Extras & Audio: The Apples who Paint Themselves Orange

"You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple."

“Hey Google, generate an image of a basket of oranges, with one bright orange apple among them.” (AI is spooky.)

I’m really happy with how this piece turned out. I’ve wanted to tackle the “man/woman” vs. “male/female” distinction (or attempted distinction) for a long time.

The words just can’t be uncoupled, definitionally. Even if we occasionally might refer to a trans person as a “man” or a “woman” in casual talk, this isn’t so much redefining the terms “man” or “woman” so much as using the words figuratively rather than strictly literally. There’s an understanding that it’s context-specific, and that there’s a bit of compromise from the sex-grounded definition of the word, not entirely unlike how we’d use a metaphor. If the underlying definitions of man and woman were to become completely uncoupled from sex, they’d no longer serve their purpose — they’d no longer make sense — even to trans-identifying people.

Speaking of metaphors, this is my favourite paragraph:

And that’s the danger of this game, of trying to shift “man” and “woman” into malleable concepts instead of material facts: the people strugging with confusion about sex and gender identity — the apples who paint themselves orange — don’t always settle nicely into the basket with the oranges. They struggle to fit in, and they often suffer, sometimes terribly — sometimes to the point of suicide. Eventually it becomes crystal clear that orange paint does not an orange make, because their shape is a little off, their skin texture is wrong, their body has a different firmness, they don’t smell the same… and most importantly, they don’t work the same in the kitchen, if you catch my drift. You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple.

Here, again, is the link to read the essay:

The Apples who Paint Themselves Orange

Listen to the audio version (for paid subscribers only) below. Do please consider becoming a paid sub; it helps me pay my bills and keeps me writing. Thanks!