The time has come for me to slack on writing for class, so I bring you some idle musings on the topic of gender. <\/p>\n
Gender confuses me. I’d like to think that I’m beyond gender, that I treat men and women, or more to the point, males and females congruently. But that is, of course, bullshit.<\/p>\n
But it got me thinking, what is gender? Sure, sure, it’s a social construct, a notion of what is appropriate for each sex: As well as appropriate attire, food, modes of thought, socialization, etc, etc. A pervasive social construct defining how to be. And gender roles are damn restrictive. Men can’t cry. Women can’t fight. Being queer throws an interesting monkeywrench into it. Am I dealt a female deck of expectations or a male deck? There are camps, but no consistent answer. I used to like to think I’m androgynous, but most folks assured me I’m pretty male acting. And on reflection, that’s pretty true. There was my memorable quote from my cabin trip up north a few months ago. On the subject of masculinity, I said “I’ll take it up the ass, but I won’t do drag.” Everyone laughed, but think about that for a second. It’s a rejection of a female gender role, or at least the trappings of one, while accepting a female gender role (to some people’s minds, anyway.)<\/p>\n
But how should I view gender? A cage for human behavior? An arbitrary, fluid set of suggestions to help me get along smoothly in society? And, at the risk of offending some good people who read this, should I pity transgender individuals as the ultimate victims of gender roles, pople who feel the need to make some fairly extreme modifications to their bodies to fit within their desired roles? Or is “transgender” the wrong word here? Should I think of them of as transsexuals, people who want to be a different sex, fuck the gender question? Maybe that’s a case by case basis. Death to stereotypes. And, quite frankly, it’s none of my damn business what other people do with their bodies, unless they ask me to get involved.<\/p>\n
Another interesting point to view here are the intersex, a small minority of people born with genitalia that doesn’t quite match boy or girl genitalia, which they sometimes keep throughout life. Doctors used to perform little sex change operations on these kids to make them one sex or the other. Essentially performing a surgery on the kid so that society wouldn’t have to think too hard about which box to put them in. While we can argue about the chromosomes, in reality, I haven’t done a chromosomal analysis of anyone I know. I never heard anyone mention having been analyzed that way. We judge sex by primary and secondary sex characteristics, and by the outward manifestations of gender, clothing, behavior, etc. <\/p>\n
In general, I try to treat people with respect, regardless of their sex or gender. Why should either of those things matter? (…says the monosexual) Is there inherent value to breaking down my internal gender roles? I dunno. Just some stuff that’s been rolling around my head lately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The time has come for me to slack on writing for class, so I bring you some idle musings on the topic of gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}