Gender, the way most people view it, is the absence or presence of a penis. Most people consider sex to be the same. After reading Kate Bornstein’s work, one realizes that sex is simply the act and gender to be more than having a penis. Gender can also be considered anything that categorizes a person. Sex, as Bornstein says, will forever be linked to gender because who we are attracted to will defines our gender identity. So who we are attracted to becomes part of our gender identity.
Social construction is one framework we use to make sense of gender. In reading 20 “The Social Construction of Gender,” how we “do gender” is discussed. Lorber explains that doing gender is placing males and females in roles that are typical. For instance, he discusses seeing two different babies and not being able to tell if it was a girl or a boy. When the father placed a ball cap on one he assumed it was a boy but then he noticed earrings and figured out it was a girl. This is what I feel it means that gender is socially constructed. As a society there are certain norms that we place on genders, such as earrings on girls and ball caps on boys. When we see someone who has deviated from the norm we tend to look at them strange or “do gender.”
Another framework we used to make sense of gender is biology, more specifically anatomy. As I stated before, most people see gender as having a penis or not. This framework is hard to categorize, as Bornstein explains, sometimes because you have individuals who have switched genders and for instance removed their penis. Where do we place these individuals? They were born with a penis which makes them a male but then they decided to remove their penis. Does this make them a woman? Since biology looks at gender as the presence or absence of a penis, then they should be considered women.
One more framework we can use to make sense of gender is culture. The culture that we are raised in can develop our ideas of gender. One example that comes to mind is a little boy in the toddler room of the day care I work at. We see him come to school with little shoes with flowers all over them and pink and purple long underwear on. When I first noticed this I thought how weird it was that a parent would dress their son in these typically girl colors and shoes. His parents are both from Russia and in a lot of countries their culture does not distinguish pink and purple as “girl” colors and shoes for small children as male or female. This is how I feel that culture can frame our understanding of gender. If in our culture we are raised to think that men raise the children and do the housework while women take the corporate world by storm, then this is how we are going to behave if we move into a different culture.