16 Years after its reclassification as a minor-planet discussion of Pluto as a planet can still kicked off spirited, heated, and intense debate. The faction that defies the International Astronomical Union’s classification in 2006 can be quite passionate about Pluto’s status as a planet even though the vast majority of that group are not astronomers or scientists. By and by they are laypeople and Pluto’s status as a planet or minor planet makes no material difference in any of their lives. Their paycheck, home equity, or personal freedoms are utterly unimpacted by the IAU’s decisions and declarations and yet they can be most vocal in defending that ‘Pluto is a planet!’
Of course, they never researched, observed, or studied Pluto. As children that learned that the Solar System has nine planets and talk of Kuiper Belts, or Trans-Neptunian Objects is uninteresting but the fact learned in grade school that there are nine planets these are their names became a foundational fragment of knowledge and something that undercuts something learned so completely as a child is on some level unsettling. Even if that fact has no bearing on their self, identity, or well-being.
A key simplistic fact we all learn as children, and one that is essential to many in their self-identification is that people are either boys or girls. There are no other categories, and like Pluto’s status as a planet, there is no doubt in the classifications, the declaration is the definition.
Unlike the debate surrounding Pluto the boy/girl classification is critical to many people’s sense of self. The classification of either girl or boy defined the roles one is expected to assume, the course of one’s life, the goals and objectives ones is expected to pursue, and can dictate everything from the clothing someone wears and the words they use to the nature of their loves and bonding commitments.
Is it really surprising then when the simplistic worldview imparted to children is redefined with new and enlarged with concepts such as trans or non-Binary that these expansions are met with fierce resistance, a resistance that is no more grounded in ‘fact’ or ‘science’ than those insisting that Pluto remains a planet simply because they were told this as a child? Particularly when so much of what so many people think of as their self-concept is tied to those first formative years when their classification was given and the course of their life ‘determined.’
None of this excuses the hatred, persecution, and prejudice that is heaped unjustly upon those who do not slot neatly into childish categories. To insist that everyone must live wholly within a category of either boy or girl with hard impermeable boundaries is as rational and defying of reality as to insist that that every has either Black hair or blond ignoring that everything nature does is a continuum, a spectrum, and the difference between girl and boy is as slippery as the difference between planet and not-planet.
