Being A Androgynous Person Is Not A Bad Thing

Ingrained thoroughly into society is the notion of a binary gender system. In this system, men are supposed to inhabit the ideals of masculinity such as strength, sexual prowess, and monetary security, while women do the same for femininity, which includes being gentle, submissive, and emotional. Such a system maintains a status quo that every individual is pressured into following. As deep-rooted in all societal structures and institutions as this is, there are means of undoing gender. One such way is through embracing that gender, rather than being static, can be subject to change throughout a person’s life. Gender fluidity can be expressed in sexual, physical, and/or emotional ways, and it works to undo normative notions of gender in the binary system by allowing people the chance to truly be themselves.

The biological sex of a person, in most cases, today can still be considered one of the main identifying characteristics of an individual. In the past the sex of a person was more than an identifying characteristic, it was who they were. They were either men or women, there was no in between or changing it. Society today has come a long way in terms of gender identity and gender roles, but the concept of patriarchy still has the upper hand when it all boils down. Allan G. Johnson’s, The Gender Knot, provides for a more diverse outlook on the women’s expected roles in life, how they are expected to handle difficult situations in marriage, and how they demonstrate courage, in Mona Lisa Smile.

A person’s sex is determined on the basis of three fundamental human physiognomies, chromosomes (XX for a female and XY for a male), gonads (ovaries for females and testes for males) and the obvious being genitals (vagina for a females and a penis for males). However socially, gender identity is formulated on the grounds of stereotypical roles from both

“I not only noticed that it was not a boy's face but a man's; I also felt or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me at the moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young. But somehow a thousand years old.” (Hesse 52). The road to discovering one's self is often fraught with hardships and tears, especially if one's self does not fit the norm of the world they are living in. It has taken a long time and will continue to do so, but slowly people are starting to understand that the world is not all black and white and neither is gender. Stereotypes associated with gender have plagued people for centuries and adhering

In this society, people have grown to believe that your gender is what defines who you are and what you do. By using gender-based clothing such as dresses and overalls, life events, and the importance of choice, Lee suggests that gender roles can’t be pushed upon someone because they must choose and accept it themselves.

Chapter five dealt with biological sexes and gender. The chapter begins by stating that there are more than two sexes, contrary to popular belief. There are at least three sexes: male, female, and intersex individuals, who have genital ambiguity. Most of this chapter discussed the difficulties of intersex individuals’ face in the society. These individuals are often ignored or forced to live their life ashamed of their bodies. In the United States these individuals are seen as abnormality, or medical accidents, that are to be corrected through surgery. In many instances the surgeries make the individual a female by removing any male anatomy within them. This is performed since many believe that gender identity is solely developed by environmental

Gender has been a big issue in society. Sex is biological, and it is through sex that gender is produced (which according to West and Zimmerman, “gender, we said, was an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and social mean” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 125) - in other words, it is the categorization of both sex to act in a certain and acceptable way by the society, also known as norms) and can be recreated through human interaction and social life. All of this is being constructed by our environment; Inequality is being formed through identity. Everything all begins from when we are born. In society, it is believed that boys are tough while the women are believed to be soft and nurturing. There

Gender and gender roles are a somewhat complicated idea to understand. Contrary to popular belief, gender and sex are two different things in that “gender is not inherently nor solely connected to one’s physical anatomy” (“Understanding Gender”). When parents automatically assign their child a gender based on their sex organs, it leaves very little room for change later in the child’s life, because children born with female sex organs are not necessarily girls, just as children born with male sex organs are not necessarily boys. Rather, gender is based on mindset, personal identity, outward presentations, and behavior of the individual. Binary genders, or the broadly

There are several sources that tell a person how to be a man or woman. Science tells us by recognizing the X or Y chromosomes. The media shows us through the physically ideal celebrities that grace the covers of magazines and flaunt their bodies in commercials. Sports, wrestling, cars, and blue for the boys. Dresses, make-up, painted nails, and pink for the girls. All of these sources, as well as others, have evolved into an expectation that has become institutionalized within society. This expectation, is placement and belonging into the binary system of person: the man or the woman. In Anne Fausot-Sterling's acrticles “The Five Sexes” and the “The Five Sexes, Revisited”, the

1.A. In the “doing gender”, author’s definition of sex is combined social condition and it is not just focus on the biological area. And also, author mentioned that different definition about sex, gender and sex category. Firstly, sex is build on traditional biological standard. It distinguished male or female by genitals. As the definition of sex, the people who was born without clearly character of male or female, those people called intersex. People’s definition of sex brings some bad influence to children’s growth. According the reading “Beyond Pink And Blue”, Intersex always received the medical treatment, and people usually can not give a right definition to the intersex people. “Recent estimates indicate that approximately one or two in every two thousand infants are born with anatomy that some people regard as sexually ambiguous.” (Preves. 2003) We can’t definite the sex just through the sexual organs but also need to combine the social implications. Secondly, sex category is a good way to definite sex, which through people’s actors, behaviors to help create definition of sex. In the article “doing gender”, author argues that people need to combine the physical characteristics and social norms to definite gender, rather than just use biological characteristics to definite the gender. It is more like the sociology of gender. For instance, in the society masculinity is more appropriate for men. otherwise, femininity is more appropriate for women. As a conclusion, the

Two phrases that stood out in this essay are “The androgynous man likes women as much or as little as he likes anyone” and “he competes on the field, whatever his field is, and bed is just one more field to him”. Both of this phrase describe the two types

They preferred male activities with male company and expressed more interest in a career than in having a family.” (G.C Davenport, ESSENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY, chapter five, page 116.) When a child is born their gender role (set of expectations to say how they should think, act, feel.) is based on their gender identity (sense of being male/female), which is usually based on what sex the child’s genitalia reflects. When we look at children who have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, it is interesting to see that some individuals develop in a feminine direction and acquire a sense of identity as female but others are brought up as males. The child’s upbringing was based purely on judgements about their genitals,

The gender binary describes a western social construct in which people are categorized based on gender; depending on the anatomy of an individual they are deemed either male or female and are thus expected to exhibit a feminine or masculine personality. As a social construct birthed in the western world, the intention of the gender binary is to create an understanding of the different individuals in our society in a way that discriminates against those considered female, those that do not identify with the binary or do not identify with the gender they are assigned at birth, and those that experience same-sex attraction. When considering the gender binary as a system of oppression, it is essential that one considers other institutions that oppress people – particularly ones in the west—to avoid a reductionist approach to the discrimination directly associated with the gender binary. To properly understand the gender binary, it is important to keep in mind that it was created to categorize people, while also working with and maintaining other systems of oppression as one itself.

Gender can be defined as “sex roles” which are conditions that one considers to be for men or women. People tends to mistake it with sex or thinks that they are both the same. We discussed about the patterns of gender which how the authors of The Kaleidoscope of Gender describes it as “regularized, prepackaged ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Spade and Valentino,2017). It becomes an identity for us. We believe that there is and can only be two genders, being masculine for men and feminine for women. These roles has been forced onto us since birth: blue for boys, and pink for girls. You can see the roles being push onto a person throughout one’s life, but we don’t notice it since it’s “normal” to us.

As evident from the generalized patterns found in differences in behaviour and outlook observed between the sexes, it may be tempting, as has been done in the past, to conclude that gender is an unavoidable aspect of human existence as determined purely from one 's genes. Indeed, human physiology is subject to sexual dimorphism; statistically significant differences in brain size and rate of maturation of specific substructures in the brain exist between males and females (Giedd, Castellanos, Rajapakese, Vaituzis, & Rapoport, 1997), yet these physical differences fail to explain how individuals form their concept of their own gender, and why they tend to conform to their perceived gender roles as defined by the society in which they live, when these roles are ever-changing. Thus, it is important to differentiate between the physical and nonphysical traits, and how the labels of femininity and masculinity should not confuse the two aspects. As defined by Unger (1979), “sex” would be used to refer to the biological differences in males and females, while “gender” describes socioculturally determined, nonphysiological traits which are arbitrarily designated as being appropriate for either females or males. With more recent awareness and interest in matters of gender nonconformity and individual gender identity, new research now explains how these concepts of gender are shaped by social influences (Perry