Gender (mod 2)

This poem was inspired by a girl in my public speaking class who said "Alan Turing had a 'bad time' later in life"

I only know how to express my thoughts mathematically

Lyrics are not my specialty so

Forgive me if my poetry

Is a little tangled up in knot theory

My biography in written in the margins of number theory

Like the six figure salary

My dad wants for me

And the 2821 miles

I put between me and my family

Allow me to turn topology into sociology

And introduce you to the concept of modulus

A bit of arithmetic to shift the infinite integers into

a cycle, a circle of finite size

Arbitrarily,

let the size be 2,

and I can prove to you

Conclusively

That it is ridiculous

to live in the world of modulus 2

First, consider infinity

And put it in one of two categories

Each value reduced to its parity

It is even, or it is odd

You are zero or you are one

In this world of mod 2

Number is based on remainder

What's left when split in half

like a community fractured

Fuck your nuance,

your knowledge of any number

beyond 1 or 0

It can be binary

So it will be

And for the sake if simplicity

why don't we assign it that value

permanently

Note the familiarity of an infinity

cut down to two simple categories

You were taught that math was immutable and indisputable

And you thought that that meant it had no connection

to the subjective

But underneath seemingly objective

studies of reality

are underlying principles of societal conformity

because the sciences aren't free

from your bigotry

any more than the humanities

It makes no sense to me

that is, numerically

to do calculations

with just two values

You're blurring the truth

reducing it to what fits

in your limited radius

counterinuitively

mod 2

is full of odd properties

Like 1=5=3=489,

which is coincidentally,

the number of times

that I'm misgendered daily

And with the options

Of just even or odd

1 + 1 equals nothing at all

But that's what you get

when you expect

A set of just two items

To explain the infinite

You can use mod 2 as you see fit,

but i don't fit into a world of 0 or 1

My identity

is as intrinsic to me as geometry

Instead, I do calculus on the axis of x, y and z,

where z is is defined to be me

as in "Xe reads xir poem to this audience"

Don't be surprised when I infuse STEM

with my pride

when some of your greatest minds

were men who liked men

But you didn't "agree"s with them

So you castrated them in your lessons

You might call my gender imaginary

But in mathematics we call that complex

And when you call the way I feel

irrational, I call it real

But we all know taking away the hurtful name

Doesn't subtract from the pain

Even if I take your slurs

and negate them, Reclaim them

Make them into something good

I can never alleviate your hate

If this diction still isn't convincing

Maybe this proof by way of contradiction

will satisfy your desire

for logically sound rationality

In a world of passion and spirituality

My query my seem queer

but so is my soul

If you wouldn't want math

To have just ones and zeroes

then why must you insist

arbitrarily

that I must fit my existence

into your binary