IT'S ALL SO INTERESTING

For many years now I have watched from the sidelines as people around the world struggled with their gender identity. I have consumed a huge amount of media on the subject, from interviews, to debates, to documentaries, news articles, online discussions, and random youtube videos. I've always been a total layman on the subject, and I still am. I've also always been pretty unconvinced by it all. I heard the plight of these people, who were clearly suffering, but I could not understand the reason for their suffering, and I certainly didn't agree with their claims, demands or proposed solutions. I was much more likely to dismiss these people as suffering from a mild to severe case of gender dysphoria, than I was to take their arguments as reasonable justification for societal change. This all changed just 2 days ago when I was midway through watching the following video on the BBC news website: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-53573764/pre-colonial-communities-history-of-gend

I want to preface this article by stating that I know human slavery to be utterly abhorrent in every form in which it does, has, and will ever, exist. I am, however, a total layman on the subject of slavery. I have no ancestry that was affected by slavery (to my knowledge), and I have never studied the subject outside of casual reading, viewing and discussion. This article is merely the musings of someone who finds the history of slavery interesting as a case study of human psychology, society (past and present), and the presence of racial discrimination in the modern world. The purpose of this article is to look at slavery through a lens that may not be utilised in many discussions on the topic in recent times (the working title of the article was "On slavery: an omission of interest"). It is a lens that considers the possibility that slavery, for some unfortunate few, may have actually been an improvement upon the circumstances in which they found themselves, or at the very