Is gender just a religious concept?

[Joann]

I remember when I started kindergarten that I had to go to the boy's room.
Why are there boys and girls rooms"? I never received an answer.
Who says "Girls will wear pink dresses with lace and boys will wear striped shirts and pants"?
Where did "Pink and blue" come from? Why not orange and green?
In nature the male generally is more adorned ie birds, flowers ect but "men" are not to wear makeup.
Men are to be competitive, Woman cooperative".

And the worst one, "Bellbottoms are for woman only"
No way, I want em back.

[patstar]

Largely, YES; and a third-dimensional incarnation concept.

[Soren]

The pink and blue was originally reversed: girls were given light blue because of the virgin mary, and boys were given light red because of Mars (the god, not the planet). I don't know why pink became the girls' color and blue the boys'.

Dresses were originally for upper class, since they restricted movement it was seen as being for privileged people. It was probably moved onto females to restrict their movements at a later point, while males were given pants so they could move easier and thus, have more freedom.

I have no clue why there "needs" to be segregated washrooms.

I don't see why men aren't socially allowed to wear makeup- I mean, JFK did, and shortly after he was elected president.

Males usually are competitive in all species, in order to prove themselves worthy of mating with to the females. Women are supposed to be subservient to the men for some reason.

And I have never heard anyone say bellbottoms were for anyone.

I think that the way gender is treated may be religiously altered, but I believe there is an inborn difference as well. After all, females in the wild have the inborn knowledge of presenting themselves, while males have the inborn knowledge of mounting. That being said, there is a small percent of females that mount and males that present, but without understanding the animals' language it is impossible to tell if they are transgendered or homosexual.

[stavraki]

I remember when I started kindergarten that I had to go to the boy's room.
Why are there boys and girls rooms"? I never received an answer.
Who says "Girls will wear pink dresses with lace and boys will wear striped shirts and pants"?
Where did "Pink and blue" come from? Why not orange and green?
In nature the male generally is more adorned ie birds, flowers ect but "men" are not to wear makeup.
Men are to be competitive, Woman cooperative".

And the worst one, "Bellbottoms are for woman only"
No way, I want em back.

I don't think we fully know and appreciate what gender is.  You can caste gender concepts through anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuropsychology, neurology, biopsychosociology and numerous other disciplines but it remains an elusive concept.  Deterministic ideas about gender (ideas about the cause and effect of gender) can be caste through social determinism (nurture) or biological determinism (nature, eg 'in-utero endocrine hypothesis'--hormone events during inutero exposures), though the division is problematic in the first place.

I've been doing some reading about gender and I'm finding the area elusive.  Though one study stays with me.  By the age of two years of age, gender typing (as perceptions of others' gender) have set in in children.  The study I read went like this:

dress a girl up in a football uniform and cut her hair, and ask 2 years olds 'is this a picture of a girl or a boy'.  they all say the picture of a girl is of a boy.  The study reveals how pervasive and entrenched gender typing is, and how early our ideas about others' genders sets in.

The funny thing is, the study also shows how culturally bound gender typing is.  Because, after all, when we were cave men and women, didn't everyone have long hair and we didn't have football outfits.  This to me also suggests that there might be a 'hardwiring' tendency of the *judger* to want to or tend to split the world into 'two' 'species' of humans, male and female.  Though the study also reminds us that there is no inviolable reason to presuppose that gender typing is 'inflexible'.  For example, what would we all think about others if we didn't have a word for 'male' and 'female', but only one word for us all 'biol-chiild' for children, say.  And if our cultures all had cross-dressing concepts imbued into us from birth.  So that half the kids wore 'dresses' on one day and 'pants' on another, in truly cross-gendered concepts of dress code.


cheers
stav

[DriftingCrow]

I don't think gender is necessarily a religious concept, I think it's mostly a sociological one. I think gender came about due to confusion over sex and gender, and biological needs -- such as women getting pregnant means they can't really go out on the hunt with the men and need to sit in their cave/hut/house and do tasks which eventually became known as "woman's work" like weaving and cooking. This biology lead to biological males being associated with the gender traits of "strong, resourceful" etc. while biological females got associated with "caring [for children]/nurturing" etc.

The concept of gender came about long before the religions that are still around today or ancient ones we learned about in history class.

Some modern-day religions (or at least the people who practice them) do incorporate "gender" as part of their religion, we can all probably think of a few instances where gender roles have been strictly enforced by religious people. There are religious text out there that do seem to prescribe certain roles for each biological sex to play. So, unless one believes that these parts of the texts or certain interpretations are here by divine grace, then one can assume that these texts/interpretations were influenced by the pre-religious culture of prescribed gender roles.

The pink and blue was originally reversed: girls were given light blue because of the virgin mary, and boys were given light red because of Mars (the god, not the planet). I don't know why pink became the girls' color and blue the boys'.

I read before that boys were given pink to wear as a baby because pink is a shade of red, which was considered a very masculine color (blood, war, fire, passion) and girls were given blue to wear because it was more femme (calm water, blue skies). But, because of superstitions, some people thought evil spirits came and killed baby boys, so people started switching the colors so the spirits would think the boys were really girls and not kill them, since no one really cared as much if a girl died.

In some countries, like Azerbaijan, pink is still considered a very masculine color and there are quite a bit of pink buildings around (including one of their important government buildings).

[DriftingCrow]

I've been doing some reading about gender and I'm finding the area elusive.  Though one study stays with me.  By the age of two years of age, gender typing (as perceptions of others' gender) have set in in children.  The study I read went like this:

dress a girl up in a football uniform and cut her hair, and ask 2 years olds 'is this a picture of a girl or a boy'.  they all say the picture of a girl is of a boy.  The study reveals how pervasive and entrenched gender typing is, and how early our ideas about others' genders sets in.

The funny thing is, the study also shows how culturally bound gender typing is.  Because, after all, when we were cave men and women, didn't everyone have long hair and we didn't have football outfits.  This to me also suggests that there might be a 'hardwiring' tendency of the *judger* to want to or tend to split the world into 'two' 'species' of humans, male and female.  Though the study also reminds us that there is no inviolable reason to presuppose that gender typing is 'inflexible'.  For example, what would we all think about others if we didn't have a word for 'male' and 'female', but only one word for us all 'biol-chiild' for children, say.  And if our cultures all had cross-dressing concepts imbued into us from birth.  So that half the kids wore 'dresses' on one day and 'pants' on another, in truly cross-gendered concepts of dress code.

This gave me another thought: I did read before that humans evolved to pick up certain physical cues to help to survive. Could creating the concept of gender, rather than just physical sex, been another sort of survival mechanism? Maybe it somehow helped human ancestors pick better mates or something?

[stavraki]

<--snip-->I think gender came about due to confusion over sex and gender, and biological needs -- such as women getting pregnant means they can't really go out on the hunt with the men and need to sit in their cave/hut/house.....In some countries, like Azerbaijan, pink is still considered a very masculine color and there are quite a bit of pink buildings around (including one of their important government buildings).

makes sense.  I wonder, for example, how differently we would think and feel about gender if men had the wombs, penis and testicle, but women the vagina and mammary glands.....I'm pretty sure we'd 'psychologise' gender very differently.  And the pink concepts being 'male' in other cultures reminds me that 'dress code is not hard wired in the genes'.

This gave me another thought: I did read before that humans evolved to pick up certain physical cues to help to survive. Could creating the concept of gender, rather than just physical sex, been another sort of survival mechanism? Maybe it somehow helped human ancestors pick better mates or something?

Interesting - there's probably something in that, I reckon.  We're quite visually focussed, yet we experience ourselves also in psychological ways.  What popped into my head was that biological sex, gender (and I'll add in sexual orientation) make for three constructs that are psychological experiences, with some kind of relationship to visual cues.  Like sexual orientation, gender identity has some kind of relationship with visual cues as well (but for different reasons--same sex attracted people see sexual arousal in the 'form' (sex?) of another, whereas, gender identity is some kind of mental experience of the self as associated with a whole bunch of visual and non-visual features).

Having said that, and about sexual orientation (different focus) sometimes we're sexually attracted to mind and for other reasons that transcend or short-circuit visual cues.

cheers
stav