The wildfires consuming California and Oregon are horrific ecological disasters. One also represents an ironic example of how the gender binary represses, maims, kills and is forever, (pardon the pun) burning humanity alive. The San Bernardino National Forest blaze was set by a gender reveal pyrotechnics mishap. Tens of thousands of acres set ablaze by the uncontrollable need to tell the world what a baby’s sex is going to be.

I mean why do we give a shit what a baby’s genitalia is going to be? Think on this one folks. Why is this exactly? I’m forever gobsmacked to see mom’s obsessing over the thought that a stranger may misgender their daughter. Insisting that they have a little bow in their hair announcing loudly, “hey this one has a vagina so get your accolades & platitudes right goddam it!”

And boys… wait what… there are boy babies?! Guess I must have missed them in the wash of muted colors and remarks of how handsome, rugged and strong he’ll be as the poor child is, “left to cry it out.” Hmmm… I wonder if he was circumcised?

Societies obsession with gender and all the rules & exceptions thereof sickens me to the core. As I can tell you from lived experience that those seemingly innocuous things compound over time to emotionally disables us for life. Yes even folks who are not trans. Hell, especially cisgender folks.

Most people, (I was for 44 before I escaped) are so convinced they have complete free will and can do anything they please. While never acknowledging how these likes and choices all follow a very specific road map. And that’s the horror, nobody really does.

The majority of people are so bought into the construct they never consider the “why” they feel the way they do. As a result most never escape the erroneous base code programming and the never ending drone of binary ideals designed to hold them hostage to the system that birthed and programmed them. Never coming to understand that their identities are not so much their own, as they are carefully curated characters blindly created by our parents and societies need to catalog us as builders and breeders.

Remember that bow? It may be pink and delightful, but it’s also a deliberate scarlet mark with a specific purpose. It says, “this one will do and be this.” How’s that free will working for us now?

For the love of forests and mother earth herself, (Ha!) I beg of you, please stop with the gender reveal nonsense. For our ecosystem just like our children, can be so much more than we’ve been convinced they are.