Neat look at genderAnd then I realized what was going on: I assumed she was judging me for buying strawberry protein powder because, without even noticing, I thought that strawberry wasn't a flavor that boys drank. Nor was vanilla. Boys drank chocolate, because brown is a boy's color and pink is a girl's. I don't know how it had never occurred to me before, even though it surely affected so many aspects of my life. I was picking which flavor to drink based on which gender I associated it with. I was gendering protein powder.
The more I started to think about it, the deeper it went. Why, for instance, did I always drink Coke instead of Sprite? Because, somewhere back in the recesses of my mind, I'd learned that Sprite was a girl's drink. Boys drank Coke. This strict, unintentional gendering of inanimate objects didn't start and end with beverages, though. I'd pick a blue pen over a purple one; a brown shirt instead of red.
Where I'm from, lines of gender and gender expression follow traditional rules that are held hard and fast.
