Can you Conceive it?

When a writer writes about a notional person he or she often feels compelled to write ‘he or she.’ This suggests that there are givens in our condition that pre-exist discourse. To fail to notice the significance of the compulsion to write ‘he or she’ is, indeed, to blink, deliberately or otherwise, at a monolithic fact - that humans are sexual - and to attempt to do this is really to fly in the face of a pre-ordained reality. Another difficulty is attempting to conceive (in every sense) us from a notional place of observation where the notional observer is not sexual and can observe sex at one remove. We are literally inconceivable in such terms as, if you subtract sex you subtract us. The attempt would be a form of long discredited Cartesian dualism.