In the company of wolves

A Few More Options



There’s always been something which felt very restrictive about the two boxes – Male – or – Female – on every questionnaire, survey, census, any form in fact – it’s not an obvious choice, not to me anyway – slipping around inside (and outside) our unstable and fluid identities – and yet there it is – the unchanging choice (which is not one) on our passports, birth certificates, and driving licences.



Having spent much of the last three years on planes, filling endless immigration forms, I’m frankly sick of the sight of these two boxes. Western culture – supposedly a culture of excess and unlimited consumerism – boasts unreservedly of choice…

…Except when it comes to the factor that, if real choice were offered, would demonstrate a genuine freedom within our society (instead of the false ones we buy - or buy into). But no, on the whole we must still decide upon which side of the dividing line we fall: we must still choose whether we are with or without, standing or sitting, on top or underneath.



Could it be that this is what our ‘progressive’ culture relies upon? That there must be some things kept ‘sacred’, ancient repressions preserved, some reactionary constant, from which the world can safely reel around wildly and flamboyantly, beneath a hedonistic guise it flaunts, but doesn’t really mean… not by the end of the day, when you get back on the plane, and are presented once again with two boxes.

Cynics might suggest that the multiple choices that we are offered in the west are thrust before us in hyped and exaggerated explosions of noise and colour in order to deliberately distract us from the choices that really matter – the ones which can really make a difference.

But I think these writers (and I’m not sure they merit that title!) of forms (another misnomer!), in their offices, cordoned in by their screened-off corners, and sitting behind their own anonymity – these Men and Women – are just lazy, and lacking in imagination. They have not questioned their own box. They themselves have been presented with two boxes into which they have made everything fit, and what they think – these 1D designers, these flat-lining dividers of peoples – is that the world is the same for all of us.



If you’d like more than two boxes, if you like your questionnaires to offer more than an Either/Or choice, then try this one by March 19th, and maybe it will set a precedent for the shapes bureaucracy could be taking.

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