Random feminist moment.
I'm sort of getting sick of the "I see myself as a person first, and woman second" meme. I understand where it comes from, and I generally agree with the sentiment, but I find the construction more than a little unfortunate. Why should we have to rank these two thing hierarchically? Shouldn't the second imply the first to start with? I don't like the implication that I have to minimize part of my identity to get to be a person. Like I said, I understand the sentiment, but the more I see that particular phrasing, the more it bothers me personally.
It doesn't help that, for some reason, in the last few weeks I've seen an inordinately high number of people (...mostly men) going through mental backflips, hoops, and contortions to justify that male is the perfectly natural, neutral default. These people have ranged from the predictable, pedantic grammar traditionalists who argue that there's no need for gender neutral language because male identifiers have been used in English for hundreds of years as the neutral (which of course reflects in no way upon the culture that language evolved in), to people going through bizarre trains of logic so they can arrive to the conclusion that Amaterasu in the game Okami and its upcoming sequel is really male. Or just male in the sequel. Until proven otherwise. Because that wolf is totally a he, no matter the context of the other games or the mythology itself that they draw on.
You know, while I'd actually be down with the idea of a goddess incarnating in a male body, because that hits some of my fucking with gender pings... but that's not what's going on with these people. No, these are guys who just don't want to play a female character in a videogame. Yes, apparently the fact that she's female is a bigger hurdle to identifying with her than the fact that she's, you know, a dog.
So while I do believe we're all people, while writing characters as human beings who could be male or female (or both, or neither, or whatever) has been my philosophy for years, and will continue to be, while I do believe that there is nearly infinite variety within humanity and within genders that makes the idea of writing men or women as monolithic types as impossible and laughable as it is sad and depressing, I just cannot get on bosrd with the "person first, woman second." If other people do, good for them. More power to them. I am in no position to judge other people on this. But I can't comfortably put a wedge between my humanity and my gender that way, and I have no intention of even trying until I see men doing the same.