Orlando Gender

Improved Essays
In the novel Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, gender is a very fluid thing that can only be determined by oneself. In other words, no one can determine someone else’s gender. It is left up to that one person to identify what they are comfortable with and who they are. Other people can try to tell them how to feel but that won’t necessarily change anything. The sexual organs that a person were born with also do not decide a person’s gender. A person’s gender can only be determined by the way they feel and how they think of themselves and these feelings don’t just appear one day the feelings have usually been there for the person’s entire life as described in a quote from A New Generation Overthrows Gender, by Jon Brooks, “I've been feeling different …show more content…
Just because someone is born with female or male sex organs does not mean that they will identify with that gender. Orlando, for example, was born with male sex organs, but then she transitioned to female because she identified more with that gender. In this quote from a second source, A New Generation Overthrows Gender, by Jon Brooks one of the people that was interviewed says that it’s true that a person’s sex organs are usually used to assign their gender, "Biology, of course, means the physical attributes that have always been used as a proxy for gender” (4). This quote proves that Orlando is truly a woman and that he is not just cross dressing like Archduke Harry did so that he could meet Orlando. This quote shows that Orlando chose the gender that she identified and was most comfortable being. “She was certainly feeling more herself” (264). Orlando feels more comfortable in a gender that doesn’t match the gender she was assigned at birth according to her sex organs at …show more content…
Even when Orlando was living as a man she did things that were stereotypically female “He blushed deeply” (40). Men are usually not supposed to be very emotional or expressive of their emotions. Orlando states that she identifies as female, but she enjoys doing things like being dominant, and participating in intellectual conversations that women weren’t expected to contribute to. Shel is sometimes more timid and submissive. A masculine person is stereotypically expected to be dispassionate and dominant. They are expected to be able to voice their opinion and have it be respected and listened to and taken seriously. The narrator expresses this fluidity when talking about Orlando. “A woman can be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man” (258). Then on the other hand the narrator says, “A man is strange and subtle as a woman” (258). These are examples of Shel and Orlando being able to live between the binaries of masculinity and femininity. They are able to express stereotypical traits of the gender opposite the ones they identify as. This quote from A look at male gender roles in Shakespeare’s Renaissance, by Leann Pettit, it is said that the social climate in the Renaissance era was starting to change and men and women were beginning to be seen in a different light, “However, the social climate was changing as to the way men and

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