How do I feel? I feel like gender is told to us when we are very young. That’s my experience anyway. I remember being very young and told I was a girl. I don’t remember exactly why it came up. I remember one time figuring out boys don’t wear dresses. I don’t think I would have thought much about gender at all as a very young child if there weren’t signals from our culture and society.
When I was very young growing up in a liberal town outside of NYC there was never any talk among my friends of differences between boys and girls or liking children of the opposite sex in some sort of dating way. That was for older teens, we were kids. It was very different when I moved to Maryland. I arrived there in 5th grade, and kids were already talking about who was their girlfriend in 3rd grade. What?!
My family liked art and fashion, and so for me, a lot of being a girl was very superficial in my mind. Hair, clothing, make-up, shoes, etc. I didn’t think about it in terms of interests or careers, although as far as interests I tended to go towards typical stereotypes liking dance and tennis, but academically I was mostly aligned with male stereotypes I guess. I never thought about it that way at all as a child.
There are many people among us who have various physical or genetic variations outside of what is “normal” and I think they find their way to their own normal. Most of us are completely unaware when these people are standing right in front of us or even family members or friends.
I have no idea at all what I would do if my own child had one of these abnormalities known at birth. Pick a gender? Hormones? Surgery? I’d be loathe to do surgery I think, but I don’t really know. I’d be nervous about hormones. I might give my child a name that can be used easily as a female or male name and see how it goes for a while if that’s medically ok.
In my teens I was around a lot of gay men, and a lot of transvestites and transgender people. I’m not sure I can say it was normal to me at first, but I didn’t have any judgement about it. Not having any information on the topic at the time, I just figured they liked to dress up as women.
What I think is I can’t see why it’s necessary for there to be a such thing as legal gender. Why does the government have to pronounce us male or female? Why is that necessary? Just stop doing that altogether and that issue disappears. Or, so I think.
I guess doctors have to ask, but they could leave a blank rather than checking one of two boxes.
There is no getting around there are males and females though. We can’t just erase that, but we can put much less emphasis on it, I think we already do as a society.
The one thing I question myself on is, it’s probably very easy for me to say to say gender shouldn’t be given so much attention. I’m female genetically, physically, was raised female, and “feel” female. For those who don’t have that all line up, maybe it is important to them to have acknowledgement by a government entity, I can’t speak for them.
I’ve said several times on fluther regarding gay people that I think it shouldn’t matter whether someone is “born” gay. The gay community uses this as an argument against the Religious Right trying to say God made then that way and they can’t change it, just like a straight person couldn’t be gay. My point is, I don’t need scientific evidence to be accepting of someone who is attracted to the same sex. They are adults, they can have sex with any other consenting adult. Furthermore, and this is even more important than the sex, is any two people who want to share their life together is fine by me.
Following that same thought process, I’m not worried about someone’s DNA in the end, I think each individual decides for themselves, and most people strongly identify as male or female, but then there are some people it’s more fluid, and that’s fine with me too. I do acknowledge there are some societal ramifications though for some people, especially if they don’t easily physically pass for the gender they identify with.