Nadia Cho
Student, University of California-Berkeley
Lost in Trans-lation
Posted: 07/30/2013 7:27 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nadia-cho/lost-in-trans-lation_b_3656705.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voicesNothing is more heavily enforced in our society than gender. We assume that gender is predetermined, that being a man or a woman is black-and-white, that our genitalia clearly make us one or the other, which is why individuals who are transgender, genderqueer or androgynous, who don't look or behave in ways that conform to accepted conceptions of gender, are met with intense invalidation, rejection and discrimination for challenging something that we assumed was completely fixed.
Everything in our culture conditions us to look, dress, talk, act and think in particular ways according to our biological sex. Therefore we fail to recognize that gender is a performance. UC Berkeley's Gender Equity Resource Center defines "gender" as "a set of socially constructed, assigned behaviors and identity patterns which are often perceived to be intertwined with and/or equivalent to one's sexual biology." Every day we dress up, do our hair, put on deodorant, speak and behave in ways that are perceived as either masculine or feminine according to the biological features that we were born with. The moment they are born, all babies are assigned a gender and a set of expected behaviors based on what's between their legs. We are not given the option of choosing the gender through which we would like to express ourselves throughout our daily lives.
