Gender...

Blog – Explain a time in which you were taught a bout gender in the way these authors were taught.

I feel extremely isolated from this subject. I've always recognized it, been aware of it, but it's just not something I think about that much. From appearance, it's not hard to tell what gender a person is, and that is what I assume they are. Not because I have an issue with people identifying with whatever gender they want, but because that is the general way society identifies people - from a very basic level, be it wrong or right. It's not stereotyping, necessarily, because that would assume that a person has certain qualities based on a set of identifiable characteristics, but it's more of a concept of generality. It's like the blue chair idea - everybody assumes the chair is blue, and if somebody wanted to call the chair yellow then that would be fine. Of course, these are people's lives we are dealing with here. Chairs are nonsensical items, but people are not. Many people take gender very seriously. Growing up in Africa, I was pretty isolated from incidents of people determining their own gender. I can only imagine how taboo that would be if somebody there tried to change the gender society labels them as. It just didn't happen. Then again, to a foreigner, there are behaviors that would jump out, such as men holding hands while walking down the streets. In America, that would be considered homosexual. In Kenya, that was what friends did. There was nothing about gender or sexual preference in the image of two men holding hands as in America. But there were defined gender roles just as in America. Women were generally the house-keepers and took care of the children. Women weren't oppressed, it was like how it is in America. Women could work if they wanted, women could live alone, women could wear what they wanted (although clothing was considerably more conservative). But women were also, 9.999999999% of the time, the ones who cooked the meals, took care of the children, and took care of the house. There were, however, women, who quite impressively, did all of that by themselves. Countless women who lost husbands to AIDs and, maybe had AIDs and/or HIV themselves. And some of there children probably did to. And these women did everything. They worked, they cooked, they grew crops, they owned animals, they paid for their children to get through school. And they didn't have any money. The courage and strength of these women is beyond words. And they are not scarce. AIDs is as big of a problem as one will find. I think that's why I never really put that much though into gender. To me, a person is defined by the content of their character, as opposed to their gender. I consider the difference between the genders minuscule because we all just the same.