Hey Medium, can we have a category for men?

Why your opening statement should never be ‘I am a …’

Robert Turner
Nov 3 · 3 min read
Image courtesy of Unsplash

Want me to take you seriously? Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be voicing your opinion in the first place. Here’s the thing though. I don’t care about you, whether your’e black, brown, white or blue, straight, gay or floating in the breeze, male or female, Ze, Zer or Zebra or any other category you choose to assign yourself.

If you’re shocked, hold on, it gets worse. No one else does either. You can count the people who do care about you, really care, on one hand. If you’re lucky you can call on the other hand as well. The rest of the world looks at you and formulates an unconscious opinion of you in a fraction of a second without even being aware they are doing so.

This on the fly opinion has nothing to do with who you feel you are and how the world should perceive you. Humans base their subjective assessment of you on visual clues our brains are programmed to look for. This mechanism is influenced by evolution, sexual and social factors, education and culture and is almost always biased. That’s just how we operate.

So, to get back to our discussion and the point you were going to raise. Don’t introduce it with a statement about your gender or race or try and contextualise it in any way. No one is interested in your perception of yourself or how you choose to categorise yourself. We are instead, interested in the content of your opinion and its validity and relevance to the discussion at hand.

Opening with an ‘I am a …’ statement will immediately invalidate any of your opinions, even if they have merit. Why? Well the answer is simple and may, I hope, give you pause for thought the next time you choose to make a public statement.

The answer is Agendas. We all have them. Mine for instance, in writing this, is to encourage free debate in an environment that is not governed by pigeon holed sound bites and to hopefully give a few of these individuals pause for thought the next time they speak.

If you choose to provide a contextual agenda for your statement before you utter it, then the world will view it through that lens. It’s human nature.

No matter how valid or relevant your idea or opinion may be, you have just done it an enormous injustice by categorising it. Let me give you an example, that’s topical and relevant.

Jamie stands up in the auditorium to pose his question to the panel. He nervously fingers the microphone and the first words out of his mouth are,

“Hi, I’m Jamie. I am a a person of colour and I’m Muslim”.

What Jamie has just done is closed off the minds of half the audience, conservatively, and probably half the panelist’s to whatever he utters next. People intolerant to Muslims or/and people of mixed race or colour are now inherently suspicious of what will follow and for good reason.

He has effectively occupied their minds with their biases and coloured their perception of what he says next. He may as well have wondered around the auditorium handing out earplugs. Categorise yourself and by association you immediately weaken your words. More importantly, responses to your questions, statements or opinions will not be honest. The answers will be couched in cautious political correctness and more often than not, fail to honestly answer the question. This is in no small part thanks to you Jamie.

You are so focused on your own identity that you have lost site of your humanity. It’s time to stop playing the childish game of identity politics and assume your mantle as a human, first and foremost. Accept that when we debate we do so about ideas and opinions. It’s the words that count and the thought behind them, not the polarising pigeon holes they are uttered from that are so divisive to our society.

So if you want the world to take you seriously, dress the part. Try not to tell us who you are. We don’t care and we’ve already worked it out anyway.

Oh and Medium, really, why no category for men? What about our right to be categorised? Where exactly are us blokes supposed to post bloke stuff? I cry foul.

Robert Turner

Written by

Opinionated humour to lighten the load. Accepting the inevitability of our regression and now actively seeking my tribe. Hope you’ll be there.

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