What is gender? 

Now I know I can’t tell you much about what gender is but I can tell you where we see it and how it affects us everyday. You can see gender place on such weird things like colors , blue is for boys and pink is for girls. You also see it in home roles such as the motherly role is usually the women and the fatherly role usually assign to the men. You see it with toys for children little boys play with trucks and little girls play with dolls. All these examples just further this binary construct of gender being only male and female. Which in my opinion is so suffocating.  We can’t talk about gender without talking about privilege. Yes, there is some privilege assign to people whose gender expression matches their gender identity and that is called cis privilege. Cis privilege gives the person the ability to walk through the world without having to be question about their gender identity. They are able to wake up and fit into the boring binary gender standard and not be harassed and abused by others. Now you may be asking who made up all these rules? My guess would have to be some old white man or many old white men. 

 So how do I feel about gender? Well from the scope of a non-binary masculine presenting person, I find myself agreeing with Kate Bronstein in their view of gender. Which is that I cannot give you an answer to what gender is, because gender in itself is personal to each and every one of us. I went through and read some of these posts and that’s when I realized that gendered was so personal to each of us because of the experience we have all been through molding and shaping our understanding of what I would define as this fluidity. O yes, I may not be able to give you a definition, but I can give you a descriptor and that is fluid. Why is it fluid? You might ask me, well here Bronstein says “I think there is a transformative nature to gen- der, but I think it’s blocked in most cultures and stagnates in two ways: “Do you know what is always changing? Running water like a river. I’ve learned from Pocahontas my favorite Disney princess, yes, I understand Pocahontas is very problematic for many reasons, but she did teach me that a river is always flowing and changing much like gender, and water is a fluid, so gender is a fluid well at least to me. As someone who is learning everyday about their gender expression, I find myself swimming through gender and unlearning all these things I have been taught such as nail polish is for girls and weightlifting is for men, men don’t wear makeup and my favorite boys are not supposed to cry. All these things that have cause me so much confusion and pain as a small child trying to navigate this binary world that doesn’t have to be. But unlearning all of this have given me such joy and finally gave me the permission to express myself the way I feel. My expression of myself is me and personal to who I am. I have a feeling that some of you will feel the same way about it. I think Kate said it the best “because I really don’t believe there’s any single correct theory. ln terms of theo- ries about gender, I’m more convinced about what gender isn’t rather than what gender is. “