I’m a straight man from the middle of nowhere, and reading this sounds to me like we have not made any progress in accepting the variety of ways that humans develop or accepting the need to make space in society for everyone to feel like there is no need to hide. It really does seem like we are, at least in some ways, going backwards.

When I was 12 years old I saw a documentary on the Discovery channel about klinefelter’s syndrome. The program was 45 minutes long but it briefly touched on various ways that the “third gender” had been expressed and incorporated into cultures around the world.

In this simple program from before the conversation about gender and sexual identity became a political cudgel to dehumanize a growing number of social groups, they didn’t discuss the politics at all. It was just the science.

It wasn’t controversial for '90’s era documentaries to simply acknowledge that the brain is just a part of the body like any other organ and can experience the same if not more variation that all of the other organs do.

Instead, the program seemed hopeful about this burgeoning new science of the mind and its ability to help us illuminate something we have known about for eons.

10 years later I read an MIT magazine article that reference brain scans of different people trying to identify gender identity versus sexual identity. They didn’t have a whole lot of conclusions but they found seven different clusters of data in the gender identity tests.

That seems to me a pretty strong indication that nature has at least a few varieties of human beyond man and woman, and although the science is encouraging…

It really shouldn’t require proof of anything to inspire people to want to be kind to each other. I don’t know that science can solve this, so maybe we have to find the faith and the hope to help it along.