Gender: A taken-for-granted example of socialization

HW:  CJ Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.
      
As you enter, please answer this question in as many ways as you can (brainstorm):
 
Individual Student Reflection - Besides being different physically, how would your life be different if you were born a different sex?




What is gender and why is it confusing? 

Often times, gender is confused and misunderstood because we are limited by our language.  We use the terms "male" and "female" to refer to sex and gender.  Then to add to the confusion, oftentimes sexuality is genderized.  Many people use the term "gay" or other pejoratives to mean that someone or something is not masculine.  So all three of these terms are confused with each other.  But, sex, sexuality and gender are different terms that technically refer to different aspects of who we are as individuals.   Professionals like doctors, psychologists, sociologists, social workers and others who study people have written and researched about the differences of these terms extensively.  Sex is the biology that someone is born with.  Most often, a person's sex is assigned based on their reproductive parts.  People are also born with an aptitude for a sexuality.  As they get older, the sexuality becomes sexual attraction such as heterosexual or homosexual attraction.  These are part of our biological makeup, our nature. Most researchers have concluded that these can't be changed.  "Gender" however, is not biological.  It is a social construction that we learn from an early age and we often take it for granted.  In sum:

• Sex is the biology individuals are born with and often assigned at birth.
• Sexuality is the biological aptitude an individual is born with for attraction.
• Gender is how an individual reacts to these two.  This is not biological but instead a social construct.  Gender can be an inner identity/feeling or an outward expression.

One example of how our language uses male to refer to both sex and gender is gender reveal parties - do they really revealing a child's gender?  Will the child be masculine?  How do we know?  Another example of the confusion is a shirt for sale on Amazon that shows the mixing of the concepts:

What does it mean that gender is a social construction?

Sex and Sexuality are determined by our nature, but gender is a social construction.   Think about how you answered that question at the top of this post.  Most of the ways your life would have been different are examples of society treating people differently based on their sex (and sexuality).  This constructs a certain way of being.  So, for example, if I am a heterosexual male, how should I act?  What colors should I like?  What clothes should I wear?  How should I talk?   What sports should I play?  Is it okay for me to cry?  To be rough?  To like violence?   To be sensitive?  And so on... These are all our gender and they are all learned reactions.

"Nature has no edges.  It is not binary."

What is a binary and how does it contribute to the confusion?

Humans tend to be dualistic in their understanding of the world (and thus, their language).  So much of our understanding is oversimplified into dualism: light and dark, wet and dry, tall and short, etc...  But the reality is that there is so much in between these concepts.  The same is true in terms of "gender".  Our culture pushes people to the edges of the continuum above.  This creates a duality for sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.  This duality is often referred to as a "gender" binary.

A socially constructed binary

Our culture boxes people into two very narrow, opposite ways of being.  It doesn't allow for any expression of sex, sexuality, or gender along the continuum.

However, in actuality, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity are all fluid on a continuum:

Evidence for the continuum

• Sex - Scientific American explains the continuum here.  And they provide a useful graphic here or here.
• Sex - One example of the spectrum of sex is the IAAF's 2018 proposal of new rules that would exclude some female runners from competing in women's Olympic events.  Guardian article here.
• Gender - The Gender Spectrum website also provides resources and an explanation.
• Here is a terrific program about gender from National Geographic called The Gender Revolution.  It has an in-depth explanation of transgender as well as some of the latest science about sex and gender.
• Here is a Guardian article about shattering the myth of the gendered brain.
• For more info, this is a great blog from Dr. Zevallos, an Australian sociologist from a Latin-Australian background.
• Some cultures have acknowledged a non-binary gender for centuries such as India's Hijra and two-spirit people from American Indians.

What is the evidence for gender changing over time?

Because gender is a social construct, it can be examined with a sociological imagination to show that it is different depending on where or when you examine it.

Checkout this post, called "The Manly Origins of Cheerleading" that shows how gender is a construct and because of that, our perception of gender changes over time.





And from the Smithonian, checkout this article about pink becoming genderized.

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

A third example of the changing social construct is heels for men.  

For more information:

Scene On Radio did an excellent 10-part series podcast is about gender from the 
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University distributed by PRX. The series attempts to answer:  What’s up with this male-dominated world? How did we get sexism, patriarchy, misogyny in the first place? How can we get better at seeing it, and what can we do about it? Co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee explore those questions and more.

This is an excellent podcast about the social construction of gender:
This 2018 episode of Hidden Brain explains how the differences between men and women are created by society.  For more info. see Ferris and Stein pgs 243-247