Gender Awareness

This morning, I learned a new piece of information that I hadn’t been aware of. I had been made aware of this information by someone who was using it incorrectly to prove an incorrect point. I’m glad I questioned the information he had given because it really made me aware of just how recent some things that we have taken as always having been really are.

This morning, I learned the social concept of gender was not solidified till 1980. That all societies, past and future, have always had a knowledge of gender, but that it hadn’t been actually coined as a construct till the 1980’s. It was coined by a lesbian woman who was doing her own feminist studies, trying to explain how gender isn’t just black and white, but how, outside the agreed social construct, is actually more grey and fluid. That just because the majority of society agrees with the man/woman dichotomy, it isn’t and hasn’t been so cut and dried. That society created the standards and how those standards have changed and transitioned depending on the society that was viewing these ideas.

It also drives home that the concept of gender has never had any reason to be defined until it came to equality. Gender was not a social construct that anyone really concerned themselves with unless there was someone outside the norm. But when it comes to equality of pay, status, and other social constructs, gender was a silent influencer that no one was willing to recognize. It was a silent oppressor.

Now, I haven’t done much research since this morning due to time, but I do plan to do so moving forward. I find it extremely interesting, considering that gender was only ever a “real” issue in the last decade. That no one really gave it much thought outside of someone dressing “differently” or having mannerisms that made others uncomfortable. So this is just me, shooting from the hip with what I have gleaned just today, what I have witnessed, and my opinions. These are not facts. They can’t be. I don’t have enough knowledge on this topic to discuss actual facts. I will after this post, however, because this is something I think we all need education on. It is something that we have not been educated on, and it shows desperately in the way our lawmakers are headed. We need to get a handle on this concept of gender before we start entering some very dangerous grounds of humanity and democracy.

It seems to me that we, as Americans, can thank the Puritans for one more devastating morality coding they imposed with such horrible and long-lasting effects. Anti-gay laws were still in effect until the late 70’s. Gay hate is still alive and well and is now including transgenders. The same white supremacist ideology that was born from Nazism is more alive and well today than ever before. The same concepts of child grooming, “trapping” and other forms of toxic ideas are fully functioning in today’s society, thanks to Puritan beliefs that are over 200 years old.

I mention the above because gender is not sexuality, but yet, Americans seem unable to separate the two. This seems to be due to the Puritan views and how important “man and wife” ideology is. Who we are visually has nothing to do with who we find attractive. It doesn’t matter how we present, whether male or female, to others, in who our heart and mind is attracted to. But we keep trying to force this concept in the same box with each other. A man needs to be attracted to a woman, and a woman needs to be attracted to a man, but no one bothers to ask why? And if they are, the answer would probably be either, “to procreate”, which is not the only function of sexuality, it is just one of the major and obvious functions, or “because that’s how it works”, which obviously, it doesn’t. We obstinately stick to the smallest of minded ideas without being willing to look at the fact that there are tons of species on earth who have varying degrees of gender and even procreation. Why are humans left to be so black and white while the rest of nature gets the freedom to be whatever they feel at the moment? We are the most intelligent creatures on the planet, but we insist on completely cutting ourselves off from the same freedoms we often marvel at in other creatures. Why?

When are we going to understand that gender is not one or the other? That we aren’t solidly one gender or the other. That the majority of us work on a spectrum? When are we going to stop having shame over our thoughts and feelings of a gender we weren’t assigned at birth? Why do we have to have shame in the first place for something that we have no control over?

Now, knowing that gender hasn’t been a concrete ideology until just recently, that means that we have viewed people often as who they are and how they present themselves and nothing else. That people living their truest lives are somehow “wrong”, simply because it doesn’t match ours is a wild thinking. I don’t get that. What does it matter how one person views themselves? It affects no one besides them. The fact you “have to see it” is of no importance. The world does not revolve around our individual perception, but we sure argue like it does.

Again, as I’ve said, these are all my thoughts and opinions and not all facts. I mull this over while I have to delay any actual research, create questions to pursue to allow myself a better understanding, and not allow myself to fall into mental traps that box my mind in. We really need to start asking the questions and finding the answers instead of insisting that because it has always been, that is how it must always be, or attribute truly horrible actions of real deviants on people who are just trying to be themselves. We need to quit letting the restrictive mindset of puritan ideals keep us in a stunted place where we can’t grow because that growth would tear apart at the wrongness of a moral belief that should have never existed in the first place. I don’t know how to make these changes in society as a whole. I can only expand my mind in these topics and hope others follow. I can only hope we aren’t doomed to forever hate others for no other reason that some group of religious zealots decided our thinking for us over 200 years ago