Columnist Dan Abernathy.

Courtesy photo

Guided by indecision and identifying with senseless futility, people are starting to step out of the closet and leave behind who they are. There is a culture war raging in the back pockets of America. This one is centered on gender.

I am not here to judge, condemn or point out anyone’s choice of sexual preference, sexual orientation or gender with some heated rhetoric that may or may not be within my beliefs. The fact is, I do not care what you call yourself and what you choose to identify with. This matters not. Whatever you choose and project, just be a good human while doing it.

The crazed media make it sound as if we are in the midst of some type of war with gender-nonconforming people. This war that is being led with misinformation and disinformation, is just a war of words that scrambles facts so we don’t notice what is really going wrong with society.

There has always been gender variation among humans. The only thing that has changed is that people are now openly discussing this reality. Now the over-saturated media keeps the flames burning so the smoke will divide and conquer us.

Gender enters into all of our social relations. When people interact, their view of themselves, including their identity, comes up against the way they are perceived by other people. This can often influence the way that others behave towards them.

Each of us is a person with our own subjectivity and experience of living with others in society. Everyone is personally involved and has an opinion about gender. It is my belief that you are born, even if it was a mistake in your internal development, male or female. What you choose to identify with after the fact, is your choice.

It is common for people to organize their perceptions according to gendered assumptions that have never been questioned. Perhaps people should ask themselves how they perceive gender stereotypes and do these stereotypes really matter? When these choices trip over crazy and fall into the complete bizarre, do they really need to bother anyone else that didn’t stubble?

Gender identification can get a bit unusual. People are now identifying as gender season. What this means is that their gender identity changes with the seasons of the year. Perhaps they are identifying as female in summer but more masculine during winter. This gender identity, also known as seasogender, or genderseason with suggested pronouns such as summer/summerself and fall/fallself.

‘Genderseason’ is part of the forever growing expansion of gender identities and sexual orientations, including 'ecosexuality', which is centered on the seductiveness of nature. The term ‘ecosexual’ is the state of finding nature sexually appealing. Whether this means feeling one with nature’s energy or physically caressing nature, I’ll leave up to you.

Keeping in line with nature, there is also a growing sector of humans that are identifying as cats. When you feel a deep connection to a particular animal that they take on their fursona, you are called furries.

When you identify as catgender you may use such pronouns as, mew/purr or stay with the traditional labels such as cat boy or cat girl. It should also be noted that the largest number of participants in the furry world are males, cat boys or as this column is leaning, he/him.

Gender awareness is being seen as a process, because the ways of thinking about ourselves and others as gendered, sexual beings shift over time in different contexts.

I feel all this is part of the crumbling of humanity. I have yet to stumble over gender issues and or pronouns. For myself, just as they have been for the past 60 some very odd years, my pronouns are grammatically and biologically correct.

I've never preserved or maintained many gender concerns or fashion sense. I am who I am just as you are who you are. I wear what I wear just as you wear what you wear. My fashion is collected and compiled from the many different aspects of my life. Where I have been, what I've done and what has influenced me from many deranged outside sources. My fashion sense falls short of accepted normality, but it is unique to me. It has labeled me as a free individual and a long way from the confines of the preverbal box.

I wear a cowboy hat. Where I go, I go protected by the brim of a Stetson. Wearing a cowboy hat marks me as being part of Wyoming and the American West. It might suggest that I am a cowboy, but I am not. I would not dishonor the profession of a working cowboy by calling myself one. My hat is merely a token I retained from a segment of my life, just as the Thai fisherman pants are from another.

In these times of mass confusion we, as a society, are being manipulated and blatantly maneuvered with fear, shame and guilt. We worry about the election process while the toxic rain of political parties drips on our shoulders like the falling feces of the albatross.

Now, more than ever, I am taking care not to allow damage to my foundation of calmness. I retreat from the normality of confusing influences and allow my observation, thoughts and engagement unconstrained by communal consciousness. I refuse to be manipulated and controlled with fear, shame and guilt.

It's accounting of sorts. It’s turning it all off so you can see and understand that it is nothing but a show. The news, politics, the rules and the all of what is being done, is nothing less than mass hypnosis and projected illusion. We must pause, shut it all down and return to being awake with what is real. We are being deceived with a false perception of visual stimuli.

I keep looking but don’t seem to find it. There has to be one, even if it no longer works. Perhaps it is a thing of the past, or a wishful thought created behind my stinging eyes. No matter what though, we need one. A dimmer switch to calm the harsh glare of what is now reality. - dbA

You can find more of the unfiltered insight and the Art of Dan Abernathy at www.contributechaos.com.