I was asked to write an article for this blog, having proposed an interesting and viable theory regarding gender as relating to the energetic qualities of yin and yang. The general premise goes something like this: beginning with the assignment of yang as active/giving and yin as passive/receiving, I proposed that masculinity is a state of emotional yin and intellectual yang, and that femininity is the opposite. While this may appear to sum things up nicely, I later felt that this was too simplistic. Perhaps it is adequate in describing the conceptual state of the human psyche, but does it really address or account for the inner experience of being "a man" or "a woman"? I realized that I have been operating under the assumption that "man" and "masculine" are synonymous, and likewise with "woman" and "feminine". I think that these labels of "man" and "woman" are societally-based, whereas the concepts of "masculine" and "feminine" are more primal. Perhaps we, as a species, began our evolutionary journey in a state where males were instinctually masculine and females were feminine, but in our present state we have evolved beyond those ways of being. I feel the work is not to change the roles of gender (i.e., to redefine the terms "man" and "woman"), but to realize that we have outgrown them. Certainly we all have moments of masculinity and femininity, expressed in context and unique to each individual. The labels of "man" and "woman" provide an unnecessary friction to this inner fluidity, and I feel that without the pressure to express oneself within the confines of gender roles many more people would be freer to experience their body as an authentic expression of their inner reality. In my own journey, I have altered my appearance many times in order to convey femininity; I came to believe that my body is a template for expression - "You're born naked, and all the rest is drag," as RuPaul says. When I first read those words, I felt empowered to do drag publicly. I later came to realize that I was ashamed of my maleness, and that drag was, for me, an attempt to hide the reality of my body from the eyes of the world. What lead me to this idea of dressing in "women's" clothes was an early feeling that my inner nature would be most easily relatable to the world had I been born into a female body. From my adult perspective, I see that it was not my inner experience of my body that created the friction - it was the understanding of others' perceptions of what males and females are allowed to express. I wanted to grow my hair long and wear pretty dresses, and those expressions were reserved for females. I would later revel in those expressions of femininity, only to outgrow them. I experimented with different aspects of gender , going through various boy and girl childhoods and adolescences, until I finally excused myself from the gender debate. What I have come to realize is that the entire notion of gender is a fabrication. Beyond physical sex, there is (possibly) no psychological maleness or femaleness; and isn't that all that gender is - the idea of being male or female and the significance thereof? -Dennis Bell