The world is full of strange and unusual things, from things like lantern fish, to aardvarks, to pelicans and to yet unknown creatures that may only be described as bearing a striking resemblance to Ann Coulter in the morning. However, none of these things are as strange as the idea of gender that the average person seems to possess.

Before going further I should say that I am a person who looks for and seeks out change in the world. According to my parents, my youth leads me to believe that we as a people can fix everything. I like to think that my parents’ age makes them think we can’t fix everything and that if they were only a bit younger, they’d realize we can. With all that given, take the rest of this column as an attack on society. Not just the right wing or the left wing, but the whole thing. A nice, brutal attack on the way society deals with gender because of our reliance on what has been termed the discontinuous mind and the poison it creates.

So, what is the discontinuous mind? It is a state of mind in which we convince ourselves that item x is fundamentally different from item y solely due to minute difference z. For example: Cheerios are fundamentally different than Toasty O’s because they are packaged in a bag within a box rather than just a bag. When used the way it is today, the discontinuous mind destroys much of our ability to understand ourselves and others as we truly are.

Gender, as I see it, is completely divorced from a person’s sex and is an arbitrary mold we create and push people to fit every day based on one, often tiny, difference: the content and cut of their underwear. When phrased this way, I hope it seems silly to draw a hard distinction between men and women in any sense other than the physical and chemical, and even in those cases we tend to generalize.

I am in no way trying to say that women and men are exactly the same and that culture shapes and creates all differences between them. We know entirely too much about biology for this to be true. However, I will go out on a limb and say that where one difference is seen, twenty similarities are ignored due to our reliance on the discontinuous mind.

Gender, much like politics, is a spectrum. Many people understand the great limitations of the left or right categorization of political beliefs. In this same manner, every person ought to understand the even greater limitations of the male and female gender categorization.

If I can get away with applying something of anthropological interest, Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist who wrote on cultural relativism, argued that through observation of other cultures it was clear “the vast majority of individuals in any group are shaped to the fashion of that culture.” When I talk about gender I am saying nothing more than that. We have decided as a culture to value certain types of behavior from men and women and have pushed these to extremes-extremes that I believe do more harm to the relationships between individuals than they do “good” in “normalizing.”

I think you might understand now why I say that seeing a baby boy’s room painted blue and decked out with airplanes and baseballs, or a baby girl’s room painted pink with princesses and ballerinas, makes me want to vomit. A baby boy is not a baseball player any more than he is a ballerina; a baby girl is no more a princess than she is a fighter pilot. The idea of a baby requiring walls decorated with particular activities and in a particular color based on their gender is absolutely nuts. When we realize this, we have to admit that what we are doing when we decorate and treat children in this gender-centric manner is simply “shaping and fashioning” a doughy little thing to fit our society’s made-up cookie cutter ideas of gender.

The sooner we realize that our conceptions of gender are made-up and only cause us to draw differences where there are none, the sooner we can move forward. I refuse to believe that the image society creates of gender is at all accurate. Women are not over-emotional relationship nuts full of mystery and a lust for all things chocolate, and men are not couch-riding, beer-drinking, nacho-eating idiots. If you happen to be male and have a lust for chocolate, or happen to be female and love beer and nachos, take heart in the fact that this is simply due to the extreme tastiness of these foods, and that the idea of gender influencing any substantial difference between people is ridiculous.

People are people, and yes, there is a definite genetic and biological difference between men and women that can lead to different ways of thinking and interests, but this is not always the case. More often than not, society plays a huge part and the rest is made up.

The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can move forward into a society where men and women can understand and appreciate each other as people first and not get hung up on silly made-up notions of behavior and expected positions in society. The opportunity, salary and understanding gap that exists between men and women is simply a product of the discontinuous mind, and while the discontinuous mind helped us in the past, it now holds us back.