[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.

[jsmith]

from a theoretical perspective, raising a child as genderless sound absolutely fabulous, but how possible is this to do when almost everyone else around you generally goes with cultural and societal beliefs when it comes to gender.

Y'all are right about this... I guess one would just have to hope that her child is hard-headed enough to ignore the attempts at indoctrination by people who aren't her parents (school, peers, extended family, etc).