Talking about duality and gender without losing our minds

Whenever anyone starts talking from a hurt and angry place, it is very difficult to stay rational. All those feelings well up and flood your brain. Often you end up talking in circles and never getting to what's actually wrong.

In a way, I feel that discussions of women and men often get derailed before anything real can be accomplished. As a child I was always confused about the whole notion of feminism, as it seemed that the majority of us want to be with the opposite gender more than anything. So how on earth was it even possible for us to devalue each other? And yet, we have, on both sides. That the language I've found myself reaching for is in its nature divisive, sides and whatnot, is very telling. It's the only frame we know.

Extend this to our future, a future where we will have an unprecedented hand in designing ourselves, our offspring, our progeny, even our reality. Because the whole concept of gender equality has been about opening up the world of men to women, we continue to perceive success in almost exclusively male terms. What does this mean for the world we will create? Is our current idea of intelligence also steeped firmly in this frame? Are we leaving behind half of ourselves, almost by accident? We all have mothers, fathers, or surrogates of the same, and I think it is essential that we not lose that in this wild, careening progress.

Humanity, to me, is what dances in the space between. Between man and woman, parent and child, lover and beloved, scientist and artist. Our ability to handle duality every single day, all of the time, is that part of human intelligence? Reading about the Turing Test, one of the reasons sited for its usefulness is because it is measurable and perhaps that is its value. Because things are only measurable until they aren't, you can't take a square root of a negative number until you can.

As we advance ever faster, how many absolutes will fall away, and how quickly? Perhaps we will get to the point where we exist entirely in the gray. Right now we cling to our black and our white while our feet dangle in the chasm. When you only hold on to one side, when you lose your duality, your balance, your world only shrinks ever smaller. Humanity is in the striving, not the achieving, we are always transhuman.