While sticking my tongue in my lover's, a-hem, throat the other night, I told him about what I felt about the beauty of being born of both sexes. You have the resources of both your feminine and masculine sides, constantly engaging with other men and women who are made of the same stuff. If we're born of both sexes, then we also possess the spiritual resources of both sexes. In other words, it is not possible for the human being to be as simple as a stallion or a mare, because the human imagination is perpetually required to examine, control and redefine reality, of which we must assume ourselves to be the center and the key. When we do not recognize, or actively ignore, Baldwin's keen observations, problems arise.
Every society has rituals or rites concerned with separating boys and girls, females from males.
It isn't easy to become a man in the United States. Or a woman, for that matter. As a child, I remember very vividly what it was like to become a boy. I was forced into a social contract based on the shape of my genitalia. My Uncle Bobby took me and my siblings out on a fishing trip when I was seven years old.