Something that's bugging me recently but has always bugged me somewhat is societal gender roles and gender pigeon-holing. I'm going to try and not offend anyone in this post but if I do it's purely because I have a different understanding to you, I would love for you to talk to me in the comments and explain your perspective if you think I have said anything out of line here or I'm missing something fundamentally important!
So I'll start with asking; what does it mean to identify as male? What does it mean to identify as female? What does it mean to identify as having both genders or even no gender? Is it a sexual thing? Is it a societal thing? To me, identifying as any of these means absolutely nothing. To me the definitions are you are male if you have male anatomy and a female if you have female anatomy and if you're blessed with characteristics of both then you are intersex - but some people would define that as sex and not gender, to me gender does not exist, to me, the words are interchangeable. As far as I'm aware identity has no gender and gender has nothing to do identity.
But then maybe I'm confused on what identity is... What is identity? My identity is who I am. It is my personality, my morality, my ambitions and desires... it is everything that drives me to do what I do. Identity to me is not skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, sex, the shape of your nose or the height of your cheekbones. I'll use an analogy I read in an article about racism the other day, I think it can be applied in the same context here; identifying people based on their outer appearance is like organising books by the colour of their covers. Categorising books by red, blue, green etc. regardless of their content would inarguably be silly, so why is it that we insist on doing it with people?
Let's debunk this a little bit more... What has society taught us about gender?
Some of the characteristics associated with being masculine; physical strength, independence, ambition, dominance, protectiveness, high sexuality, tolerance of physical pain, emotional disconnect and an affinity to the colour blue.
Some of the characteristics associated with being feminine; compassion, humility, sexual elusion, generosity, servitude, physical delicacy, bashfulness and a love of the colour pink.
Now look at these characteristics and ignore the gender label assigned to them. If you only possess qualities from one of these classifications and brush the others off as having nothing to do with you then my personal opinion is that you can not possibly be a healthy or happy individual. I admit these are rather outdated views of gender roles, but to a high degree these are still brutally imposed upon us from a very young age.
I'll get a little more personal here, I have always said I didn't get on with girls as much as I got on with boys and I've never really thought about it, I always just felt like I had more male friends than female friends... But now that I think about it that's not strictly true, I've always had loads of female friends but I just always thought of females as having the above female characteristics and therefore automatically said I didn't have as many friends like that. If I were to count the number of male and female friends I have/I had I think I'd get quite even numbers.
I've never been much of a girly girl (I say as I'm sat here wearing a 'hot pink' bra which I bought because I loved the colour). I have two older brothers who I spent most of my childhood playing with, fighting with and generally getting into trouble with. Naturally their friends were my friends and vice versa, they went to all boys schools until they were 11/12, so all of their friends from school were guys and I went to all girls schools until I was 12/13 so all of my friends from school were girls. I guess I was outnumbered 2 to 1 so maybe I did have more male friends than female friends as a child but I don't remember hanging out with one gender more than the other...
As a kid some of the things I loved to do were climbing things, playing football and netball, wrestling/fighting, collecting bugs, playing with animals, dressing up in silly outfits, doing stupid things with my hair and speaking in funny accents, dancing, singing, shouting, skating, picking flowers, reading, maths, taking things apart, fixing things, making things, putting glitter on things, fluffy things, colouring (or just colour in general), watermelon, strawberries and mashed potato. Some of the things I hated were make-up, dresses, snails/slugs/anything slimey, ballet, small spiders, English, history, sour sweets, bananas, mushrooms and anything slow. (I really tried to rack my brain for stuff I disliked but I can't think of much...).
When I went to a co-ed secondary school I developed new interests and dropped others, some of the things I'd previously hated I'd learned to love, but this is something I think of as a product of growing up, meeting new people and learning new things, not of my male-to-female friend ratio. I continued to make new friends based on common interests, not on our common gender.
I think I'm quite lucky that my parents allowed me to behave like a kid instead of making me behave "as a girl". I hated make-up, as I said before, not because it was girly, but because it felt weird, took too long to apply and meant I had to be careful not to smudge it. I hated dresses because they restricted my freedom, they got caught on bushes and trees and I didn't have any pockets. I chose my clothes because of comfort and practicality, not clothes that were designed to teach me what a woman should look like to attract the opposite gender. Similarly I chose to play with toys that were fun and interesting and not toys that were designed to teach me to like what was considered feminine.
As children we don't have different body shapes, so why are there two sections for boys and girls clothing, children shouldn't be make to feel guilty for wearing what they want to wear, they're children, who are they trying to impress?! How many young boys are put off participating in dance because a leotard is considered a female clothes item?! Even more ridiculous are gender specific toys! Why should children continuously be made to feel guilty for their interests?! Where's the sense in that? EVERYONE LIKES TEDDIES!! It's these societal pressures which feed into the disparity of sexes in certain career paths. On one side of the toy shop you find the toys which encourage looking after babies and animals or hair dressing and beauty. On the other side of the shop are the toys for construction, science kits, the army and space. If we stopped telling kids that certain toys were for certain genders do you not think there would be a shift in these gender dominated roles?
We have such an ingrained idea of how men/women should be that it affects our judgement of people, and I know I'm not alone in this. I'll use my example earlier where I stated that I've always said I get on with guys more than girls. It's not strictly true, as I said before, I have a lot of friends of both genders and also a few in between, but when I meet a girl for the first time I automatically think I will not get on with her because I associate the above "feminine" characteristics with her. Due to my somewhat negative perception of women any woman I meet has to try harder to gain my trust. It's not something I've consciously done, it's just something that's been ingrained...
So what I'd like to end on goes back to my original remark that gender does not exist. Everyone has the sex organs they are born with and these determine their sex. A person's sex does not and should not be perceived to define anything more than that.
