Whole Lotta Transitioning Goin' On

I just looked, and I see that the Word of the Year for 2017 was "fake news." Hard to argue with that. But for this year, I'm putting my money on "transitioning." It's gotten so you don't have to say from what to what. Divorcing? Moving? Changing jobs? Nope, transitioning from one sexual or gender identity (they are different but get conflated) to another. I've got to admit that even I, a card carrying liberal humanist of the let-consenting-adults-do-what-they-want kind, am finding it hard to wrap my mind around the suddenness of all this. I'm a bit gobsmacked, actually.

I guess I'm caught off guard partly because I had a different conception of how one deals with matters of gender identity. I subscribe to the Taoist notion that the complementary principles of the yin and the yang, which in some senses correspond to the feminine and masculine aspects of life, both exist each within the other. This is similar to the Jungian notion of the anima and animus. The anima is the feminine aspect that resides in the male, and the animus, the male aspect in the female. Each of us possesses these in different ratios, and an evolved person acknowledges this reality, and rather than denying it, or repressing it or casting it out, develops the balance that is right for them. So a given woman might be a fairly masculine woman, but still a woman. I wasn't aware how many people find this approach, which I find compelling, to be wholly inadequate, and feel with their entire being that they simply must change their sexual/gender identity. Farewell tomboys? The key question does persist though. Once the transition is done, is one exempted from the yin yang balancing act? I suspect not. The work still has to happen, even if now reversed.

Still, there's another wrinkle. I see that many people are transitioning into a "queer" reality, neither male nor female. But I don't know enough yet about how that plays out. I do get that there's a logic to what they are doing, but wonder if it's possible to be fully exempted (liberated?) from gender identity. What would the Taoist yin-yang circle look like then?

And yet another wrinkle, which I came across since writing my first draft earlier this week. Apparently people are now committed to raising gender-less "theybies." Well, what to make of this? Certainly gender stereotyping doesn't do anyone any favors, but neither does the notion that there is an inherent problem with differentiated genders.

UPDATE: 4-19
Astute readers will have noticed that I missed a whole category here: and that is gender "fluidity." So that yin-yang configuration is in constant flux. That makes sense.