America's "Only Two Things" Fetish

The population of the United States is entrenched in a two-party political system. What this means, functionally, is that any issue (abortion, universal healthcare, trans rights, etc.) is divided into two irreconcilable, opposite stances. You either support abortion unilaterally or oppose abortion unilaterally. This black-and-white thinking sucks in itself, but it indicates an even larger contradiction which will take a few paragraphs to explain.

If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly neither a Democrat or a Republican but somewhere left of the mainstream entirely. Imagine, then, the average American voter scanning the list of stances claimed by one party and realizing they don’t agree with every single one of them. These people exist, and they have the unfortunate burden of finding a new label for themselves. Perhaps they identify as libertarians, tea-partiers, independents, “free-thinkers,” etc. (We’ll put aside for this discussion the fact that most of these "rational" individuals are just fashionable Republicans). Henceforth I’ll use the word independents, since that seems to have the most neutral connotation. Using their own good sense, independents analyze each issue and determine their stance regardless of what they believe about unrelated issues. This in itself is admirable, even revolutionary, though in practice I’ve never met an independent I liked.

Here’s what confuses me about the whole thing. Independents can look at a binary system (Democrat/Republican, Left/Right) and decide that neither of them is a perfect fit. In fact they often can't shut up about it. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine applying the same process to one’s gender? Why shouldn’t you take each aspect of gender expression in isolation and decide whether it rings true for you, regardless of what other expressions you might happen to adopt?

This is where I must stop speculating, given that I’m a man that does exactly what it says on the tin, as the Brits say. Gender expression has never been a question for me. But I imagine it’s beyond frustrating for nonbinary folks to be punished and ostracized for thinking critically, a skill that all segments of the political spectrum claim to value. Why does the US have an Only Two Things fetish?