Maybe it’s too big, maybe it’s too small, maybe it’s too average or you don’t have one at all.
Maybe you don’t dress right. Your hair’s too long or short. Maybe you like women or nothing of the sort.
The pants police are coming. They’re coming for us all. They’ll use a complex trait or two, to shove us to the wall.
“Almost all human traits are complex traits. They don’t act like a switch being on or off. They are more like a bell curve. The average trait is what most people have but being outside of the middle of the curve is perfectly normal. An example would be height.” People are not 3 inches tall or three miles tall, but they do show variation in height. Likewise, sexual expression and interest is a complex trait.
Recently, a sweet child wanted to have an adult conversation about the election.
“Donald Trump is mean but Kamala Harris wanted men to play women’s sports,” the child said. “So, people had two poor choices.”
I was surprised that the trans issue was one they focused on, but I shouldn’t have been. The Trump campaign spent over 200 million dollars on anti-trans ads. The complexities of the issue have been explained on many levels. Yet the campaign didn’t care to pass this on to the public.
The White House’s definition of two genders as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell [or] a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell” has been called wrong and simplistic. It’s outdated and some in high places want to keep the outdated ideas.
Many animals can be both sexes and can have a fluid sexual attraction. The whole notion of binary sexuality is only one form of normal. Why would anyone care? Clearly, this is paving the way to look into our pants and apply discrimination.
Women have no explicit constitutional rights. Furthermore, Christian Nationalists have a limited view of equality and autonomy.
When you discriminate against a group, you can pay them less and even get free work out of them. Yes, highlighting differences and even saying they are natural can produce a whole underpaid underclass. One example would be saying women are naturally better at housework and taking care of kids and then paying less for these services, not paying at all, and not even recognizing this as useful work. One time women were told they didn’t have brains for complex thoughts, but science didn’t support this. Still, the gender pay gap persists. You can see how bad it is in your area here. We are seeing discrimination in search of a target. Discrimination needs to be able to easily sort us into male and female. Hence, the pants police and their partners, the book police. Maybe they will sort us further, based on our genitals or some other arbitrary look -or as scientists say “phenotype.”
We even work against nature in our society. Throughout history, dressing like a woman has been harmful to health. In a gender-biased human society, women spend much more time grooming because they need to look like they will accept pain in order to get male approval. We even have a “conservative bad make-up” trend that’s easy to spot and doesn’t look great close up. In fact, it’s based on pageantry and can be easily replicated for drag shows. It’s part of the reason people go to drag shows and pay for it—the pageantry and recognition that gender roles are kind of funny. Maybe drag shows will be banned as well.
In most species, it’s the males who need to preen and look pretty. Why do we think it’s how human women should look? Women are supposed to have kids, run after them, clean the house, and gob on drag-show level make-up. The animal world is laughing at us.
Catherine Haustein 
