Doing Gender

I’ve learned that gender is socially constructed, while sex is biological throughout the years. And I believe that this gender binary can be very harmful because some people don’t fit into the category of what a woman or man is. But one thing that Butler mentions in Gender Trouble that stuck to me is how since men and masculinity are seen as the dominant and majority anything that is NOT man/masculine it is automatically a woman/feminine. I don’t know, it was a way that I have not seen it before. I know women are seen as minorities and that they are labeled the “Other.” Anyway, the topic of gender and the gender binary can get really complicated because like I said before not all people identify with the men and women categories. Some people are in between or simply don’t identify with any gender and that is where I feel like the gender binary needs to either be destroyed or it needs to expand it’s “binaries” to include all sorts of genders.

In this country or rather world, there is this insane obsession to gender people right way. On the first sight of a person even a baby, we try to figure out what the gender or rather sex of a baby. And if you notice for children, and I’m taking this example from another article I read awhile ago, where the author noticed that when looking at a baby they would try to figure out the gender simply by looking at it’s ears, clothes, colors, and  toys. And that idea of doing gender has always fascinated me ever since I became aware of looking at things in a feminist perspective. But it’s this need in our society, that has to know the gender of a person, because that is the very first impression you give to people and it’s this type of necessity to know what pronouns to use towards a person.