Autobiography On Gender

Pink, Barbie, princess, jewelry, makeup, dresses, dolls, bows, ballet slippers. All of these items listed and countless more defined my childhood when I was growing up. As soon as we women find out they are pregnant, most of them want to know what the sex of the baby is. In our culture, your sexual organs especially define you and any deviance from them is frowned upon and not widely accepted by society. It wasn’t till recently that our society started to become more accepting of those who identified as a gender other than the one they obviously represent or were assigned too. When I think about what my gender is and what that means to me, I have to ask myself what it was that shaped me, how the roles of gender and sex are assigned in society, …show more content…
You can walk down the toy isle at any store and the toys are very gender role based, where fire trucks and tools are marketed toward boys, and dolls and cooking sets are marketed toward girls. It is only recently that we are starting to see a shift in this, but it still is not enough. Many videos have gone viral of little girls questioning the toys and clothes they are offered and expected to want. They boys get to build with Legos while the girls get to dress up/down Barbies. Even the clothes they are marketed that are marketed toward them have sayings like “Beautiful, Be a princess, and I need a hero”; Boy shits include “Be a hero, You can’t spell awesome without me, and Young Wild & Free.” These set a clear image for where boys and girls are supposed to fit into society; Boys have to be strong and tough while girls should be saved and obsessed with their looks. The message that this sends to young boys and girls is very detrimental to their development as to what roles they can and should play be in society. 1. Reading from syllabus This focus of gender specific roles is well explained by Peggy Ornstein, Appendices from Cinderella Ate My Doctor, where she discuses the effects of the princess culture on young girls. She discusses the progression of the princess phase into the sexualization of girls, Bust as part of that there’s this unprecedented way that beauty and …show more content…
As I learned in Naming All the Parts, when a child’s gender was decidable, the Navajo tribes would place a tipi on fire with the child inside and whatever they ran out with, would determine their gender (Bornstein 203). Now to westerners that sounds absolutely crazy and absurd, but these tribes found it normal found a child to respectively have a say in their gender. Now which is crazier: the tribes for letting the children decide, or westerners for assigning it to them during childbirth? Sure their method may seem a little extreme to us, but we should follow in their example that the biological makeup of a child should not determine how they should have to live their life. Better yet, society as a whole, needs to stop trying to play God and discriminating against those who don’t match their ideal Heteronormativity. For those who are born intersex , it can be quite confusing and upsetting to find out that society doesn’t have a “place for them” because most typically only see 2 genders: male and female. This, I believe has to do with a lack of awareness and understanding to things that we are unfamiliar with. With the help of the LGBTQ community, we are now understanding more and more about sexual choices and eliminating negative connotations that are associated with those who identify in the LGBTQ Community. 3