In a world where “gender non binary” becomes more and more prevalent, we still try to put people in gender-boxes. And that is exactly the kind of thing that reinforces this whole mess of gender-bias; as long as we keep looking at ourselves as belonging to a certain group and others as belonging to another group. And more and more people find out that they don’t actually fit in one group or another.
I feel that as monastics we are all human beings and we all belong to the same family that is Sangha. How can the Sangha flourish in the west if we keep on putting people in boxes where they don’t fit and tell them that they cannot associate or talk too much with people from the other box? Or worse, that one box is better than the other? Should we not recognise that the world today and our notions of gender are vastly different from India 2500 years ago?
We can learn so much from each other if we just learn to see each other, not as men or women, but as people.
