Everything Is Subjective and Contains Its Opposite

This is not a reason to reject trans people and their language

Marbles by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

Pick up any word, and you can perceive how it contains its opposite—necessarily so.

• Bravery means facing your fear. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel any fear. If you weren’t afraid at all, you wouldn’t need to be brave.
• Strength contains the idea of vulnerability. Part of being strong is knowing your weaknesses, leveraging your skills strategically, and letting yourself rest and heal when you’re tired or injured.
• Paying attention to one thing means not paying attention to another. Our attention is finite at any moment. We can’t be equally curious about everything.
• The reason I point down and left is to distinguish it from up and right. The instruction of where to go embeds the instruction of where not to go.
• Liking something implies that I’ve also experienced disliking something else, so I’ve learned to distinguish amusement from boredom, or pleasure from pain. Also, I can like and dislike something at the same time in different ways.
• Verb tenses, and the ways we use them to storytell, connect the parts of our narratives. We talk about what was then, is now, will be later. (Or what we didn’t know then, but…