Gender dysphoria, conventions of the society, orthodoxy beset in our lives and other such musings by – yours truly, a confused, lovable and disoriented heart.

A girl is born. Dress her in pink and flowery prints. Decorate her room as if a unicorn lived there. Buy her barbie dolls and cute jewellery. Prepare for her marriage. Inculcate skills and ideologies like keeping a family together, cooking, taking care of kids and elders, household chores. Manipulate, restrict, restrain and dominate her to believe in your orthodox thinking. Fabricate and develop rules and restrictions on her daily life and way of living. Take control of her because she cannot survive the world on her own. Irrespective of her desires and abilities, a man will be accountable for her, always. Command her to fit in the moulds that the society has made for her because this is how the generations have lived and should live. Welcome to a happy society.

A boy is born. Dress him in blue and hard darker prints. Decorate his room like it’s a sports stadium with an abundance of action hero-worship. Buy him cars and toy weapons and sports equipment. Prepare for a career that you choose. Inculcate skills like manliness in the forms of undemonstrative emotional suffering, restrain and blocking, taking control of women and household responsibilities, fighting and showing anger and aggression, guiltless and unregretful violence and mistakes. Take control of his emotions, feelings and needs, but subtly and inexplicably, to give them a false sense of pride and ego, because irrespective of his abilities he has to see all the problems through alone, hiding and blocking away all weaknesses and emotions. Command him to fit in the moulds made for him because this is how the generations have lived and should live. Welcome to a happy society.

The society is broken and deplorable in the sense that it has such hard and orthodox stereotypes set up for all kinds of people, that these words, ideas and unsaid rules that control every aspect of a person’s lifestyle and choices. Lives are not individual or unique but just another peg in the fleeting deck of faux ideals and orthodoxical thoughts, of the society. There is no place for anybody who is different and does not confine to their norms. They cannot identify themselves, or accept their true identities, just because of the unacceptance, cruelty, and ill-treatment that they will have to bear the brunt of. They try to shape every being in their moulds and try to direct our lives like the ones that have lived before. All this leads to an alarming rate of homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, self-worth issues, depression and mental problems and if plunged to a very dark extent may lead to deaths, suicides and genocides.

When we talk about feminism we are talking about equality of opportunities, incomes, choices, lifestyle and not that every person is liable to the same old stereotypical discriminatory attitudes. It’s not just women that suffer from it but also men who have to show up a hardcore pretence of masculinity which makes it hard for their real identity to show and develop. In childhood, it is very easy and even adoring to dress their sons in dresses and braid their hair, but equally distressing and abominable if the same is done in adulthood, by choice. Men don’t cry, men don’t wear pink, men don’t show affection, men don’t need emotional support, men don’t cook. Women don’t fight, women don’t join manly endeavours, women don’t live a single life, women don’t dress this way, women don’t like sex, women can’t raise kids alone, and such others are the everyday dangerous and conservative musings of a typical societal household. These bigoted ideologies make the lives a miserable of every different individual, who has different opinions or choices or just cannot conform to the beliefs of the society; who wants to live a peaceful life just away from the incompatible matrix of the society.

It is important for us to shun these stereotypes, gender roles, and casts made by the society to cripple our freedom, to speak, to love, to choose our lifestyle, to live peacefully, to just Live. If some ancient philosopher said that we are social animals and that we need society and people to back us up and talk to and live with, then with all due respect, somewhere it should also be written that the society should let the person be free enough to have their own opinions, needs, desires and choices. Let love be love, let a person be who they are, let a person choose what/who they want to, let a person live as and how they want to.

LIVE AND LET LIVE.