When I finished reading the story of little Storm, in that instant, I felt deeply sorry for Storm, a child who would have grown up normally like everyone else around him/her, everyone else except for his/her two brothers. However, a decision was made by Storm’s parents to break the convention of identifying children by gender, and as a result the chance for Storm to be raised like others. Storm’s parents, Witterick and Stocker are indeed doing something wrong. Their extreme and unusual parenting decision would make Storm a lifelong victim of prejudice.
According to Storm’s parents, they want to love their children for who they are, not what genitals they have; they want to be supportive of the individuality of their children and empower them with the freedom to do anything they want, even things the parents themselves were not allowed to do as kids. Though this is also a very accurate description of what the majority of parents hope for their children, they are realistic about the society they live in. Whereas Storm’s parents are not only thinking, also acting as idealists through their action of raising a genderless baby in this imperfect world. In other words, their idealism has motivated them to rear Storm free of gender identities.
However, life is a much more complicated topic than what an idealist is willing to understand and seek answers for. As a result, idealists such as Storm’s parents are often not taking the scientific actualities and negative aspects of the issue into account. In this case, being idealists has also made Witterick and Stocker blinded to the irrefutable biological differences between boys and girls. Far more evidence has shown that male and female are genetically very different and ...
... middle of paper ...
...orm to be genderless. However, it is harmful to Storm growing up so far away from the biological and social norms because eventually Storm will have to make contact with society, and when he/she does, he/she would be feeling isolated, and be haunted by various difficulties in life. After all, the gender convention has been a part of society and well adapted to humans for thousands of years, and it will probably take another thousand of years for genderless babies like Storm to be able to tell anyone about their undefined gender identities without being alienated or judged. As for Storm living in the Twenty-First century, his/her parents are taking an enormous risk to gamble on the chance of Storm’s future to be desirable. In the end, I just hope that Witterick and Stocker know when to stop when they realize that Storm might have become another victim of prejudice.
I watched the foreign film Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), a Belgian film by filmmaker Alain Berliner. It is a warm, startling, funny, and realistic study of what happens when a seven-year-old boy is convinced, beyond all reason and outward evidence to the contrary, that he is really a girl. His certitude is astonishing in one so little, and his gender conviction is so strong that his belief can't be laughed away as the result of a “phase” or an “active imagination.” Yet the crux of Ma Vie en Rose is not a study of trans-gendered children per se, despite the fact that such sensational subject matter would seem to be surefire material for attention-grabbing moviemaking. You're never even quite certain about the long-term psychological ramifications of young Ludovic's obsession: Is he trans-gendered, a transvestite, gay, or straight? Such determinations are not the movie's concern. What Ma Vie en Rose is interested in is what it means to be a “difficult” child, a child who whose difference always sets him apart, and what it means to be the parents of such a child. Here we see some cultural differences with the characters.
In this article, Eckert and Ginet use pathos in the last two pages of the articles. The tow writers express their feelings when they mention “ In words, they do not have the option of growing into just people, but into boys or girls”( Eckert and Ginet,742). These sentences show to the readers, they emotion about how children become adults and know what your gender is.The tone for these sentences is cruel with the reality because children have to mature at an early age to know what their gender
Basically, what one needs to know before proceeding to read through this analysis of gender development is that gender identity refers to “one’s sense of oneself as male, female, or transgender” (American Psychological Association, 2006). When one’s gender identity and biological sex are not congruent, the individual may identify as transsexual or as another transgender category (cf. Gainor, 2000). Example, Jennifer in the book, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, who brought us through the struggle of living a transgendered life from start to finish. Also, the formation of gender identity is influenced by social factors, such as family, friends, the environment, etc. For example, fathers tend to be more involved when their sons engage in gender-appropriate activities such as playing baseball or soccer rather than wanting to become a dancer or a cheerleader.
... drives. There are boys in the mountain villages of the Dominican Republic that lack testosterone and “are usually raised as ‘conditional’ girls” (681). Once these boys reach puberty, “the family shifts the child over from daughter to son. The dresses are thrown out. He begins to wear male clothes and starts dating girls” (681). These boys, also known as “guevedoces,” show biological features that produce in later stages of life rather than birth which determines gender role. My female cousin, who was raised by a single father, grew up acting and playing like a boy. She was very aggressive when she was younger but as she grew older, society and human nature has changed her. She is not only influenced by our culture to act in a feminine, lady-like way, but she is now an adult that wants to have a family and become a mother in order to produce off-springs and survive.
What defines gender? The sex of a person refers to their physical anatomy, their sexual orientation refers to whom they are attracted to. The gender identity of a person, however, is their internal sense of being male, female, neither or both. The way in which they manifest their masculinity and/or femininity is their gender expression. Society has no right to dictate a person’s gender identity or manifestation, nor does it have the right to confine them to any one of these. Too often does the public deem someone’s gender and expression the same as their sex, and treat them as such without consulting the individual. The play Down from Heaven by Colleen Wagner and the novel Annabel by Kathleen Winter depict the ongoing battle that society faces
The distinguishing of gender in children is a continuing debate, in regards to, determining what in fact causes children to differentiate their own gender. Nature versus nurture comes into play as people ask themselves, if parents are the cause of boys acknowledging themselves as boys and girls as girls. By only participating in stereotypical boy or girl activities, nature’s course is undermined. In Katha Pollitt’s essay “Why Boys Don’t Play With Dolls” she explains why she believes that it is society’s influence that truly teaches a child to act like his or her own gender. Pollitt briefly discusses patriarchy and how parents unknowingly begin building the basis of a child’s identity since early childhood. Similarly in Deborah Blum’s “The Gender Blur: Where does Biology End and Society Take Over?” shares personal experiences of her own children and questions whether it was them who influenced their children. Blum analyzes why nurture
Identity is simply said to be a person’s own sense of their self, their personal sense of who they are or the image they give out to the rest of the society. Gender, sex and sexuality play a big role in our identity today because it also determines who we really are, not only to ourselves but also to the society. In society today, gender is when a lady acts so feminine or when a man acts manly while sex is either a man or a woman and sexuality is one is attracted to their opposite sex. People mostly judge on how a person looks like and then decide their sex.
The author faces both gender and religious oppression in her home. At first, the author seems like she was a young and immature child, getting an occasional whipping every so often, that she is “used to.” This was partly due to the fact that the author did not act like what a girl should. The author states that she was
Betsy Lucal, "What it means to be gendered me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
Norms in society do not just come about randomly in one’s life, they start once a child is born. To emphasize, directly from infancy, children are being guided to norms due to their parents’ preferences and choices they create for them, whether it is playing with legos, or a doll house; gender classification begins in the womb. A prime example comes from a female author, Ev’Yan, of the book “Sex, love,Liberation,” who strongly expresses her feelings for feminism and the constant pressure to conform to gender. She stated that “From a very young age, I was taught consistently & subliminally about what it means to be a girl, to the point where it became second nature. The Disney films, fairy tales, & depictions of women in the media gave me a good definition of what femininity was. It also showed me what femininity wasn’t (Ev’Yan).She felt that society puts so much pressure on ourselves to be as close to our gender identities as possible, with no confusion; to prevent confusion, her mother always forced her to wear dresses. In her book, she expressed her opinion that her parents already knew her gender before she was born, allowing them t...
In today’s society, it can be argued that the choice of being male or female is up to others more than you. A child’s appearance, beliefs and emotions are controlled until they have completely understood what they were “born to be.” In the article Learning to Be Gendered, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet speaks out on how we are influenced to differentiate ourselves through gender. It starts with our parents, creating our appearances, names and behaviors and distinguishing them into a male or female thing. Eventually, we grow to continue this action on our own by watching our peers. From personal experience, a child cannot freely choose the gender that suits them best unless our society approves.
As a child grows and conforms to the world around them they go through various stages, one of the most important and detrimental stages in childhood development is gender identity. The development of the meaning of a child’s sex and gender can form the whole future of that child’s identity as a person. This decision whether accidental or genetic can effect that child’s life style views and social interactions for the rest of their lives. Ranging from making friends in school all the way to intimate relationships later on in life, gender identity can become an important aspect to ones future endeavors.
This essay will argue that children should definitely be raised with gender, and address some key concepts and perspectives used in sociological analysis.
There are many different diagnosed disorders known to society, each disorder, with the many symptoms and side effects, serious in its own effect. Many disorders have symptoms that impact numerous areas of a person’s life and cause distress for the one suffering from these symptoms. All disorders are something that people are naturally born with and must learn to manage during life. Among these disorders is Gender Identity Disorder. Gender is a term used in discussing the different roles, identities, and expectations that our society associates with males and females. Gender identity shapes how we think and influences our behaviors. Most people identify their gender with the biological sex determined by genitalia; however, some experience discrepancy between biological sex and the feeling of being born as the wrong gender. According to American Accreditation Health Care Commission, gender identity disorder is a conflict between a person's physical gender and the gender he or she identifies with (Health Central). In “Gender Identity Disorder : A Misunderstood, Diagnosis” Kristopher J. Cook says, “Gender identity disorder denotes a strong and persistent desire to be of the other sex (or the insistence that one is of the other sex), together with persistent discomfort about one’s own sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the role assigned to one’s own sex.” (DOCUMENT) As with any disorder, there are many hardships for those that are struggling with Gender Identity Disorder, also known as GID. Many who have this disorder often find themselves battling depression due to insecurities with who they are and the unacceptance from society. This depression will often lead to suicide attempts and some, unfortunately, succeed. A Truth ma...
According to Kate Bornstein and their work Gender Outlaw, “the first question we usually ask new parents is: Is it a boy or a girl?” (46). This question creates a sense of a rigid dichotomy, by which individuals must outwardly conform to either being male or female. Individuals who do not prescribe to this binary concept of gender identity find themselves ostracized from much of society – ignored, ridiculed, and laughed at as an insignificant minority. For this group of people, “either/or is used as a control mechanism,” creating a normative group by which power can be derived from (102). According to Bornstein, the concept of the gender binary being the “natural state of affairs” is one of the most dangerous thoughts proliferated about gender within modern society (105). For individuals who do not conform to this socially created structure, they are seen as opposing the natural order of things, and subsequently, their power is stripped by society, and they are deemed as unnatural and inhuman. These oppressive labels create intense feelings of gender dissonance, and the pressure to conform can often overwhelm the individual, directly resulting in often horrific