John Lennon asked people to imagine no heaven, no hell below us, no countries, no religion, and nothing to kill or die for. It was easy when we tried. But he did not, could not imagine no gender. Can you? We think our understanding of gender comes from our biology and not from our culture, but research by Nigerian feminist scholar Oyèrónkẹ Oyèwùmí revealed that gender is a recent way of categorizing people in Yorùbá culture. Prior to colonization, they classified people in society by their seniority, their age, rather
than by gender. Their kinship connections were gender neutral. Colonialism has pushed gender constructions on their society, forcing them to adapt to European norms. Exceptions do not prove the rule in anything except the law. This exception to social organizing proves that gender is a social construct separate from biological sexual attributes. It’s hard to wrap our minds around that because gender is integral to our social identity, denoting our social power, economic power, and often our legal standing .
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It is not a choice. I did not choose to have to struggle with this internal conflict day after day. Seeing a member of opposing sex in the mirror staring back at me looks like a stranger to me and my body feels like there is something ‘wrong’ with it. Soanos
Gender reveal parties are such a common thing nowadays you can even purchase gender reveal lasagna sauce. The problem is, gender is not being revealed, it’s being programmed. The biological sex of the expected addition to the family is all that is revealed. Now family can get down to the business of programming that infant’s gender by buying pink rabbits for girls and blue bears for boys. They will get her a Dream Kitchen and buy him some Tonka Trucks. She will get dresses in lace, he will get overalls in denim. Soon she will learn math is hard and he will learn crying is for sissies. This is how we abuse our children generation after generation in a futile attempt to enforce gender conformity on behalf of the status quo. The thing is, it does not work. Page 48 | ECLIPSE February 2019
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Humanity is not as simple as the pink/blue dichotomy of the gender reveal party. There are people who are only blue on the outside but pink on the inside. There are also people pink on outside and blue on the inside. There are people who are more purple or white, who understand themselves best outside the entire gender spectrum. Really, we’re a big bag of gender Jordan Almonds. Biological sex may be binary (Not really, ask someone intersex!), but gender and sexual orientation are anything but. People use the word trans as a catchall label for all sorts of people whose selves are not congruent to the sex they were assigned at birth. The trans label is only about their self-identity, not their orientation which is about desire