Sex, Gender and Rainbows
Today’s
topic introduced by Catherine Sword is the multiple facets of gender.
Gender as you know is the perceived identity a person has of his or her
or their life.
Sex
is what we are born into: we are born into a female body or a male body
or in some rare cases a body with both sets of genitals. When a doctor
screens a pregnant belly with the jelly and the imaging machine, what
she or he or they are looking for is the sex of the baby in utero.
Gender
is what happens after you are born. Whether environmental influences
play much of a part, no one can say. Recently parents have tried to
guide their offspring into more fluid sex roles through for instance
keeping all guns and all dolls out of the house, so children play with
more “gender neutral” toys. One doctor reports her experience in this
way. She says she stopped by the playroom door listening as her two-year
old daughter crooned away in sweet, soft tones. Since no dolls were in
the house, the Dr. was intrigued and peeked inside. She saw her toddler
lovingly cooing to a firetruck which she had wrapped up in a blanket.
She was saying, “There, there little truck. It will be all right.”
Since
gender identity comprises the largest part of how we identify in our
lives, it makes sense those who have come to a different sense of
themselves will struggle in our culture. This is because our culture was
birthed out of the early Christians who believed God allowed,
sanctioned, forgave, showed mercy for and interest in only
heterosexuals. Further, He only showed those qualities and more to white
heterosexual males. That’s the bottom line, you’ll forgive the pun.
Now
the white male pays for all the history that has come before. It’s a
bad time to be a white heterosexual male, but it’s still better than
being in the fluid category or any other category. Our teens are in
angst and those for whom gender is a question are more at risk for
suicide than those who believe themselves clearly in the category of
hetero.
One
final comment: we are all confused. Heterosexuality was never the only
choice, it was always just the only choice for being in public. Anyone
who was different and public such as Oscar Wilde, paid deeply for what
was seen as a social transgression.
It
was of course simply that Oscar and his ilk made the white heterosexual
males feel insecure. If you think about it nearly everything makes the
white heterosexual male insecure except a case of 24 and a rifle. But I
digress.
The
history then of Western European development is strewn with the bodies
of those who bravely tried to define themselves differently and received
the blows and wallops for it.
Consider
the word faggot. It is of course deeply contemptuous and therefore to
be stricken from use for any person who calls him or her or themselves
human. But the word does describe what happened. When the wood piles
were gathered to incinerate gays and lesbians, the arm loads of wood
were called faggots. Faggots of wood crisped the skin and cooked the
bodies of these people, because the white heterosexual male community
(there were white hetero women who believed in the same things, but they
had no power) decreed them wrong.
Now
we, the white heterosexual community, must make room: in our bathrooms,
at our tables, in our hearts and minds for the explosion of descriptors
around gender. If we are confused and maybe even a bit scared of these
changes, we must take a deep breath and make room for everyone.
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