Gender III

Camera filters? What do they have to do with gender? Well, let me say I personally don't agree with the notion the various parts of us make up our whole being. Our gender identity, sexual identity (or orientation as some call it), and our physical identity (physical sex), along with our personality and temperament are not parts of the whole, but each a filter with which we see ourselves and the world.

I got this idea from my photography. You can stack filters in front of a lens on the camera, and that changes the scene, the colors are inhibited, passed, shifted, or changed by the filters. The same applies to our gender and gender expressions and behavoir, it's a reflection of the totality of each of the facets of ourselves, they all interact with each other, as the stack of filters in front of the lens.

There should be seven filters, three for the primary colors - red, blue and green, and three for the secondary colors - cyan, magenta and yellow, along with a variable neutral density filter (lacked space on the page) to reflect the three primary factors of us, sex, gender and orientation, and three secondary factors, personality, temperment and intelligence, and the neurtal density filter as experience.

All of these are each a part of our whole being, each a whole within our body and mind. We can't see ourselves and the world without looking through all of them at once. And it's the sum of their effects that shows us the colors we see. The filters are constantly changing, rearranging the order and intensity to change are view, changing our expression and behavior. It's our own kaleidolscope to the world.

And when all the light we see is received, it is processed into thought, emotions and memories, adding to the positive or negative nuture we experience in our individual sex and gender identity, not unlike the highend digital camera where you control how the images are captured and processed with the array of settings, an infinite variety, except our minds are infinitely greater. And it changes with our experiences through our life.

So as much as we want to change people, each of us have our own set of filters, unique to use but common in the unversality of being human. We all have the same set, but with our own choice of hues, brightness and saturation, and our own degrees of neutral density of gray tones from white to black.