HOW TO BE YOU 101

Alina M Reyes

An application form sits in front of you. Name? Easy. Age? Not high enough. Gender? Frick. I guess we answer that one easily enough. You've known it existed since before you even knew what it was for, it's hardly a brain-twister. I mean sex, gender, same thing, right?

Aged six, I sat with my brand new toy doctor's set, fresh from Woolworth's. Plastic stethoscope in hand, I studied my single page notes and began scribbling my details. Name: Melissa, D.O.B: 28/08/1998, Sex: NO. As far as I was concerned sex meant kissing, kissing with tongues. Sex was naughty. The other 's' word. Say sex in class and the room would either erupt with nervous laughter or fall into a stone cold silence. You do not speak about sex, you do not know about sex. No.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I learnt the real difference between the two, sex and gender, that is:

Sex: each of the two categories, male and female, into which humans and most other living beings are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. 

Gender: any of the categories, such as masculine, feminine, neuter, or common, but not necessarily corresponding to the sex of the referent when animate

To put it simply, sex is biological and gender is sociological. Whether somebody is considered to be masculine or feminine is relative to the society they live in; whereas the sex of a person can (usually) be found sitting very quietly between their legs, and regardless of whether you're in Haiti or the Himalayas that isn't ever going to change (bar trans surgeries).

From the minute you slipped out of your mama's fairy you've been under constant gender socialisation - the teaching of the expected behaviour in regards to your sex. Males are taught to be strong, dominant, and to show little emotion (with the exception of anger). Females are taught to be kind, passive, to be docile. We are all born as blank canvases and throughout our lives acquire either masculine or feminine traits. This process takes place every day of your life; it is one of the main functions of the family, a part of the school's hidden curriculum and is slotted into every gap in the media.

The problem with this is that girls learn to be subordinate women whilst boys learn that they should be aggressive men. We then, as society, stereotype females as vulnerable and males as brutes. These behavioural expectations are imposed on both men and women and when one chooses not to conform, issues arise. Men of all ages are made to feel ashamed when they show emotion, upset in particular. Women aren't taken seriously in positions of power. Homosexual men are seen as 'soft' as they aren't being the emotionless robots they've been taught to be. Girls are immediately labelled as rebellious or obnoxious if they're not completely submissive. Whether this happens subliminally or out in the open, it happens and is destructive.

How would you solve a problem like gender roles? Gender socialisation has been embedded into the very foundations of society, it would be silly to think we could just drop the idea now. Of course, every social construct has it's flaws, but the thing about man-made flaws is that man can fix them. What we need to recognise is that the tissue that beholds your pee rifle doesn't dictate your personality.

The way a person acts shouldn't be sex-dependent. Your sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who you want to be, what you want to do and who you choose to share your body with. Feminism calls people to recognise that many of the said differences between men and women are products of our society and are therefore changeable - so there's no problem with wanting to change them.

Not all girls are submissive.
Not all boys are 'hard'.
Gender may not be 'real', but the problems are.


Posted by Melissa