I also want to tell stories

that floats away

and hopefully find an echo

Yesterday I wrote some of my thoughts down about what it is to feel like a man or a woman or even none of those. I have no scientific training, and I have not done any extensive research in this specific matter. The way I write on this blog is: I pick a subject, or it pics me, and I begin writing what I know about it without a plan where I want to end; I use what is still there from 49 years on this earth and a 25-year interest in science, philosophy, and psychology. I enjoy writing like this because while I write, thoughts start flowing, and often things float by that I haven’t seen in years; I can even surprise myself where I end, usually after around 1000 words.

I liked what I wrote yesterday, but when I came to work this morning and saw all my colleagues, clearly being men, I thought, how can I ever argue my case? My strongest argument was, I believe, that if a baby gets raised in the wild by animals, does it then feel like a man or a woman? No one ever taught “it” what those concepts are; the conclusion should be that the “thing” in us that thinks is genderless; we are all the same on the inside. I have to say that I probably make a  giant logical error somewhere, and maybe there are thousands of books written about this, but as I stated before, I just write what I know and research in the past; I am not looking for proof.

Even if what I say makes sense, this argument will not persuade many people. Before I drove to work, while drinking my coffee and still reading Darwin, I got distracted; I needed to read something more modern and picked up the book from Daniel C Dennett, Darwin’s dangerous Idea, evolution and the meaning of life. I read the preface, and somewhere halfway, I read this: “I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not so much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. I am not complaining about injustice—we all must ignore arguments, and no doubt we all ignore arguments that history will tell us we should have taken seriously.”

It is always nice to read something from people you praise highly; they also struggle, at their level, with the same things as I do at my level. Arguments can be rock solid, but arguments seldom sway people. Dennett goes on that he will try to tell a story and see if that works, but he probably knows that his book is just a tiny step towards a more enlightened world, read by people like me who are already on his side.