The other morning, after taking a shower, I was toweling off when my toddler padded into the bathroom. He looks up, points, and starts laughing. Of course, I had to whisper to him that he was in no position to be laughing. But since he can’t talk, he communicates in other ways, and his “laugh” is the same laugh that does when he discovers his own … um, equipment, when I’m changing his diaper.

He was essentially recognizing the similarity between us. But it also conveyed a message to me, that “sex” is not something that develops during adolescence, but is biologically wired into us from the beginning.

But with this “self identification” that comes with sexual identification, also comes a way of identifying others.

However, these two statements do not imply only two sexes.

Granted, any standard distribution will put the majority in two “camps”, but if you look at a bell curve, you may see the bulk in the middle, but there is a significant numbers that fall outside of the middle.

I was listening to the radio the other night where a person with two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome was being interviewed. Of course, once his biological diagnosis was made, doctors immediately tried to “correct” it by hormone therapy and whatnot.

He made two statements that intrigued me. The first was that he was surprised with the energy increase. Sure, we’ve all heard of the aggressiveness that comes from testosterone, but he used the term “energy”. The other comment he made was that after taking the hormones for a few weeks, he started to miss his “quiet, reflective side.”

But wait a minute, while I believe I have only a single X and a single Y chromosome, I too have a “quiet, reflective” side that I would miss as well. I have never identified myself as a “man’s man.” I enjoy art, poetry, and “communication without conquest,” and always felt like I resonated with my feminine side.

Clearly, my position on this dual bell curve is not directly in the middle, but a little off-center.

While these statements probably won’t shock any of my readership (yes, both of you), these “discoveries” are fairly recent, and our culture has been built up around this standard distribution, and culture, like politics, tends to favor the majority… often to the exclusion of the minority. For instance, we don’t have non-derogatory pronouns for people that don’t clearly fit into the “he” or “she” categories.