My New Perspective

           Taking this course has really changed my perception not only on gender, but also of other people in general. By reading so many first person experiences with inequality based off of societal prejudices I have learned to see the world differently. This may sound like a hyperbole, but it isn’t. I have learned to see things from another person’s shoes and realize that I have to be respectful of others and their beliefs, needs, desires, etc.… We all are different, have different opinions, and deserve the opportunity to express our selves and our viewpoints any way we want. I’ve also realized how controlling society can be and have begun to mentally challenge it. I’ve started questioning things such as gender binary. What would the world be like with out gender policing? Or just in general if we didn’t live our lives according to some societal notion of right and wrong. Who are we to judge others who differ from social norms? Are these norms set in writing? No, they aren’t, so why are we so engrossed in following them and scrutinize all those who decide not to follow it?

            There are a lot of questions that I put on to myself and I’ve learned to be more cautious and accepting of peoples’ right to expression. However, focusing on the gender aspect of this course, I feel not entirely motivated for change. Although I believe change would be good in general, I personally have nothing at stake weather or not things change. This may be a little selfish of me, but societal norms are just something normal to me and I feel as though messing with something that doesn’t bother me doesn’t make sense. I have other things more important in my personal day-to-day life. However, I support those who do have something more at stake and I would totally support anyone who fought society to be more equal. I can understand because prejudices exist in so many forms. For example, the one I most often deal with would be racism. Although changing gender binary wouldn’t help me in the realm of racism, I can still relate to this form of prejudice. So in conclusion, I’ve learned to change my perspective about societal norms and regulations by placing myself in the place of others. Although I personally am not going to seek out gender equality and freedom to choose a gender, I will fully support those who decide to search for this freedom.

Providing LGBTQ Affiliation on College Applications

           Today in class we started a debate on whether colleges should be allowed to have students identify themselves as LGBTQ. I do not agree with this idea. This question would cause too many problems. Although having the option to identify allows colleges to help these students by providing them with extra help and programs, in reality we would be alienating them more. School officials will not be able to provide the right help to these students. In reality they probably don’t need help, nor do they want to be a spectacle. By identifying them, schools would be pointing them out to all the rest of the student body and making them susceptible to pressure from those who aren’t accepting of the LGBTQ community. This question on college applications would also point out who identifies with a different gender, allowing some schools to deny those students if they wish, or to favor them. This could also create certain favoritism, so that some students may even lie and say they’re a member of the LGBTQ community in order to gain admittance to a certain college. Instead of having these questions, colleges should ignore gender or have a neither gender and not force people to have to identify. Colleges should be looking for personality and intellectualism, and ignore gender. Everyone should be treated as equal.

            I do see why colleges might want to know what their students identify as, but I don’t feel that it is necessary. It might be beneficial to know the statistics and to make them feel welcomed. However, I feel the negatives out weigh the benefits. Students are not old enough or mature enough to know what they really feel and we shouldn’t need to force them to decide.

Having One Gender is not worth the Pain of Surgeries

The video on hermaphrodites was very powerful. It made me almost cry to know that some people suffer greatly because medical doctors and parents think it’s best to submit people to surgeries all their life, than to let them live the way they were born. I personally feel that we shouldn’t be able to choose our child’s sex for them. It was evident in the video that we saw, that choosing to make a hermaphrodite child one sex is more damaging than helpful. How are we to know if the sex we chose is the one they will identify with? Since we don’t know, we really shouldn’t choose. Maybe they identify with both and by making them live as one we are just forcing them to be something they aren’t. Plus, the process seems ridiculously painful and not worth it. Why would a child need to suffer that much pain when they could easily have a normal child hood without surgery. No one will be looking at their privates and the day they fall in love, that person will love everything about them.

            If one day they choose to have a surgery, I hope it’s because they want to have it and they understand the consequences. As parents, people think they know best, but sometimes you have to let your child choose and this is one of those situations. Being an overprotective parent in this situation makes it worse, and I think medical doctors also deserve blame for recommending these surgeries. They, better than anyone, should know that children born with two genders can live normally and that having these surgeries is painful, long, and tedious. As doctors they should be more understanding and accepting. They understand how often mutations occur. Our bodies make mutations everyday of our lives and these people were just unlucky (or lucky, depending on how you view it) that they had a mutation in their reproductive genes.

Is There a Law That States How We Should Dress?

Today’s film was very interesting. I never knew San Francisco had had such an important role in the transgender community. In class we’ve read a lot about violence against transgender people, but seeing it is a very different experience. We saw how the police would search for transgender people and lock them up for “impersonating a female.” This made me wonder, is there a law against dressing like the opposite sex? Is there a distinct way the law says we’re supposed to dress? Can people be locked up for dressing like a girl, but being a boy now?

            There was a short clip in the film of a TV show where the host said, “all these charming ladies are breaking the law,” were they breaking the law, or a societal law? I think often people assume that normality is a law. When something is out of the ordinary people jump to the conclusion that this person has committed a felony and they can be persecuted, but I definitely don’t feel that the ladies of the Tenderloin district were breaking any laws. These women were just trying to be who they are and instead of being left alone, the police would come and beat them up. Why would the police waste their time fighting these women, instead of finding crooks off the streets? Maybe because they thought of themselves as manly men and thought it was weird to be transgender.  Or maybe because they were too lazy to fight real crime. Or maybe they were just trying to get rid of a minority. There are so many possibilities, but I think the most obvious was because to them, transgender people aren’t normal and hence breaking the law.

African American Members of the Transgender Community

It is true that we don’t live in a very accepting world. Discrimination happens frequently in jobs, at school, while at the store, etc. However, I never stopped to think about those people who fit more than one of the discriminated categories. It’s hard to deal when being discriminated for one reason such as weight, color, race, etc but being lower than low on the social totem pole is something I never thought of. Even within the discriminated community, some are discriminated more than others.  As Monica Roberts puts it “There is this saying that when white America has a cold, black America has a fever. Well, when black America has a fever, black transgender America has pneumonia”

A transgender African American will be discriminated not only for being African American, but for being transgender as well. These two reasons are what they are. And by discriminating them for being transgender and African American people are telling them they shouldn’t be who they are. But what reason do others have to stop another from being themselves? We wouldn’t tell a figure skater to quit skating if that is what they associate best with; for that same reason we shouldn’t tell transgender people to stop being who they are. I used to think members of the LGBTQ society were just looking for attention and going through a phase, but after having to read so many articles written by members of this community I have come to realize that expressing yourself in such a way is a difficult task. No one would face such hardship if it weren’t so meaningful. Being transgender requires a lot of effort and an admirable amount of resilience. They may be some of the strongest people out there, but they’re being undermined because of who they are.

Beth Richie and the Abolition of a Prison Nation

Beth Richie’s lecture today was quite interesting. At first, I was quite lost in the use of her vocabulary, but I was able to understand her point of view and what she aspires to accomplish. It seems that her lecture circulated around the idea of the abolition of prison nation and the instigation of community resistance. She made her points obvious through tales of the degradation of minorities by policy and how some policies instated for the “good” of the people actually just widen the amount of people that can be jailed. That, for example, in this prison nation we live in, “enacting a loitering law [just] widens who can be jailed for standing” (Richie).

            In her book Arrested Justice Richie explains the building of prisons and the impact on black women. Two stories from her book that she mentions are very heartfelt and lead to the idea that women are being incarcerated unjustly because of their race and gender and that there is a white mail hierarchy. Tanya’s story, for example, got spun by the media as an ongoing labor strike, while in reality Tanya had ditched her young child in a dumpster as a result (most likely) from her environment. No one knew that Tanya had been raped by her uncle and was in an abusive (like) relationship, while also living with three people with criminal records. Nothing Tanya had gone through in her life was placed on paper and so the legal system had no way to see Tanya’s real reason for leaving her baby, yet she would still be scrutinized for her actions by the law.  Ms. B’s story deals with abuse by the police and the favoring of a white male over her for being an African American woman. In Ms. B’s case instead of being able to go to the police for help, they attacked her. In the end we saw how the prison nation is causing a severe injustice to the underprivileged communities. A few key facts Richie mentions toward a solution are: create alternatives of prison state; build stronger more radical connections with other coalitions; build our base following the leadership of those who are most affected.

The Pakistan Transgender Community is Not Really Accepted, Although Legal

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After watching the video in class today, I can’t help but think that the Pakistan government approved a third gender option for their own benefit. After approving this third gender the government gave itself power over this new group of people. They gained hardly anything in return for this humiliation except for a new box to fill out on an application because in reality the Pakistan people do not all approve. The video made the passing of this law seem easy. The only way I think this law could pass easily would be by bypassing the people meaning that the people did not elect this law. The government uses the transgender community for money collecting, further humiliating this community. Instead of helping the transgender community be accepted, they make them something to run away from.  They essentially play a role of the debt collector.

            Some people in class mentioned that this humiliation is something they are accustomed to and that it may be a good pay off toward this new acceptance. However, in my opinion I’m not sure whether it was worth it. To the Pakistan people they may have their own gender, but they are no different than before, or they may have a worse view of them if they are targets of debt collectors. It would have been a lot better to first be accepted by everyone and have everyone’s support in getting a third gender. Otherwise they seem forced into the government and a smooth cohabit able transition will not occur for the Pakistan transgender community.

Evolution of a New Sex

 

After reading Anne Fausto-Sterling’s article in class it really opened me to this new reality. Although I had never really thought about it before, there are people who are born with two genders and either decide between one or the other or switch around. It’s kind of weird to think of someone having both sexes and it makes me feel bad for them. They embody the physical reality of what many have only mentally. They have both sexes and/or both genders. It really correlated with story about Maria Patina, who is in all reality a woman, but because she has a y chromosome everyone shunned her.

This article also got me thinking about evolution. I was wondering what it would be like if somehow through evolution we started to get a higher rate of hermaphrodites. Already 4% of the population is born this way, it is possible for numbers to increase if they start reproducing. This was a bit hard for me to understand, I never got a clear understanding of whether reproduction is possible for hermaphrodites or not. Either way, if they did reproduce normally, it is completely possible for the number to increase in the population. I wonder if then society would be forced to accept this double gender or genderless group of people (which ever way they decide to identify themselves). Once its physically impossible would they accept it, or would they force people to choose a gender as many are now? Or would they remain a secret to society, because for example, before reading this article I had never thought of this group of people.

Gender Variance Acceptance: Native American vs American

When I think of Native Americans I think of tradition. I’m not trying to be harsh toward Native Americans when I say that the original Native Americans were as close to the most natural form of human possible. What I mean to say is that they obeyed the laws of nature. They treated the Earth with care and respect. Although cruel, Europeans referred to them as savages, and that is kind of what humans should be like; we are animals. Unlike Native Americans, after conquering the New World Europeans continued to take the world by storm through innovation. Native Americans did not have a method of manipulating nature as we do now through technology. As humans we have developed methods to manipulate the normal human capacity on Earth. We’ve been able to increase food supply to enormous unnatural amounts and found solutions to fight off once plague causing diseases. All of these resources have created a world in which humans are in control and where innovation is sought. This idea is what lead me to believe that Native Americans, compared to others, would have a much more traditional view on life. I believed that they would follow nature’s course of only female and male genders. However, it seems that I was wrong, and in reality Native Americans were more innovative and accepting of gender and gender variance than even modern Americans.

It’s amazing to see how Americans were able to surpass Native Americans in technology by such large amounts, and yet something such as gender variance was accepted by Native American culture much more readily than American culture. Why is that? Could it be that their ties to nature, really do allow them to realize that nothing is perfect; nature is not perfect. Nothing is black and white in this world, there are always the colors in between, or in this case the identities outside of the norm in which we identify with. There is a whole spectrum of identities in which the majority of the population resides on either side with no respect for the in between.

Is it Okay to Raise Your Child Genderless?

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There has been a lot of debate about whether parents should guide their children to express themselves as a certain gender based on their sex. Some people believe that the child should be raised sex unknown, such as in Monicabielanko’s “Boy or Girl? 4-Month-Old Being Raised Genderless”. Although this does seem to give children a sort of freedom to express themselves in any way they please, I still think it is also a disadvantage to the child because of our current societal norms. It’s true that people should be able to identify with the gender they choose, but raising a child without knowing his/her sex may cause more damage than help. They could be made fun of for not knowing what gender they are. Although this is unkind, it’s the sad reality of the moment. Once the child is older then they can decide for themselves whether they better identify with a different gender. At a more mature level they can make this decision on their own, without the influence of others.

I also think that if a person is made to conform to something they don’t like, they will fight against it. If someone disagrees with the sex they were given, they will probably eventually try to change it when they are ready. For some people this comes early in life, such as childhood, and for others at adulthood. Just like some fight for the poor, others for immigrants, and some for women, people don’t tend to take things silently; we fight for what we believe in.