Genderbread person explained to a stubborn German.

When I saw that our assignment was to explain the genderbread person v2.0 to someone who is unfamiliar with it, I immediately knew who I was going to explain it to; my father. Good ol' Ralph Lutz always means well, but sometimes his old school ways really can make him seem like a class-ass-jerk; and since I live all the way back on Long Island, the only way I could explain this to him was over the phone, (a task that seemed almost impossible). When I called to tell him what I was going, his response first was "oh can't you do this with your mother?", which of course translated to, "I don't care". But I persevered to keep going.(And for a side-note so you know how bad my father can be stubborn: my father once asked me in the middle of a restaurant if I was a lesbian because I never have a boyfriend, I got to the NYC pride parades, I'm in STEPS, and because I do the hair and make-up for the performers for the drag shows.)

To say my dad is completely ignorant to this topic would be a lie. With my last 4 years of college, going on 5, my dad has be schooled a few times already by me due to his lack of knowledge (like the time that he said being a lesbian meant they were transgendered......). So I started to explain to him the genderbread person v2.0. Ralph did well with understanding gender identity, gender expression, and biological sex, though he had to make his rude jokes about "she-males", and then I had to yell at him and school him. But what really confused my dad was when I tried to discuss to him sexual attraction and romantic attraction. Everything else to him he could make sense of but he just could not get on board with how sexuality works and how diverse it is. It was here where my dad's German stubbornness really shined through, brighter than ever. He just couldn't grasp that someone could be only sexually attracted to one sex/gender but then only romantically attracted to one. He kept trying to place a lab on it; "what does that make them then", "what is it then if a person is intersex?" and just more questions on those lines. But through a hour long discussion, I finally got what I wanted to hear from him, "I guess there are just things you can't put labels on because you're right, it isn't so black and white. I don't completely get it and I don't know if I ever will just because this wasn't anything close to what the issues were when I was your age. But I do get that it's a different time where things like this matter." Like my dad said himself, I don't know if he will ever be fully able to get sex and gender and all the bending that comes along with it; but all I can ask him to do is try to see and understand from a new perspective.