Philip Patston continues his look at gender fluidity and asks how the creative community could be continually delighted by humanity's diversity.

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Someone wanting surgery to change gender often gets a strong reaction. Their desire to change is an aberration and they are encouraged, often compelled, to see their current form as normal, even if it seems wrong to them and causes distress. 

Contrast this with the orphaned Bangladeshi conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna, who were separated in Melbourne in November last year. Separation was considered the only option, because their conjunction was considered an aberration. Even though the surgeries were traumatic and life threatening, and they were learning to sit up and operate as a functional unit, arguing with Mother Nature was completely reasonable.

If feeling that you were living in a body wrongly gendered was seen as totally unacceptable and causing distress beyond reasonable necessity, then  surgery in this instance, particularly because it is not life threatening, would be treated as routinely cosmetic.

And if conjoined twins were viewed as an unusual but natural – not to mention interesting – example of diversity, to risk one if not two lives to make them "normal" would be seen as preposterous.

You may be thinking what I'm suggesting is odd, even outrageous. But I'm not trying to be right. I'm just considering another stance in order to explore deeper the beliefs and assumptions that govern our collective behaviour. Considering the link between supposedly opposite issues on the social spectrum is a good way to do that.

Creatives do the same when considering a new painting technique or an innovative choreographic move. Poets use unique phrases to create vibrant images from words on a page. 

I get disappointed when artists and performers exhibit prejudice towards diversity, such as gender fluidity, because I expect them to be able to think more creatively about the world than ordinary folk.

Luckily, in general, the creative community is accepting of diversity, though I think we could be doing more to promote it in wider society. I think we could more actively apply our creative bent to designing a society that was far less concerned with conformity and propping up the establishment. We could be actively constructing a collective ideology that continually delighted by the next unique characteristic that humanity exhibited.

In his Venus Project lecture last week, Jacque Fresco questioned society's values, assumptions, beliefs, even language. Why do we get upset about swear words, when we don't even mean what the words mean (bullshit has nothing to do with shit from bulls)? Laws are made when humans don't know how to fix a problem. Politicians were relevant 100 years ago, but now they do what machines could do more efficiently.

His passion for a completely new way of organising society was inspiring and exciting.

I used to run training workshops but now I can't honestly say, "I know exactly what you need to know about diversity," because what we need to know is changing so quickly. These days I find myself mainly facilitating exploratory conversations. All people really need to know now is how to work out what changed since yesterday.

And that may be as simple or complex as a conversation about what people who change their gender have in common with conjoined twins.

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