We quite naturally often generalize something into two factions — gender, morality, ethics, personalities; it’s an exhaustive list. We are so used to thinking in such a dichotomous manner, we rarely think any deeper than this. It’s almost unfathomable for most of us, to think in terms of spectrum of characteristics. This extends to how we picture cultures from other parts for the world. Which gives rise to our stereotypical imagery that we create in our minds.
Let’s take an easy example of personalities and how we see them. We categorize a talkative person as egregious, vivacious, charming, any term that screams “social butterfly”. Conversely, we see a taciturn person or a shy person, both of those despite being quite different, are categorized as introverts. Setting aside the fact that personalities are more complex than such binary construct, this is a simplification process that is very innate in each of us and takes experience and deliberate learning to eschew this. More often than not, the non-observant would create impressions that are just shallow representations of something or someone. The number of times I have got irritated at another stereotypical representation of introverts or extroverts in mainstream media — an extrovert shown as a mean, bullying hunk or a bitch or a bespectacled, awkward, bumbling person representing an introvert — is just countless. While over the course of time this distinction has been made not quite so glaring with a little bit of window-dressing, the essence and fundamental distinction between these personality traits hasn’t changed. The few outlier examples of this from mainstream media that one would counteract with, are too few and far in between. Part of it is deliberate but a large part of it is generalization and just how people perceive a group that they are not familiar with, this unconscious way of thinking that they are superior over ‘others’ just by being.
The current climate regarding LGBTQ+ issues is evident enough to show how the world views ‘gender’ and this inexplicable unease they feel to shift from their binary view to a non-binary one. Even when they try to understand, say ‘what transgender means ‘— most people still associate it with a man identifying himself as a woman while it encompasses anyone who identifies themselves as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth. It could be masculine, feminine, non-binary, gender-fluid, etc. The binary, simplistic method of thinking creates yet another misrepresentation which then gets propagated everywhere. Unless someone explicitly says otherwise or we actually confer with someone, most of us maintain the same original impression we formed in our minds the first time.
We often forget that there has been a constant cycle of knowledge-experiment-rediscovery, that our predecessors have been engaged in to reach here. Rather we think of our standing right now as a culmination in terms of evolution and partly contributes to this refusal to redefine our thinking. Theories about various scientific phenomenon were engaged in disputes for decades before being proven. Why wouldn’t they be? To constantly be engaged in this cycle is exhausting and simply to accept that our long-held core beliefs are wrong would be difficult no matter the era. Is it a justification? No but it is a fact that needs to be considered before spewing abuses at those who don’t understand. Lastly and most importantly, most of us would be like ‘who-the-f***-cares’. We all have our own life, including me even though it might not seem like that if you read this article. See that’s a generalization right there!
