[culturehandy]

I pitched this in the Community Forum and it was well recieved.

This thread is all about the politics and cross cultural and societal views on gender.

I started thinking increasingly about gender when the media frenzy about Caster Semenya emerged. It is my opinion that the only reason people questioned Ms. Semenya's gender is because she appeared to be "masculine". That is, she looked masculine according to the ideas of society at large. Had she had softer, more "feminine" features, questions of her gender would not have come up.

So, what is gender? We know that there is sex, your biological sex, but gender is a social construct.

[deschatsrouge]

In our culture I think we associate Gender and biology so closely because our culture only has two genders. Some cultures like Samoa and India have a third gender. I used to date a Transgendered person and in that experience all the social constructs of gender were pointed out to me. Like knitting. Men can have the ability to knit but it's a "woman's" pastime. She explained to me that some times transgendered people take on the roles of their target gender just to appear more similar to it. to me this points out how little biology plays in gender.

Humans can't really live without culture. I think this is the reason we are so apt to accept gender roles. Culture tells us what gender is, but because in our culture gender is tied with biological sex we think in black and white, male and female terms. If I understand correctly transgendered people in other cultures are satisfied sometimes with just taking on gender roles and not altering their anatomy to match their desired biological sex.