This is Sophia and Oliver. They are being raised by the same family,
live in the same house, attend the same school; all of their resources are
the same but their outcome will be completely different. The only difference?
Their gender: Sophia is a girl and Oliver is a boy.
According to the Trump
administration’s planned definition, “Sex means a person’s status as male or
female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth”.
So far so easy, but there is always a bigger picture. Through this definition
transgender people have been completely spoken out of existence, as have
intersex and non-binary people (intersex
means people born with genitals not clearly classifiable as male or female and affects
1 in 1,500 to 1 in 2,000 births). Following Trump's definition, all of those
people are nonexistent, especially in legal matters, and the definition is
therefore very controversial.
Gender identity has always
been a topic Trump's administration and lots of people don’t see eye to eye on.
Two sexes and two fitting genders? Most likely not as easy as that. Looking at
chromosomes, XX generally equals female, XY generally male. What about
mutations such as XXX, XXY, XYY, people with XX and XY cells, people with XY
chromosomes looking female or vice versa, etc.? Sex is complicated just as
gender is. Obama's administration, for example, considered gender to be more of
an individual choice allowing people to legally identify as masculine,
feminine, both or neither. The state of New York introduced the opportunity for
their citizens to choose a third option besides male or female on their
driver’s license and gave people the option to change their gender on their
birth certificate in 2018. This can protect transgender people from having to
out themselves involuntarily to police, health care, employer and so on.
But still, when you think
back on your days in kindergarten, there were clear rules regarding who plays
with who and what kind of interest each child should have, based on their
gender. Stereotypically, being a boy means blue, cars, mechanics, science, etc.,
whereas being a girl is connected to pink, horses, princesses, makeup, etc.
Those stereotypes cause
every single person on this planet to have to deal with expectations put onto
them by society. Every country, region, wherever you want to draw the line, is
living with those stereotypes and hands them down from generation to
generation. Until this date, gender stereotypes are still extremely traditional
even though we all have been living with them our entire life and may not fully
agree with the person we are supposed to become. Maybe you don’t want to wear
dresses as a girl, unbelievable till 1945 and the women’s movement; or you want
to put on makeup as a boy, for which people are still discriminated against
today.
The bitter reality is that
we do have laws protecting people that do not fit into narrow definitions of
gender such as article 14 of The Human Rights Act: “Prohibition of
discrimination” which states “The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set
forth in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act shall
be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, color,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin,
association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.” But
society still has not completely accepted that gender identity is more complex
than being male or female and that there is no threat coming from different
kinds of gender identity.
It is as easy as live and
let live.
The truth is, there is no
end to gender stereotypes in the near future but that doesn’t mean that there
is no end to them at all. The problem is, gender stereotypes maintain the
societal system we live in today. They make it possible to evaluate and explain
behavior of other people and allow us to assign those people to groups with
characteristics associated with them. This is the way our social thinking
works, has always worked and will probably be working for quite some time.
Developing society is a long
shot but a necessary one. Reflect on your own way of thinking because you
should tolerate the opinions and behavior of others so that they will similarly
tolerate your own.
Never forget LGBT+ rights
are human rights and in the end we are all just humans.
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