Gender In Judith Lorber's Night To His Day

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Child X, unfortunately this child isn’t professor X’s super power wielding prodigy, they have another power instead; X was raised free of sexual roles in a world that revolves around the socially acceptable labeling process that is gender. The excerpt “Night to his Day” analyzes and shows the significance of how society perceives and controls everyday thought of how people look. Judith Lorber hits the point that is becoming increasingly relevant in my life and the lives of many other Americans growing up in today’s world. “Indeed, it is at puberty, when sex characteristics become evident, that most societies put pubescent children through their most important rites of passage, the rituals that officially mark them as fully gendered- that is, …show more content…

These colors also covered a child in that pumpkin patch that day, covered with a tee-shirt and a pair of shorts. “Ah, a boy, I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child’s ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done,” (Lorber). This child, me, never grew out of this style of clothing and always went for the comfortable lifestyle avoiding jeans and skirts for more “boyish” graphic tees. Society may look at me and think this person is not ready to be a woman or this thing is not fit to be a man. At the end of the day the only thing I want to be is myself. “Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine,” (Lorber). Without the ability to specifically identify who or what a person is, a plethora of people feel left in the dark, and aren’t sure what to do without their carefully constructed classification system. Do I even fit in with the social construct of gender? Or am I just this special child X that defies the stereotypes, growing up and leaving other members in the dark just by showing my true

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