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 know now, and will forget in the future.) If past and future didn’t contain the idea of each other, we couldn’t tell these stories.

And so on.

When someone looks scared and weak, you might find a way to view them as brave and strong. When someone looks like they’re not paying attention to one thing, it might be because they’re extremely attentive to something else. If someone’s pointing firmly in one direction, it’s precisely because they have thoughts about the possible consequences of the other direction. If they’re pleased and happy, that’s on a continuum with less pleasant feelings. If you already know everything in this paragraph, it’s because you learned it in the list above, which one minute ago was still in your present, and a minute before that was still in your future.

For that matter:

Pick up any word, and you can deconstruct it.