The way in which humankind looks upon, and treats difference — especially within, but by no means limited to, our own kind — is deplorable. What would change it? Could it be as simple as listening more, and judging less, while hoping to understand and learn about someone else’s life? A life other than our own selfish existence? I’d like to think it might be.
This morning, again, in the third installment of CBC’s The Current, Anna Maria Tremonti spent the first bit of the piece speaking with Kristen Worley, “an elite Canadian cyclist who publicly acknowledges that she transitioned from the male sex to the female sex.” She had some very profound comments concerning “the stress that comes with the combination of intense athletic competition and equally intense scrutiny about your gender,” and she didn’t stop there;
“[Rushed Transcript] We need to re-identify ourselves — not just as the rules of sport — but a society, too. And to re-identify that this is normal human developments, that go on, and we have to really look at what we have created, the stereotypes, with the narrow binaries, we’ve created around men and women, and understand we, as a society have created this narrow binary, and sport is a small window of that conservative [there’s that word again] model that we have created and a majority of people fall into that grey zone. And it’s just that we tend to punish difference, for some strange reason we have this social reasoning, and we think it’s OK to go out and punish somebody, like a Castor Semenya for being a young intersexed woman, who has no idea she was intersexed, she was learning it as we were all learning it ourselves in the world media. And we protect the doping athletes, and put all these protections in place, and laws in place, and money in place to do that. But for some strange reason we go out and punish difference. It’s a strange social phenomenon…”
We desperately need a much better perspective on what it really means to be human…