I had a dream Binary gender and social justice engineering.

[Sisyphus]

I had a dream that I was working on a rube goldberg device that transversed many upward plateaus that streamed into each other in one large sloping hill. Many people worked together to create the contraption and its purpose was to create a successful way for something to be done in society that society did not make a mechanism for. I laid on my back with a pillow under my head on plateau at the top, working the device at the end where it merged to the plateau below. My child came up next to me with a checklist for the device. the device had nothing to do with gender, but at each point there was a circle for girl (in reddish pink) and a circle for boy (in a dark light blue). The circles were lined up in a column, boy on the left, girl on the right, with the bottom of the device start at the bottom of the page and the top at the top.

My child says to me, okay, I've got it all mapped, this is how you run the machine, right? All the girl circles are lit up on the right. I'm busy with what I'm focused on so I waive it off with a nod and an uh uh. But my kid keeps bringing the paper back and putting it next to my face. Then it dawns on me. I look at it, and I say, no, this isn't right. I'm not a woman. I have to say it two or three time. Then my child nods, and gets it and taps the paper, and all of the circles on the left for boy light up. My child says, so you're like this. Its a satisfied statement, as if by saying i'm not a woman then I am a man. I say, No, I'm not a man. But the lights stubbornly stay lit up on the left from top to bottom. I say it too or three times, and then the right lights up and the left winks off, and all woman is lit. I say again, No, I'm not a woman. I can feel the left starting to light up, so I say, and I'm not a man, so the right tries to light up and I say, I'm not a woman, I'm not a man, I'm not a woman, I'm not a man, until the paper stops lighting up. 

My child looks at the paper and me and says, Oh, I get it. But now this map won't work. Where do I fit you in? How do you run the device? And I didn't know. Even though I was a fundamental continbutor and builder of the device for social justice for something else, I couldn't make it work for with the map that everyone was using as the overarching guideline. It was workable with no gender consideration at all. I couldn't even figure out why this was overlaid on the device operating route, but it was, and it covered up the parts underneath that did matter, and made it difficult to see how to use the machine without binary gender runs.

[Taka]

stop the gender enforcement!

not that easy though, when people think society is built on two genders.
gender does matter, but not in the way most people assume.
sex matters too, in matters of sexual attraction and procreation.

but we still treat the sexes differently, and kind of pretend gender is always the same.
and when we don't know, we force a category on the person. like by performing genital mutilation on a young child who can't even express their own will.

[Ativan Prescribed]

I used to work for several corporations in research and development, lots of research and then develop prototypes that were usually completely new ways of doing things, sometimes just totally new concepts turned into real life things.
I can't say all of them were machines, some were just things that were used in machines or just stood alone for what they were.
A lot of research goes into looking at similar machines and concepts and the reasoning behind them.
My strong suit was being able to cut the Rube Goldberg out of complex machines and simplify them.
It took new concepts, either mine or others and then developing working models, usually quite a few, as the first ones don't always work as expected, they become the basis for the next one and so on.
Always there is the temptation to just keep adding on something or other to achieve the desired results.
It was always the expectation that this wasn't needed, there must be an easier way to do whatever was asked for.
In doing this kind of stuff, I'd come across variations on those conceptual themes that were nothing more than add-ons until they eventually had something that worked.
Sometimes they were started out as one thing and in attempting to make them, they found a way to make something entirely different, but still, you could see the remnants of what they were started out as, but they worked and that was good enough at the time.
But so many things are used, especially in manufacturing, that are just a mess of different unrelated things put together in such a way that they got the job done.
Most of the time, the money and the time to do it right wasn't available or they just plain didn't care, so long as it worked.
That's fine up to a point, most of those kinds of things soon start to need repairs and those are done in the same way, just get it working again.
So deconstructing things and finding better ways or new ways , even novel ways to do things was essentially what I did.
Make things simpler is usually making them more efficient, always the goals, but time and money are constraints on that as well.
It's a nice thing about some R&D labs or divisions, especially in larger corporations that have dedicated money to work with, deep pockets and lots of people to take care of much of the work needed, the testing and such, technicians who would do the more mundane testing, pretty much people who checked out what was made to see if there were any flaws not initially seen, so those could be taken care of, adjustments made, etc.
You can see where just making add-ons are a quick way to do something, but that's just the thing we were trying to get rid of, so it took more than just doing things the simplest way and actually finding the better or even the best way.

Society is pretty much like a really big machine with a lot of working parts.
It would be pretty hard to just scrap it all and start over, some people who made some of the changes as things went just don't want to see their hard work demolished or tossed away.
It's understandable, I'm the same way.
(Some stuff I came up with have since been replaced, but good choices as far as I can tell, it's progress, technology advancing...)
But society really doesn't have the capacity to do this for the most part, it like it's add ons, especially once it gets used to doing things in a certain way.
New concepts can be scary to think about, it takes society also thinking and learning how to use these concepts, it can be initially hard to do.
Seeing this topic reminds me that society has certain concepts so ingrained into it's thinking, that it's considered by far to many people that it's the best and nothing is going to be able to change what they think of as the truth, to change it means having to learn a lot of things in order for any new concept to be able to be used, so what's used now is thought of as the rule, the unbreakable machine that works just fine, so long as people don't try and mess with it.
It's the epitome of some things, written in stone, we can go no further, so why should anyone want to try to change the system, this machine.

For me, there were plenty of times that within my division, we could understand what it was we were doing and had our own way of talking, development speak, of a sort I suppose.
But it had to be sold to the people who held the purse strings and on goes the three piece and go in front of these people and sell what I knew was a better way.
They don't understand development speak, they understand headquarters speak, and the only way to get the point across was to give a brief overview of the project and demonstrate end results, but the bottom line was to talk about money, how it could make more of it, save more of it, just money talks and everything else goes back to the labs or worse yet, they decide to kill the project before it's seen all the way through.
You have to make the case for the money already spent and for the money that is going to be needed to make the changes or just producing the gizmo (geek speak).

So it is with the part of societies machine, the part that uses gender to produce stuff, much of the world runs around that major concept to keep the machine working, an endless supply of gender things...
It's pretty cobbled together quick fixes that aren't efficient or even really needed, there are much better ways to do this, I see it, you probably do as well.
To sell these changes to society, it's going to take being able to talk their talk, especially to the ones who pay for and run the gender division of the great machine.

I found out that the easiest way to do that was to learn the language of the ones who are essentially the top dogs who control the money, but also have to learn to be able to teach it to the people who are on the lines out in the factory, the sales reps and so on, so much time wasted in learning their speak.
So it became much easier to just dumb down the conversation until they started to ask enough questions that they soon learned the key words and parts of what was new, to make it seem to them as if they were just discovering this new thing on their own, even though they knew they were just learning about it.
Perception was everything in getting this part of my job done.
Lots of what if questions directed at them, only to listen to the answers and then suggesting something else and then slowly explaining the parts as they questioned it, so to them, it seemed like a journey of discovery, despite that they really knew that had already happened and that they were just catching up on it as they needed.
And that was key to getting the necessary changes made, to get them engaged in the way that they thought, the way they spoke, their speak.

This forum as well as others and groups here and there, we talk about it, we take it apart and put it back together in a better way, we try our best, a lot of the time it's more than just band aide fixes, but real change and it simplifies the way that society can work.
But we know it in the way we speak.
We know how it works, the changes needed, how to get there.
Lately, there are events that capture societies attention, gets them asking the questions, some opposition, the 'but we always did it this way' kind of stuff, but really Laverne Cox opened up a lot of doors for her part in Orange is the New Black, and that might have even prompted Caitlyn Jenner to come out like she has, pretty much with a bang and this in your face kind of 'this is one way to see it' message that has attracted a lot of attention.
So much so that the naysayers have come out in force, but a lot of society is paying attention and asking, trying to learn this new to them gender thing.
They are questioning whether the machine needs to be fixed or even parts of it rebuilt in a simpler easier way.
I can see the media trying to answer the questions and they fuck up a lot of it, they miss the point in so many ways, when it should be easy.
Talking about it in a matter of fact way that is simplified and takes into consideration that there are a lot of similar questions being asked is pretty key.
But despite the naysayers objections, society is really trying and learning what all this means, and acceptance is still at an all time high.
The naysayers want a confrontation, they are starting to be seen as getting in the way of what society is trying to learn, to understand.
Confrontational ways of getting the point across aren't as necessary as they were, but plain and simple talk is, showing the logic of changing the gender part of societies machine.

The machine is a Rube Goldberg machine that has been cobbled together over the centuries and more.
We need to be able to talk about it in a way that makes sense to society, in their speak, with the logic they are used to using, so they can easily see this is a good thing for everyone.
Some of the people who hold the purse strings are making money already, the fashion industry, it started out a few years ago and then it kinda whimpered out, it had no carry through.
So all the controversy aside, Caitlyn has opened up new doors that weren't there before, so what if they made money doing it and had all the easiest ways to get to where they are.
There's still more to come, the people who represent us are getting a better voice in it, society is listening more.
The question and even objections that Caitlyn doesn't represent everyone else is a difficult one to handle, but it is an opportunity to give voice to the concerns trans people really have.

The everyday people, the ones who have had their lives ended abruptly, the hardships encountered because of the opposition, it needs to be addressed in ways society understands.
Put it in terms of 'what if it was them', and simply use societies hardships as an example and tell it like it is, that this goes on all the time, just in a different way, form, but it does just the same.
I can see some places that have turned it into yet another confrontation, but in others, they are explaining it in terms that society can better understand.
We need to pay attention to this, it has never come up before like this, it's a new discovery for society, despite that they know we have already figured it out.
It's starting to look like we might have a real chance at getting the funding we need for so many things, and that brings about changes that are good for everyone.
It's an opportunity to bring trans up in society and not looked at as so different that we just don't belong, they are starting to come to the realization we have always been here.

We all grew up having to learn societies speak, so use it with them, use examples that they can relate to and then relate it to ourselves.
Yep, there are a lot of controversies and negatives yet to overcome in this dialogue we are having, so we need to step past what ever controversy there is in the media over any individuals success because they are the media darlings and use those controversies like a springboard into the real issues that surround us, talk their talk while we walk our walk.
We don't need to all be on the same page, we need to be able to talk to society in the ways that work, find them and use them if and when you can.
I get that it isn't for everyone, many have yet to fully come out and that makes it hard to speak up, but if and when you do, try not to be afraid of speaking out.
I wouldn't fault anyone not to, it isn't for everyone and just not something that some can or should do, circumstances need to be right for you.
But walk your own walk, that's what they need to see in the end, that it really is a better way to run the machine and it's easy, the hardest parts have already been done.
Ativan