Today we plumb the depths of the marvelously

complex human.

But, first allow me to acknowledge that I am not

a sociologist.

I am also a straight, white man who doesn't have

to worry about a lot of the hate that a lot of other people

do have to worry about.

But, my goal with this video is I want

people to understand, because I think understanding

will lead to less hate.

And also less self-hate.

For a lot of people it is nice to imagine

that humans are simple and that you can know

a person's sex and then you will know all sorts of things

about them deeply and clearly.

And if you don't fit into this nice little box,

people who do can get really confused

and sometimes even angry.

And if you yourself don't fit into one of these nice

little boxes, and you think people should,

then you end up hating yourself.

And that's probably even worse.

I think the best, and maybe only way to solve

this problem is for people to understand that there are

no nice shiny boxes.

Or if there are shiny boxes, there are an infinite

number of them.

Enough to put all of the people who currently exist,

have ever existed, and will ever exist.

So, together, let's understand.

We're gonna start simple:

What's going on down here, in between the legs.

That is your sex.

Your biological sex.

And it tends to be binary, though there are all sorts

of conditions that result in intersex individuals.

And as interesting and complicated as this is,

the rest of it is much more complicated.

So, I'm just gonna move on from here.

'Cause we all kinda get what sex is.

Now we move on up to the top, to the brain,

which is the thing that decides what gender

you identify with:

Whether you feel like a man or a woman

or neither or both.

Because the fascinating thing is,

as much as we try to label things,

there is no way to label every point

on an infinite continuum.

And that's what we're dealing with here.

So, to actually visualize how this works

I've created a graph for you.

On the X-axis we have gender: male to female.

And on the Y-axis we have the intensity

of the identification with that gender.

I would be about here because I identify as a man

though I recognize that there are some woman-y

parts of me.

But, let's also put a hypothetical biological female

on the graph that identifies very strongly as a man.

Now that could be really uncomfortable,

especially when there is a bunch of people in the world

who insist on calling him a woman just because

of the body that he happens to be

very uncomfortable with.

Which is why sex does not determine the pronoun

you should use.

Gender does.

Now, moving on to your heart -

your metaphorical heart, of course.

This is who you are attracted to:

men, women, all genders.

Again, it's a spectrum and that spectrum

includes intensity because there are people who don't

feel strong sexual attraction at all.

That's why asexual is a sexual orientation.

A newer idea that I was happy to be exposed to

yesterday on Tumblr,

is the idea of Romantic Orientation.

These are the people you want to have strong,

intimate relationships with,

but it sorta separates out the idea that sex

has to be the goal or end point or like end all and be all

of every intimate relationship.

Now that we've dealt with how we feel,

let's deal with what happens when other people

actually get involved.

That's sexual behavior which is actually very different

from sexual orientation.

And that might seem a little bit strange at first,

but it's not.

Consider for example, a heterosexual priest.

That priest's orientation is heterosexual,

but because of his religion, his behavior is celibate.

Here we're not talking about the preference,

we're talking about the behavior.

Now, built up of all of this are gender roles

which are built by societies, not by individuals.

The obvious ones are masculine gender roles

and feminine gender roles.

But as all dichotomies are false dichotomies,

this one is a spectrum too.

Now that we've sort of gone over all of this,

it's important to note that every single one of these

categories is independent from each other.

So, a biological female could be a man who only has sex

with woman despite the fact that he's attracted

to both men and woman and kind of, you know,

feels more comfortable in feminine gender roles.

That may not be the most common combination

of these factors, but it's certainly not weird.

And another important point, many people move across

these spectrums; sometimes from year to year,

sometimes hour to hour.

But, what's really important is that we trust ourselves

and we understand ourselves.

And we love and respect ourselves and we grant

that same understanding and respect to the people

around us.

Because when the world becomes one of infinite

continuums and those false dichotomies break down

and those two shiny boxes break apart into seven billion

shiny boxes it's actually pretty beautiful.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.