EP 8: Her&Him

Bloom Education Series: Gender Affirming Care and Self Advocacy

Saturday, April 20, 2024
Other dates will be available - visit
www.borderlandrainbow.org

Borderland Rainbow Center
2714 Wyoming Avenue El Paso, TX 79903
 Find out more about the project here: EventBrite





Thank you Brandon  and  June for talking to Queer Onda El Paso.





There are many different ways someone can express their gender or sex.
 
Gender identity isn’t an easy topic to understand, and sometimes we need to unlearn some old ideas so we can really get what gender is all about. Most of us were taught that there are only two genders (man/masculine & woman/feminine) and two sexes (male & female). However, there is a lot more to it than that.

Gender is a social construct, an idea created by people to help categorize and explain the world around them. You may not notice it all the time, but each gender comes with a set of expectations, like how to act, talk, dress, feel emotion, and interact with other people. For example, when you think of a teenage boy living in the United States, what comes to mind? Do you imagine him playing football, or do you picture him dancing in a ballet recital? It’s likely that you imagined him playing football first — but why?

In the United States, we have very defined gender roles that describe what it means to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, and we learn what’s expected of us at a very early age. Even though these expectations are made up — there’s no reason why boys shouldn’t be encouraged to practice ballet, for example — gendered characteristics, activities, expressions, and stereotypes are really ingrained in our society, and shape most of our lives.

Here are some other gender-specific constructed differences that you may recognize: young girls often get pink clothes, and boys get blue clothes; women are deemed overemotional and men are discouraged from crying; a deep voice is considered masculine while a high voice is feminine; boys should play with building blocks and girls should play with dolls; men are athletic and aggressive, women are nurturing and gentle… the list of expectations based on gender can go on and on, and changes from culture to culture.

In reality, gender roles aren’t set in stone. Even though our society expects certain things from certain people, we don’t have to conform. Rather than on a binary (only two ways of being), gender and sex exist on a spectrum, meaning that there are a lot of different ways that people can express their gender identity or sex.
SOURCE: The Trevor Project