Fact is, this is probably just displacement, since it is also difficult enough to find evidence of thinking in the Real World either.

Occasionally, an academic bursts the bonds of tenure conformity and polysyllabic navel-gazing and treats us to a bracing display of social analysis good enough to almost make you believe there is life on campus after all.

Now, English professor Lennard Davis (SUNY-Binghamton) has done it again, in a venue even more unlikely than Partisan Review.

In the (you ready?) Chronicle of Higher Education (March 24, 2000), a publication that normally adds whole layers of dust motes to the concept of "musty," Prof. Davis has published an essay, part confession, part analysis, part social prediction, concerning what happens to a nice, progressive, po-mo teaching academic when his teenage son comes home from college and announces that he is "transgendered."

Pause for important note directly to the reader: What follows is my riff on Davis’s thoughts. I urge you to go directly to the source: "Gaining a Daughter: A Father's Transgendered Tale." Lennard Davis has, I believe, opened a window on our fast-approaching, many-gendered future. Ready or not, 21^st century, here we come!

As Prof. Davis, with admirable aplomb, recounts his and his wife’s reactions (which he compares to the grieving sequence: denial, anger, resignation, acceptance) to his son’s announcement, I find myself nodding yes, yes, yes, thinking: of course, dummy (meaning myself), this is the direction the world is headed in, a world of infinitely malleable personas—including genders, a world whose society, whose very lives, will reflect the iridescent, shifting complexities and hyper-connections of which the Internet is only an outward and visible sign. The Rainbow Coalition and then some. Actually, a whole lot more than some.

It falls to the Davis’s son to begin educating mom and dad about gender in this new world that’s fast approaching. He, it turns out, does NOT want to rush off to Denmark for a quickie Christine-Jorgensen- ectomy. That, as he puts it, is so primitive, from an ancient "binaried" society where you were either one gender or the other period.

I won’t spoil the story by giving away details here. Go read it yourself. You owe it, if not to yourself, then to your own children. They’re going to need all the help they can get growing up in a newly quicksilvered world where "stability" will no longer be that fusty, stagnant thing generations of mankind have longed and fought for ("As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be").

Confucius (and other holy to near-holy worthies) say, "Listen to mom and dad." But what if dad not only has a penis but also breasts and no beard, and mom has a vagina, a beard, and no breasts, and dad-next-door trans-dresses and wishes to be referred to with feminine pronouns while mom-next-door is off at work as a Marine drill sergeant? As Rusty Godowski, the long-ago object of Myra Breckinridge's paradigm-busting lust, perceived, "It sort of does your head."

Take a thousand TV channels, an infinity of Internet sites, unbroken affluence of an unprecedented kind, 24-7 broadband 2-way communication anywhere on the planet, careers based on creative job-hopping, the approach of a true lingua franca, and what you get is a society with the order-in-chaos of a fractal, the chaos-in-order of blobs of mercury dancing on glass.

The quicksilver generation. Mercury. Hermes the Trickster (Hg!) come to blazingly, flauntingly, technicolored life, is upon us.

A poly-gendered society, after the first shock, will be the least of our problems. Not two, not four, not eight—a hundred genders, proclaims the Davis’s son. And none of those fixed. A given individual, he points out, may whiz through ten different genders in a morning.

Beyond gender, what will this quicksilver world look like? Still mostly mired in our simple (primitive!) ruts, I find it hard to see, hard to say.

Is it too much to expect a world of chameleon artists? I think not.

A world where not just one but several or even many scientific paradigms hold sway? I think not. (The cosmologists are already there: they're talking about simultaneous universes in each of which different kinds of physical laws apply.)

Too much to expect a world where my neighbor spends more time getting on with his/her life and a lot less time telling me how to get on with mine? I think not.