8,000,000,000 Genders; Or, Why “Gender” Should Be Abandoned
And Why All Social Constructions Should Never Be Taken Too Seriously

By Christopher Bernard

A Personal Note

One day, coming into my bedroom with an unusually serious expression on her elegantly beautiful face, my mother sat me down and gave me a brief talk that turned out to be one of the most influential in my life. I was nine years old.
 
What she said, in her characteristically direct, even blunt way, was that I was a boy because I had a penis and testicles; my sister, on the other hand, was a girl because she had a vagina. (We were easygoing about nudity in our household, without making a fetish of it, so I knew precisely what she meant; I was only puzzled why she was making a point about something she knew I was fully aware of.)

At this point you might think, and dismiss, my mother as a biological determinist. But not so fast, because then she came to her main point. Men and women were not (according to her definitions) absolute categories; they were not walled off from each other in impenetrable silos: all men had some so-called feminine traits, and all women had some so-called masculine traits. This was essential, she said, to their “emotional balance” and psychological wellbeing.

She went on: Some men were excessively “masculine” (I was reminded of the Charles Atlas ads I had seen in comic books; the posturing muscleman had always struck me as ludicrous) and some women were excessively “feminine” (and I thought of Marilyn Monroe, who struck me, then and now, as almost a caricature of femaleness; both Atlas and Monroe were performing, theatrical, false; healthy men and women did not let themselves to be bound and throttled by appearances). In both cases, this was unhealthy for both males and females, to say nothing of their relationships. Gender excesses (she said) had a number of bad effects: they created a wall between the sexes, and locked both women and men away from parts of their own psyches, creating sometimes irresolvable emotional conflicts within them.

As she said this, I was thinking of both her and my father. My father, from a family that came to America from England in the early seventeenth century, with old Norman blood and later native American heritage (according to family legend), was a television director and producer and involved in the arts and literature (he was a gifted draftsman, musician, and writer; his own father had had literary ambitions in his youth, and his mother was a gifted poet). Dad was also the main, and an adventurous, cook at home and the main wit at our family dinners, often reducing the rest of us to tears of laughter. He had no interest in sports, automobile mechanics, or the sorts of things my friends’ fathers cared about, aside from shooting pheasant in the farm country where we lived during the hunting season each fall.

My mother had traits some might call masculine: the elder daughter of a Czechoslovakian father and a Welsh mother, she had a blusteriness and directness, and an impatience with insinuation and communicative hints, to say nothing of an irascible fearlessness that had no time for squeamishness and timidity (such as my own), that I didn’t see in my friends’ mothers or other females. She swore like a sailor and made no pretense of extreme sensitiveness, though she was a talented photographer and sculptor and had a gift for pithy phrases that was legendary in the family. I have often said that Polly had more testosterone than most of the men I knew.

So I felt I had examples right before my eyes of what my mother was saying. And since I loved and trusted both of my parents implicitly, and was convinced I had by far the best family that walked upon the green earth, her lesson met no resistance from me.

My mother gave me a serious look and asked if I understood. I nodded, though I was still puzzled why she had told me this at that particular moment. Then I recalled I was being referred to more and more as “a sensitive boy” and already showing signs of artistic interests and a complete indifference to sports and other traditionally boyish pursuits, so I guessed there might be some connection; my mother was doing this to reassure me, and I felt a warmth of deep gratitude such as I have rarely felt. It is only in the last few years I have come to realize what a profoundly wise and kind thing she had done for me. She died too long ago for me to have had the chance to thank her, and I can only wish I had had this realization sooner.

Her talk had the great benefit of allowing me never to doubt my “masculinity”; whatever I did or whoever I was, I was “male” by definition. I would have other problems to deal with – how, for example, to be a decent human being in an often indifferent and brutal world and what it meant to be a successful grownup – or merely how to talk to “girls” without offending them (a talent I have never quite mastered). But “gender issues” had no meaning for me. Who was a “real man”? I was. Next question.

Social Illusions and a Modest Proposal

What a difference a handful of decades can make.

What is “gender”? What used to be a convenient two genders has, in recent decades, morphed, according to some, into as many as 78 – a meaningless number. And the dazzling invention of pronouns confuses the matter further. In my more puckish moments, I claim that my own pronouns are “I/me/mine.” Or if I want to be really annoying: “we/us/ours,” though whether I am being royal or merely editorial depends on whose skin I am trying to get under.

I have come to suspect that “gender” may have no useful meaning at all.

The social construction “gender” has come to represent, for some, what no social construction, by definition, can be: an essence, an ultimate reality about a person, an “identity” (that other dubious and fashionable idea), when it is, at best, a rough intellectual model that, like any model, only approximates what it represents, and therefore must not be taken with complete seriousness and never, under any circumstances, literally.

One of the many pitfalls of the human condition is a perennial temptation to take our intellectual inventions and “social constructions” as well as the surrounding web of insights and projections, guesses and delusions that make up human culture, as ultimate realities; even among secularists, as somehow sacred. And any deviation in the real world from those imagined realities may find itself attacked as “false,” “inappropriate,” or “politically incorrect.” I recall the futile controversies during Obama’s first presidential campaign over whether he was “black” enough; one of the more ludicrous moments of that time. But it takes only a glance at recent history to see how such illusions, and the futile attempt to impose them on real human beings, can lead to psychological, social, and political pathologies of the most horrendous kind; to personal despair and mass violence.

Any concept, any idea we have about the world, is, of course, a more or less crude, more or less effective, tool for living in it. A useful concept grows and changes over time, adapting to circumstances and molding with the times; a useless concept is one that has frozen at a given moment and is now used as a weapon with which to hammer people who refuse to be paralyzed by fear of change. By the same token, every worthwhile concept is living, never to be completed because never a perfectly accurate picture of reality.

My favorite example is “house”: certainly we mean something very different when we say “house” from what was meant during Shakespeare’s time – our “house” is likely to contain dozens of devices and items of “infrastructure” that Shakespeare could only have dreamed about in his most exalted inspirations, and yet it retains the same function in the “real world”: a structure to keep out the wind and the rain; a shelter, a place to make a home.

But imagine if we had saddled the concept “house” with details irrelevant to its function: if we had said a “house” must be half-timber, or built of bricks, or have at least one chimney and hearth, or not be higher than twenty feet – and if we had taken these details with complete seriousness so that not only was any building that deviated from these “norms” not a “house,” but was some sort of threat to the community, to social order, even to human life – and one can imagine the (to speak charitably) violent lunacy into which we would have descended.

When taken literally, “gender” is a form of just such misapplied Platonism: it presents the idea as more real (a “real man,” an “ideal woman”) than the scrubby, scruffy reality of actual boys and girls, of men and women trying to live in the world. As soon as one says this, it is obviously true. But when it comes to gender, we seem to immediately forget it and become hypnotized by phantoms.

“Gender” is especially, even tragically, problematic because of the explosive emotions regarding sexuality and physical desire (different from gender though easily confused with it). This is true above all during adolescence, when young people have yet to learn that the “concepts” and “norms” of their society have no objective reality outside practical necessity and the dictates of power, and therefore they try, hopelessly, to conform to them, often down to the most exacting, and delusive, details. Indeed, their peers are often the worst offenders, as they seek to impose these illusions not only on themselves but also, through peer pressure, on their fellows. The violent dance of delusions and paranoia that makes up so much of human life often takes its first cruel steps in the corridors of high school.

The mistake we have made is splitting off the concept of gender from the biological reality of sex. This mistake has had disastrous consequences.

If we believe that “maleness” (to choose a glaring example) is reflected in a particular concept of “gender,” and then try to impose that concept, we are certain that, at some point, we will get wrong what actual boys and men do and what they really are. No concept of “maleness” can cover all the details of how actual men and boys behave and exist in the world; and many of those details are often conflicting and ambiguous and change over time. Many details regarding “gender” are illusory, though an illusion shared by powerful and influential figures, from parents to teachers, from peers to priests to presidents. The particulars of males will fall outside any concept of maleness and confuse people who cling to the concept no matter how much reality contradicts it. Most importantly, they will confuse the boy or man himself over who and what he “is.”

Whenever we take a concept as more true than the physical reality the concept represents, we become at best wrong-headed and at worst actively evil – both delusional and cruel, even murderous. The history of the past century provides more examples than many may be willing to fully absorb: the lessons, that is, of human delusions followed to the point of murder and mass murder.

All social constructions are illusions, socially shared will-o’-wisps, socially agreed plausible absurdities that are useful but have no ultimate reality; that have only the most tangential relationship to the reality we must deal with if we hope to live for moment to moment in the world. To take them seriously is to court madness and death, for an individual or a society. They should be handled, like any belief, lightly and ironically, and willingly discarded as soon as they cease to serve their purpose, which is to help us survive – no, thrive and know happiness in this world. As soon as they prevent that, they have become our enemy and must be mastered and conquered.

Speaking for myself (and I present this only as a catalyst for further discussion), I would define “masculine” as whatever physical human beings born with penises and testicles and the hormonal system that goes with them be and do.

And I would define the “feminine” analogously; that is according to sex, not gender.

In other words, I would abandon “gender” as a normative or even a useful term. It has done more damage than almost any other word or idea in the language in recent history. It is time to add it to such anachronisms as “phlogiston,” “phrenology,” and “bloodletting” – the obsolete social constructions with absurd or horrendous consequences in the real world that we abandoned long ago.

When asked my “gender,” I reply (puckishly!): myself.

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet and critic as well as essayist. His books include the novels A Spy in the Ruins, Voyage to a Phantom City, and Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, and the poetry collections Chien Lunatique, The Rose Shipwreck, and the award-winning The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, as well as collections of short fiction In the American Night and Dangerous Stories for Boys. His new poetry collection, The Beauty of Matter, will be published in 2023.

The Winter of 2023

By Christopher Bernard

The winter of 2022
a wind of iron and crystal blew.

In spring a gale attacked the park
Shredding his last piece of heart.

In summer’s dead zone he did dwell
Till rain and frost bathed fever’s hell.

Now winter has come round again.

The twisting seasons never end.

The winter of 2023
A white hand swept across the sea.

A palace of ice rose in the east,
Towers of snow in a waste of peace.

The year before it leaves a scar
Of fire and talisman of war.

It leaves behind a memory
Sweet and bitter as dark honey.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

The Man Who Talked to the Sea 
By Christopher Bernard

            He stands, hour after hour, at the edge of the surf, staring at the sea.
            In an old battered suit and scuffed shoes, he looks as if he just walked out of an office on Main Street. He sometimes wears a hat, a businesslike fedora, though usually his head is bare, the tufts of thinning whiteness stir like grass in the sea breeze.

            His eyes are watery blue, his skin pale despite hours in the sun. Every so often he takes a deep breath of air briny and ion-charged from the churning waves, then slowly exhales with a look almost of happiness.
            At times he focuses on small craft: a sailboat, motorboat, jet-skiers, wind surfers. Or surfers near the beach’s heaviest waves, a quarter mile off: he watches them with detached interest as the young men – and increasingly young women – lurch up on their boards and shoot the swells as they rise and collapse one after another, hour after hour.

           Or he gazes at the sky: a biplane with a banner advertising hair dye or a new movie, a police helicopter like a spider swinging down from the sky’s rafters, a commercial air carrier lifting off from a local airport like an aluminum cigarillo, a high-flying air force jet leaking a contrail over half the sky – that disappears in an instant or spreads across the azure, becoming an ice cloud as it expands until it looks like the wing of an enormous dragonfly.

           What he most loves are the freighters and cruise liners coming and going from the mouth of the nearby harbor, piled with oblong containers like boot boxes, or tall and white, striped with balconies or spotted like a colander with portholes, keeping their grace despite all attempts to ruin it for the sake of profit. They even retained a little of the old-fashioned romance of sea voyages, as they appeared on the horizon, small points or dirty smudges, and slowly grew, their bows sharp and high, their bridges straight and cool as a captain’s gaze, their smoke stacks saluting as they passed down the shoreline like the bodies of great whales – or leaving the coast at whose edge he stands and, heading out to sea, their sterns turning toward him as they faded to dots, the smoke turning into rust and ash on the horizon as the ships disappeared over the horizon.

            And of course, there are the birds: terns; sea gulls; crows flapping up now and again like black flags of anarchy; sandpipers nibbling nervously; ragged lines of pelicans, with their awkward bills and heads cocked like triggers and wings angled for either a long, leisurely drifting or a sudden plunge to surprise a fish for dinner.
            He never tires of watching the sea’s commerce: infinitely various, never the same yet always the same: sea and sky like an old married couple with the same quarrels and the same needs, even the stars and moon over the night sea reflections of shells and sand, foam and flotsam that lay at his feet. Just as they seemed reflections, as in a small mirror, of moon and stars and sun.

            Sometimes, after taking a furtive glance around him, he talks to the ocean. He speaks quietly, almost caressingly, for a long time, sometimes nodding or shaking his head or shrugging, as he might when speaking with a friend, and sometimes he pauses and appears to be listening for a response.
            After a time he turns away with a vague smile and quiet look of satisfaction, as though he has gotten whatever it was he was looking for and, his face bent to the sand, slowly walks away.

            The local children sometimes watch him while playing fort or catch, digging wells in the beach or dribbling sandcastles. They stop and stare, wondering briefly to themselves or passing rude jokes before going back to their games.
          More than once a few crept up behind him and tried to hear what he was saying to the sea. They crouched down and listened, hitting the one who threatened to giggle. But they couldn’t catch his words, soft as they were against the noise of the surf, and they got bored and crept away. One time they beat a retreat in full cry, and the man turned to them, a look of surprise on his face that turned instantly into a rueful smile. He shrugged and glanced back at the sea as at a wise and sympathetic friend, as if sharing a quiet joke and relishing it, even if the joke was at his own expense.
*
          One day a young couple was walking barefoot down the beach. They were silent, avoiding each other’s eyes, their faces grim, a wide distance between them. The beach was otherwise empty: the sand showed only their footprints, parallel lines of spoor disappearing in the distance. The waves fell with unusual quietness, and the tide was out leaving a wide swathe of bright wet sand.
            A breeze stirred the hair of the young woman, slender and soft, though angry and hurt. She let the wind pull the hair across her eyes as though wanting to hide behind it, from the light and the young man beside her.

            He looked exasperated and glum, his mouth twisted, and walked with exaggerated emphasis, his footprints emphatic, like gashes, the woman’s softer, as if she hardly wanted to touch the ground.
            She seemed to want to disappear. He seemed to want to hit something with all his might.
            They walked in silence beneath the morning sun and an almost cloudless sky.
            Neither of them noticed the man gazing out to sea till they almost walked into him – or rather, the young man did, who was walking near the water.

            They stopped, a little disconcerted. The man didn’t seem to notice them. He was staring intently at the waves, his face full in the brilliant sunlight, his eyes seemingly blind in the glare. He seemed far away, in his own world. And he was speaking, softly, and – given the quietness of the waves – just audibly. They listened.

            “Thalassa, thalassa,” the old man said, “sea, o sea, you who murmur across the world’s seasons, who bear life in the cup of your seabed, who bore life from the beginning, who crash and swirl along every coast, who are both thing and symbol of the thing, of being and destruction, life and death and love and birth, of joy and suffering, ecstasy and despair, ephemeral, perpetual, in change and permanence, water and crystal and gold and ash and mud and wine and earth and sea, o sea, thalassa, thalassa, you are the comforter and destroyer, the ever-kind and ever-ruining, lover and demolisher, betrayer of promise, builder of promise, creator of hope, betrayer of hope, image of the eternal, image of God, thalassa, thalassa, o sea, o sea, speak to me with your tongue of many voices, chant to me your music, and grant me ears to hear and know, with love and awe and patience and faith, as you give me being and take it away, thalassa, thalassa, o sea . . .”

            And the old man murmured on in the same fashion, and the young couple stood there listening and wondering, the man is crazy, he’s talking to the sea, astonished and a little repelled but frozen to the ground. He paid them no heed. He spoke to the sea as if he were, as usual, alone, as to an intimate friend.
            The couple, almost despite themselves, turned to look to the sea as well, and listened to the waves 
And it was almost as though they could hear words in the ocean sounds, as though the old man and the ocean were speaking together, even though the old man never stopped to listen; they seemed to have an understanding, seemed tender together, one might almost think they loved one another, and the young couple was curiously moved. 

After a time longer than they knew, as the sun rose higher and the wash turned back at the turning of the tide, a wave rushed up and crashed against their legs. The woman stumbled, cried out, fell . . . 
The young man leapt over and tried pulling her away, but the wave yanked her from his hands and dragged her, choking in the foam, down and out toward the ocean. He dove after her, slipping, falling in the wash as a second, even bigger wave, crashed over him. He bobbed up, spitting and choking, and saw her arm flailing a dozen yards away in the swirling foam as more rollers swept toward them. 

He lurched again toward her, grabbing her hand just as it disappeared under another wave, and reached out just in time to catch the elbow of her other arm and, managing to get a grip on the sand, pulled, almost lost his hold, then pulled and dragged again with all his might in a brief lull between the backwash and the next wave. The young woman appeared out of the water, sputtering and frightened, like a naiad, half drowned as she was born from the waves.

The two struggled and stumbled up the slick tract of sand just as another big wave raced in pursuit of them. 
Once back on dry sand, the couple, drenched to the skin and shivering, turned to each other, their frightened eyes darting, opening, deeply, each into the other, and a moment later they fell into each other’s arms.
“I almost thought . . .”
“I know . . . “

They slowly caught their breath, then wiped the water out of each other’s eyes, and, still wrapped in each other’s arms, walked slowly away, keeping just out of reach of the tide as it washed up the beach like a violating hand or an invading army.
“Where did the old man go?” the young woman asked, stopping and, smoothing back her wet hair and peering across the now empty shore.

	The young man shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he was just a hallucination!” He laughed, nervously. But the woman kept peering, worriedly, out to sea. . . . 
	Perhaps he had been caught in the same waves they had. The riptide here, at times of the tide’s turning, was known to wash the unsuspecting off the beach, sweeping them a mile out to sea, drowning them and sweeping their bodies miles away down the coast. 

Or maybe he had walked away just in time. Maybe he had grown tired of staring at the sea and talking to the waves. All good things come to an end, they say. 
Or maybe he had accomplished his task and he could go home with a good conscience. It was the right time for him to move on. 
For whatever reason, he was never seen again after that day. 
But according to some, if you listen closely to the surf, you can hear the words, “Thalassa, Thalassa, sea, o sea . . . .”

____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org). His books include In the American Night and Other Stories (where this story first appeared in a slightly different version), A Spy in the Ruins, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café and the award-winning poetry collection, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses.

Billionaire’s Walk

By Christopher Bernard


Ah yes, we love it here - who wouldn’t
like to sleep in a ragged tent
dropped like an empty sausage casing
abandoned on dirty cement?
The killing machine of the marketplace
has put us in this place.
One of us wrote down this song
for those of us who refuse to belong.
He’s long gone now, but he had style;
he wore his home in his pocket comb,
and knew how to laugh
at a world that did not love him.

“Be not typical. Be rare.
Be not thin or fat.
Stow your worries with your care.
Take not this or that
for whatever’s less than you know what
you’re owed, be it pennies in your hat.
Let the hoi-polloi know that.
Flaunt your rags, and know what’s what,
but walk like a billionaire!

“Take your time. Be debonair.
The sun’s your flash well lit.
Nobless oblige invites your share.
Your throne’s where’ere you sit.
Whatever speed you turn your wit,
a gentleman you are. Why, it
is never clearer than when you’re fit
and walk like a billionaire!

“Be gracious to the folk who stare.
The tourists are so sweet!
Allow them to donate their fare:
they owe you that one treat.
You’re part of the local color, neat.
You lounge and loll about the street.
You’re boom plucked from a bust defeat,
and walk like a billionaire!

“And when you’ve had at last your share,
are happy as a dog,
and everything looks fair and square,
and you’re like a bump on a log,
serene and creamed and soft as a bog,
you’ll puff your butts with a chink and a jog,
and live by your wits between Gog and Magog.
Who cares if you sleep in the gutter? By God,
you walk like a billionaire!”


Dedicated to the homeless in the richest 
nation on earth

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

Throne

By Christopher Bernard

“Queen Elizabeth II: Britain’s longest reigning monarch dies aged 96”

“World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds”

—Two headlines from September 8, 2022

The rock you rolled to the top of the tender hill, 
The ship you winged into the regal bay, 
The sun you alchemied in a whispering still,
The heel you drove into stone as into clay, 
The moon in your thimble, meteor in your dream, 
School round your dubious, bloody history 
Curling toward the sun, a scruffy team; 
A knight in darkness fighting faithfully 
The dragon wrapped inside his thrusting mind 
Alarmed, frightened, cunning, clever, strong. 
Out of nothing designed and yet designed 
To trap a cosmos in a wind of wrong 
On a day when fire eats his meat and bread, 
His future closes like a fist, and a queen is dead. 

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

August, New Hope, 1961

By Christopher Bernard

The heavy ripening summer,
green in the mountains,
high wheat, sleek corn,
alfalfa massed against the ground,
strawberries, raspberries, black,
peaches almost over-ripe,
tomatoes big and sweet –
a sultry land baking hot
with loam, topsoil, sleep.

The year ripening:
the wind from the north, in snow, rain,
ice, forgotten. Trickles
of moisture tickle the back of your neck.
Nothing tempts like ice-sweat lemonade,
except maybe a plunge 
in a pool under the hickories.
Time stops for weeks.
You never want it to move again.

August the earth in that place slept
and dreamt of a half-forgotten spring,
winter dead, July’s hopes,
as a whisper of coolness slipped inside,
like a drop of water inside a crack.
And under the sultry atmosphere
a breath of ice stole like a knife, 
steely and rare. . . .
Someone now long dead
looked up from her summer book, hesitated, and said,
to no one in particular, “I can feel fall in the air.”

_____
	
Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

What Is the Opposite of Politics?


A shift of rain in the trees.
A snow globe in a sandbox.
My cousin's scuffed knees.

What is the cost of mercy?
A spade of silent rust.
You'll never know if justice
is less refined than dust.

Who is that fellow singing?
I never knew his kind.
You say he's rough and tender.
I hope to live forever
if heaven is his mind.
_____

Christopher Bernard’s most recent book is A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, winner of a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and named one of the “100 Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is founder and a principal, with Ho Lin, Steven Hill, and Jonah Raskin, of the webzine Caveat Lector.