Over the rainbow

{ ZARA MURAO Editor, Wknd }

What would a post-gender world look like? Amid tortured conversations around TERFs, toilets and third-person pronouns, British-Canadian comedian Mae Martin saunters in like a time traveller from a future crafted by Ursula K Le Guin. Her book, Can Everyone Please Calm Down? A Guide to 21st Century Sexuality, was released in 2019 but shot onto best seller lists this year, following the cult success of the second season of her semi-autobiographical series, Feel Good. In Season 2, Martin sits Peter Pan-like at a group session in a rehab facility and jokes about her gender being a sort of Adam Driver/Backstreet Boy situation. In real life, she is a queer person who determinedly doesn’t care about pronouns. All this comes together in …Calm Down, which is directed at young people and people new to the idea of sexuality as a spectrum. It addresses them, and their questions, concerns and fears, in a way that is informative, funny, and moves the conversation forward rather than around in circles. The conversation she’s crafting comes from a place of lived experience, lack of fear, and a sense of humour and empathy at the idea that gender and sex should have become so fraught to begin with. This is not a work of literary art but it does what all great works of art do: offers a timeless take on a universal question. Except here, it argues that many of these are questions we shouldn’t be asking in the first place.