Black or White?
Someone wrote…
Too many people think that gender is black or white, male or female, and tied to a person’s biology. In reality, the world of gender is far more diverse than that, and it’s beautiful.
Do you see the gender as a “world”?
Posted by julian on February 10th, 2009 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice 7 comments »
February 10th, 2009 at 8:20 am |
I see it as a spectrum. There are two ends to it and some people fall closer to the extreme ends, while others fall somewhere in between. But a female doesn’t necessarily have to fall towards the feminine end of the gender spectrum. A female can fall on the masculine end of the spectrum. We’re all different, and no one’s gender is exactly the same.
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February 10th, 2009 at 12:04 pm |
Interesting discussion!
I think of Gender as a kind of 3-D cloud: points falling in random places along the intersections of lots of spectrums that are coming in from all different angles, and where not every point hits every spectrum.
I also see gender as an open-ended free tagging field, but that’s just cuz I build websites.
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February 10th, 2009 at 12:16 pm |
I really like this cloud idea, and if I knew anything about Derrida, I would probably say it now, but I don’t. Except for that he said something about webs of interconnected meaning, and that sounds applicable here.
To me, gender is so much more complicated than a spectrum. You can’t explore a spectrum. You can explore a cloud. And I think you can explore gender.
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February 10th, 2009 at 12:32 pm |
I’m with you, Sarah — if it’s not black or white (and it’s not) then there’s no reason to constrain it to 1 or 2 dimensions. I think it’s also relative and multifaceted. As your perspective changes, so does another’s gender.
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February 10th, 2009 at 12:35 pm |
“As your perspective changes, so does another’s gender.”
Ooh, beautiful. Yes.
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February 10th, 2009 at 1:01 pm |
I see it as a space with at least two dimensions. One is how you identify: masculine at one end, feminine at the other. Another is who you’re attracted to: men at one end and women at the other. Most folks live in one of the corners (males attracted to men; females attracted to men, etc.) The Kinsey scale, for example, runs along two of the sides of the diagram. It’s easy to imagine more dimensions.
But some of us live in the middle: neither male nor female (or both); attracted to other middling kinds of people. I kind of wander around out there in the desert, visiting oases and then moving along. I met my partner there, in the empty quarter.
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February 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pm |
I like the term “gender galaxy,” which is very much like the cloud Sarah mentioned. Or gender universe, which is even bigger. Or… is there anything larger than a universe? Because that’s how big gender diversity is!
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