Once upon a time there was a complex and mysterious land: the Land of Gender.

Gender was a dense place, thick with hidden secrets. The terrain was unknowable, the wilderness untamed: brambly groves, swirling rivers, deep canyons, towering forests. The Land resisted any attempt to understand or define it.

Explorers embarked on great journeys to survey Gender, to make sense of its breadth and variety. Because the terrain had an infinite number of vistas – expansive deserts, lofty mountains, cresting oceans – each explorer came away from the Land of Gender with a different understanding of the landscape. But none of these vantage points proved any more complete or detailed than any other; no explorer had any better view of Gender than any other.

For untold ages, attempting to put the Land of Gender to paper, to capture its shape, was impossible. Cartography was useless, inadequate. The land refused to be charted or unified by a singular map. It continued to exist in only the experiences of those who ventured into the unknowns, their disparate accounts and partial understandings.

While most explorers were content with the mysteries and fluidity of the Land of Gender, one explorer in particular wished desperately to strip the Land of its relentlessness. Where other explorers would enjoy the mysteries of the Land of Gender, this explorer found fear and panic.  And so He set about developing a map which could measure, manage, and master the Land of Gender once and for all.

You might think that He, devoted as He was to this task, might have traveled around to find out what others had learned about the Land of Gender from their vantage points.  But not He. From His one perspective he surveyed the Land, with one singular vision.

The map that He created was an unqualified success; finally the Land of Gender had been tamed.  Gender could at last be represented as two very rigid, strictly defined, predetermined paths. The paths were very straight. Those following the paths were very straight. Imagine the simplicity!

The two paths He navigated through Gender did not overlap. There were no junctions or trading posts, on-ramps or interchanges.  There was certainly no way to travel on both paths at the same time – it was one, or the other.

He rejoiced. New explorers entering the Land were given His map. Since their paths through Gender were always and already determined, explorers no longer needed to grapple with the Land’s expansive wilderness. Walls were built along the paths, to protect explorers from the deep canyons within the Land of Gender, the lofty mountain peaks, dense forests with bright clearings, enchanting streams and ponds.

He constructed elaborate elaborate ceremonies and rituals to keep explorers focused on their paths, lest they remember what lay beyond the walls. Structured ways for explorers to formalize their commitment to a given path: circumcisions, Bat Mitzvahs, girls discouraged from football and boys shunned for wanting to be cheerleaders, debutante balls and chastity balls and proms and weddings and more.

In more subtle ways, too, each explorer was tacitly reminded of the path on which they traveled. They found boxes that needed to be checked, signs they must follow, specific magazines, clothes, and movies for their eyes only.

Over the years, most explorers stopped wondering what was on the other path, let alone what was beyond the walls towering over the paths themselves. They no longer took interest in the mysteries of the thickets, groves, or ponds. The paths, and the rituals and ceremonies that marked their course, became an easy way for explorers to understand themselves. Dirt roads became paved, paved surfaces were expanded, and the straight-and-narrow paths through the Land of Gender became synonymous with Land itself: the Land was two roads, the two roads compromised all of Gender, and there was nothing more. The roads eclipsed and replaced all else. When people thought about the Land of Gender, all they thought about were its two roads.

And so it went, for many years.

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