I do not really believe in gender (Gender Dysphoria)

Name: Bryn Pearson

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Product:	Gender Dysphoria
Date:	07.11.01 (158 review reads)
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Advantages: if you can lose the prejudice, you may find out a whole lot about yourself that you've been repressing.

Disadvantages: prejudice and unwillingness to change or to accept difference.

When a baby forms in the womb, it initially has no identifiable gender, and its entirely undefinable genitals will gradually change into either male of female forms. We all start out the same. What happens to us afterwards is more social than physical, and I strongly suspect that with less rigid constructs of gender, we would have fewer people taking radical steps to redefine themselves.

Children are basically all the same - they need to pee in different ways, but biologically speaking, that's it - there are no real physical differences. What we do, is we take all the little girl children and tell them they should be pretty (pitty the ones who aren't, because this is hell on earth) we teach them to be fairies and princesses, to cry when they are sad, to wear nice frocks. We give them dolls and encourage them into the nurturing/caring rolls. We get them to play at being mothers and nurses. We take all the boys and tell them they should be tough. We laugh at them if they cry, and teach them that the only emotion they can show is anger. We encourage them to take risks, to run faster and play harder. We give them toy cars, trains, and mechano. Consequentally, the boys and the girls behave in very different ways. We have taught them to be different.

By the time a child hits teenage, their gender is firmly enforced, usually. We then give them soap operas and top of the pops, teenage magazines about makeup and who you should fancy for the girls etc. We teach gender and we teach it very well. During the teens, hormones start, and the physical differences between the two genders start to show - women tend to acquire some curves, blokes lay down a bit more muscle, girls get more emotional (would boys also, if they thought it was ok to?) and everyone suddenly wants to get laid. The urges are all the same, but boys are taught that they should say yes while girls are taught to say no.

Boys who want to sew or stay home and deal with the parent
ing are considered freakish, as are girls who play rugby and drink pints. This is because we believe that certain character traits and behaviours acocmpany each gender. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is a load of horseshit.

Take two children (and I can think of a few cases of this apart from myself.) From an early age, give both of them the same toys, encourage them to play in the same way, dress the girl in trousers and let her climb trees if she wants to, let the boy dress up as a princess now and then. Teach both of them to cook and knit. Send both to ballet classes, teach both to play football. Encourage them to develop broad interests and to do things that interest them. When the hormones kick in, they will start to think about their bodies differently, but will still have the same interests. They can go out into the world and do well enough for themelves. The downside, is that being such a child, you never quite fit in, and this really is a tragedy. Not fitting in, you start to wonder if you might do a better job of being the other gender, and experimentation follows along.

Its worse than this - what do we do to people who refuse to conform to gender steryotypes? We assume that they are homosexual or lesbian. Sexual orrientation has absolutly nothing to do with gender steryotyping. The most femenine women can be gay, the most masculine men can fancy other men. If a man wears women's clothes, we think this is transgressive. Go to your library and look at some historical costumes. look at priestly robes, at roman togas, at kilts. There is no preordianed thing that says women wear skirts and men wear trousers, this is an artificial distinction that we have made. if a man wears a dress and wants to feel pretty, this means only that he is wearing a dress and exploring the possibilities of feeling pretty. If a woman wears trousers and flat shoes, she may be doing so because that way she can go shopping without crippling her feet or ge
tting cold.

I think that gender is largley a fabrication, and that if we let go of the steryotypes and let people get one wit being whoever they are, the world would be a far better place. Some men are gentle, some are violent, some like to knit, some take up ballet, others join the army. All of that is equally true for women.

As for me, I'm psychologically andogynous, according to all the psyche tests I could find. I like to cook and to care for people, I sew, knit, dance, wear ankle length skirts, have long hair, I maried a bloke.... I also wear comabt trousers and big boots a lot, I fight with an axe in an otherwise male group of re-enactors, I bind my breasts sometimes so that I can look more like a bloke, I drink pints, I am ambitious, dominating, aggressive and sometimes violent. Most of us go around suppressing a whole chunk of who we are because it doesn't fit with our sense of who we should be. if we could all be a bit more open and honest, a bit less rigid in our ideas of normal, then this ludicrous term "Gender dysphoria" would go away. If gender is a fabrication, how can the term mean anything at all?

I can understand why people might want to change gender - if I had the opportunity to change and change back, as they do in Iain Bank's Culture novels, I would do it, and I suspect I wouldn't be alone.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be other than you are, and everything making assumptions about who or what other people should be.

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