing up the argument that nature – and not society – has created the gender rules. He is being charmingly old fashioned. You know, like the way people use to bring up menstruation as a reason to prevent women from voting. Or the making of babies and their successful survival, as the determining factor for the correct casting of gender roles (the well known “women should stay at home and raise their children argument”).

    A very naive look, across culture and across history, (and by naive I mean you do not need to be a scientist to be able to see this) reveals easily that this has never been about nature: it has been about the way we have interpreted and understood nature, which has always been conditioned by the stage of our own evolution and the survival needs of each community at each moment and time. But what about the fact that only women can carry babies? Asks a friend of mine. I correct my friend: only people with uteruses can carry babies, they do not have to be women. Nature stops there: A person with a uterus can carry a baby. And the way biotechnology is growing btw, soon that uterus might not even need to be attached to a person’s body. My point is that humanity is changing and the way we understand and execute the reproduction of our species is changing. The way we understand gender is also changing. Where will it stop, the charming TV presenter asks? Why should it stop? I ask back.

    If it turns out, that all we have been secretly wanting for thousands of years was to be elephants, I say we should go for it!

    Where will it stop? Seriously?

    Every oppressive system that was worth its name has used this question as an excuse to continue excluding, suppressing, abusing. Someone somewhere again and again in human history has asked this question: Where will it stop? Where will it stop if we allow women to vote or go to university? Where will it stop?

    Well, I have news for you my dear TV presenter: evolution and change and expansion never stops. Where there is life it will not stop.

    We will sit down and we will talk about it, as new needs arise, as we keep spotting the ways in which we can create a better world for all of us, and especially for the most vulnerable of us.

    We have outgrown our loyalty to the idea that value lies only with the big animals that eat the smaller ones. Because we have now observed nature long enough to know what will happen in the world if insects (bottom of the food chain) become extinct. There is a reason why, in our days, there is so much talk about vulnerability and about finding ways to honour it and safeguard it: We are becoming wiser. We understand now that this, which is strong in us, can only survive, if this, which is vulnerable in us, is safe and protected.

    If you, my dear TV presenter, feel that you are an elephant, I, personally, will do everything in my power to protect you and celebrate you. That’s how it works.