Pandrogyne - Destruction of the Gender Bias

I recently had a chance to watch The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jay and was totally inspired. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is one of my heroes. I hope to one day achieve the level of creativity and self-expression that he seemed to reach at a very early age. I have been thinking about gender quite a bit lately and have basically decided for myself that it is nothing more than cultural programming.  If you accept that we are all just humans then there are really only a few chemicals that separate what we call male and female.  However look at the impact from the biases we create around gender.  How many humans have been oppressed or made to suffer under the notions of difference?  

I mentioned The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jay primarily because of an art piece they did together called Pandrogyne.
Culled from Genesis' website:
In the 1990s, Genesis began a collaboration with the performance artist, Lady Jaye Breyer. Inspired by the language of true love and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity, Genesis and Lady Jaye applied the “cut-up” to their own bodies in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, "pandrogynous" character, "BREYER P-ORRIDGE." This project focused on one central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. They embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in an effort to resemble one another as much as possible. The work was an exercise in truly elective, truly creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousnesses.

I thought this documentary was a very touching story of love and also freedom.  I wondered if I could be as accepting as Lady Jay was of Genesis....What if we could relate to each other sans gender?  Is gender merely a perception?  Imagine a world where there was no bias around the concept of how we happen to be born.  Imagine a world where love is just love and transcends the physical world.

 "As soon as we met, we started dressing the same.  It was just an intuitive thing. As time went by we thought more and more about it and to become each other was a very romantic way to fulfill being in love. Some people will be satisfied with a mutual orgasm, some people will have babies to express the two of them becoming one, but we wanted to actually do something different. So we decided to take the whole idea further."

"Suppose you took two people and cut them up and reassembled them to look like each other.  It would create a third being. And that third being could only exist when the two people were together.” 

Genesis explored the concept and created a name for the “third being” – 'The Pandrogyne' – which is a hybrid of the words 'positive' and 'androgyne', a term for a person who doesn't fit into either the accepted masculine or feminine gender roles of their society.
He became aware that it could also be seen as a comment on another of his preoccupations, man's "prehistoric behaviour patterns" of aggression, violence, greed and an aversion to anything 'other' that, he feels, are threatening its future. In a quiet, fragile, high-pitched voice Genesis says that man must change or destroy itself. 

"For the first time you've got prehistoric behaviour with really dangerous toys. It's not going to be hairy apes throwing stones at each other this time. It's going to be something much more catastrophic. At the moment those behaviour patterns are triumphant. We're regressing politically, economically and spiritually at a tremendously frightening rate. We've done nothing concrete, nothing conscious, to adjust our impulses to fit with the current environment. That's one of the reasons that you have this polarised, dogmatic, violent environment around you filled with greed and ignorance and consumerism.  Ultimately it's not even about how you look," he says. "It's about the choice of the human species to knowingly and consciously evolve or be doomed."

Genesis and Lady Jay both got their breast implants on Valentine's Day 2003, so that they could wake up next to each other on the most romantic day of the year, both with new breasts.
"Lady Jay often mentions she wishes it didn't seem to be about gender because it's not, it's about identity and behaviour. And she said it would be wonderful when we get to a point where people can design themselves and say, 'I want to have fur like a tiger and little horns, and I want an extra eye on the back of my head, and four arms so that I can type and run something else at the same time'." -- Lady Jay & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge