A large subset of Americans is so disconcerted by a small subset of fellow citizens that the former sometimes tries to proclaim the latter out of existence, as President Donald Trump did in his inaugural address in January: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”

Well, sure. Most people fit reasonably into those two categories. But what about the citizens who don’t reside comfortably in either? What do we do with them?

This dilemma reflects the fact that many of us don’t have much patience for complexity. We prefer simplicity: black or white; us or them; girl or boy.

But the way humans were created or evolved is much more complicated. Most people feel like men or women, and their bodies reflect that reality. But the sexuality of a significant number of citizens is more complex.

Most are attracted to the opposite sex—which probably makes theological and evolutionary sense—but many are attracted to the same sex or to both sexes. And some have the body of one gender, but, they contend, the psyche of the other. Fond of simplicity, we often lump all this complexity under the general term LGBTQ+.

Part of the political right pretends that LGBTQ+ doesn’t exist, and another part commits considerable energy to making their lives difficult.

Charlie Kirk is a good lens through which to consider the transgender slice of LGBTQ+. He called transgender citizens “abominations” and “a throbbing middle finger to God.” Transgender was one of Kirk’s favorite debate topics, and he often set up his inexperienced student opponents with this gambit: “What is a woman?”

The students often took the bait, sometimes responding that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, a naïve response that makes the same mistake that Kirk makes: oversimplification.

Kirk’s go-to marker for gender was chromosomes. He often asked his transgender interlocutors whether they are XX or XY. If they’re XX, they’re female; if XY they’re male. Case closed.

But between 1 and 2 percent of Americans are born with chromosomal variations that don’t fall neatly into these two categories. A person can be just X, with no Y, or XXY or a mixture of XX and XY cells. Some have both ovarian and testicular development and other physical variations that aren’t easily identified as male or female.

And while 1 to 2 percent is a small number, it translates into 3 to 6 million Americans.

But Kirk distinguished between men and women in other ways. He said women are far more likely to talk about “micro topics”—friends, relationships—and men are more likely to talk about “macro topics”—the stock market, politics, sports.

This sounds like a generalization in service of the flimsy premise that women are better suited to be nurses and social workers while men should be engineers and politicians. But even if Kirk is right about how men and women talk—and I’m still skeptical—he doesn’t account for women who want to talk about sports and politics—and there are many—and men who are willing to talk about so-called “micro topics.”

Maybe the question Kirk should have been asking is “What is not a woman?”

Perhaps we can agree that an XY guy who drives a pickup and talks about sports is a man. And we can come up with a stereotypical XX counterpart. But it’s presumptuous and somewhat arrogant to tell the citizens who fall in between these boundaries that they’re just making things up. Who is Charlie Kirk—or anyone else—to say what is not a woman?

I’ve known some of these citizens—you have, too—and whether you believe they’re a quirk of evolution and were created in the image of God, they are real, and they deserve to be treated with dignity.

And with empathy. Kirk wasn’t a fan of empathy. “I can’t stand the word empathy,” he said, calling it a “made-up, new-age term that has done a lot of damage.”

I disagree. Empathy and appreciation for complexity. We need more of both.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas and can be reached at jcrispcolumns@gmail.com

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