Hi, are you me? I've often said pretty much the exact same thing! It's so common that people love to put things in little binary boxes, when it's so rare to actually be that clear cut in the real world. It's a useful mental shortcut sometimes, but also often goes too far and is treated as a fundamental truth rather than just categories for aiding our understanding of the world! Really nice to see someone expressing the same sentiment, even using some of the same phrases as I often do when describing it 🙂

Everything is on a spectrum, but without categorizing life would become impossibly confusing. I like to think of color for example, there’s really only one specific true blue color, there are a bunch of different types of blue, light shades, dark shades, some mixed in with other colors, however at the end of the day everyone still calls it blue. It may not be fully accurate, specific shades may have their own identities which again may not fully match, some may just barely be blue, but its helpful because without calling it blue you would need a Phd to know what each minute color is.

Look at cutting edge attitudes on gender, the entire thing is an absolute mess, filled with genders that most don’t even know exists, and insistence on people respecting them, and even some wanting to get rid of the concept of gender entirely.

If you were to ask me, I’d argue to keep the binary gender in place, but stop doing the thing people do where they start assigning a million different traits to it. Stop saying “a true man must act like” or “a proper lady does”, and just accept that like a color spectrum, every person is just slightly different, and may not do the things the way you do them, and as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, that’s ok. And that goes for most binaries we have.