Editor’s Note - This guest column was submitted by a local high school student and was verified as the author but chose - and we agreed - to run it under nom de plume or pen name, given the heated rhetoric that often surrounds the subject matter. CCCNews believes the topic continues to need light shed upon it through local voices who are seeing it from a personal perspective.
By Orsetta W.
“Gender refers to a complex system of roles, expressions, identities, performances, and qualities that are given gendered meaning by society. Usually, they are assigned to people based on the appearance of their sex characteristics at birth.
Gender characteristics can change over time and vary on cultures.” (savethechildren.org) Everyone I know grew up with the knowledge of, boys have penises and girls have vaginas. This information made sense on the surface, there shouldn’t be any reason to not think this right?
…But there is.
We as humans are much more complicated than we would like to be. The word “gender” is a socially constructed word we created to pretty much divide the sexes apart and create inequality among each other. The way we identify as human beings and whether that is identifying as a woman, a man, or maybe something else that just feels right to you has nothing to do with what we have between our legs. Our sex isn’t even a just male or female thing, intersex people are overlooked constantly by society, which is just another very disappointing downfall we have created for ourselves.
Sex is a wide spectrum, which many do not think about. Our minds are not as simple as everyone likes to perceive them, and we should not be subjected to this type of mindset as it only destroys creativity in youth.
People born with penises for centuries have been convinced you have to identify as a boy. You have to be strong; you have to do this or that and it’s the same for those that are born with a vagina. We were told from young ages ``boys will be boys”, “cover up, there are boys in the house” or the horrid saying of “women are too emotional”.
Are they? Are those who identify as women more emotional than you? Or maybe they are just fed up with you and your ignorance. This saying doesn’t even make much sense to me.
Hormones of course can cause someone to be more emotional, but I feel as if I rarely see women being overly emotional as to how many self-identified men I see doing so.
On the topic of emotions, gender roles are one of the biggest reasons why so many people, especially those that call themselves men suffer from depression and other mental health issues. Society has deemed the emotions they express as maybe too feminine, or “gay” which I hope we all know aren’t actually bad things.
Sadly many men have been subjected to this mindset, and now many believe their emotions aren’t important or if they try to express themselves, they’ll be exiled by their peers, which in most cases is actually true because their peers have been exposed to the same thought process.
Society needs to destroy this mentality.
We need to destroy the boxes we have created and placed each of ourselves in.
Humans are not meant to be put into the box that gender and the roles that come along with it force us into. Others may argue gender and gender roles are important because they provide “stability” in society which in some sense yes, yes it does.
Though I don’t think this system is providing stability for us anymore because of how we are evolving and because of how more people are realizing they are not happy living like this.
“Well you should just suck it up”, “You need Jesus!”, “you’re just a brainwashed teen” are the words I can already hear you screaming. Am I just making things up or are you just scared of change and can’t accept this backward ideology is only adding more harm to you now instead of order in society.
I really wish more people could understand that change is important to us as a species, and actually, we are only where we are now because we created change in society.
I don’t think we’ll ever accomplish a world where gender is obsolete, but I do hope for a world where fewer people are subjected to ignorance and can live in peace instead of worrying about this almost meaningless thing that gender is.
