[Groop]Groop Gender Confusion

[Larry Steller]

--- Finn Smith <mulch3@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Gary:
> 
> I am a male. From Thaspluit.  
>(You know, sister-planet to yours . . .)

It's funny, when I first read Gary's email about Finn, my first
thought was, "Oh, and all this time I assumed Finn was a guy!"

Then I read Finn's response...

(I feel myself getting long-winded, folks!)

Over the years, there have been a few members of the Groop
whose gender I was unsure of, since there are a fair amount of
names (both real and pseudonyms) that could be either. 

Whenever we interact with people whom we haven't met, we make
assumptions that may be ERRoneous (Hey, we are GROOpers and
GROOpies). 

New fictional Grooper "CheesyDipper" could be male, female,
black, white, asian, hispanic, deaf, jewish, muslim, hindu, tall,
short, fat, thin, gay, adolescent, elderly, bald, belgian,
brazilian, zoltronian, able-bodied, out-of-shape, quadraplegic,
...I could come up with plenty of varied descriptives, but there
are two points I want to make:

The details are very important and totally irrelevant!!!

Irrelevant because how we interact with each other shouldn't be
influenced by descriptives, rather by actions! E-communities are
great forums for allowing people to relate  BEFORE we can judge
by visual cues! This can ultimately be a way for people to
overcome prejudices they may not even be aware of. I mean, I
doubt there are many people (at least in the Groop) who would
develop a close friendship with CHEESYDIPPER, then hate them
because they turn out to be gay, muslim  or a yankee fan...

Important, because who we are is certainly important to each of
us, and are NOT therefore irrelevant details. They ARE a big part
of WHO WE ARE. 

Anyway, the notion of TOLERENCE has been foremost in my thoughts
these last six months, so even though there was NOTHING
intolerant in these two posts, this all sort of just bubbled to
the top. I'm much more reflective than I used to be (and I don't
mean shinier!), but JUST AS LONG-WINDED, huh?

I could go on at length, but will bring this all back to my buddy
Gary: we did a little thing called GUESS THE GROOPER a few years
ago, where we sent in pictures of ourselves and put up a website
where we made guesses who was who. 

Don't ask me why, but I had always had a mental picture of Gary
as about 5'10" and 260 lbs, with a full beard. No reason, I think
just the name GROSSMANN gave me a mental picture of a LARGEMANN.
To find out he was slim, trim and a long-distance runner
shouldn't have surprised me, but did! 

Oddly enough, I understand most people seemed to have guessed my
picture right away. I guess I just look like a Larry...


=====
-Larry Steller
New York, New York

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