#he taught it to us by calling it the ‘bruce jenner effect’

[studentshackworld-blog]

The most important factors influencing the gender identification of students

From childhood to adulthood, it has been engrossed in our minds that gender is a trait. I mean, while we were kids, we knew who is a boy and who is a girl. We learned to differentiate between them or we have been taught to learn the difference. A child’s mind doesn’t function the way we think it does. It has a very simple computational method. Adults teach children to differentiate right and wrong, safe and dangerous, or boy and girl. Children wouldn’t think like that if they are not guided since the start.

Studies found out that children, in general, don’t even learn to differentiate between gender till the age of two to three years. Basically, they can’t tell the difference between people on what color clothing they are wearing or what kind of physical features they have. We will be highlighting some factors which influence the gender identification in children.

·         What is gender identity?

 Since many years, humans have led to believe that there are only two types of genders; girl and boy. However, as people grow up they feel like they belong in the wrong gender, that is, they have a different body or they want to be both male and female or they do not want to be put into a spot where they have to choose from either. This is called gender identity when you can’t relate to yourself and you feel like you belong in a different body because you feel closer to that gender.

 ·         Factors influencing gender identity:

 1.      The main factor that plays a major role in influencing gender identity is hormonal changes when a child hits puberty. Researchers say that same-sex hormone that is vital for organ development sometimes increases in a person. When this effect takes place in a girl, she develops an extra organ that look like male genitalia. Because of this heightened hormone, girls show traits of a boy. Whereas, if this hormone is at the extreme in a boy, they don’t show any such physical traits. So students who are going through that need space to express themselves. They should talk to parents, counselors or friends about how to deal with the situation.

 2.      Another factor that influences gender identification is social and environmental impacting a student. This is by far the most ignored factor in our society. Since childhood, we teach our children how to behave and what to like or dislike. We don’t give them the space to express themselves and decide for themselves who they want to be. We focus on feeding them the stereotypical information like pink is for girls and blue is for boys. So if a boy likes pink color, he is called out “not to behave like a girl”. Or if a girl is interested in fighting, we tell her that “it’s not a ladylike thing to do”. So if a child is raised in a strict stereotypical household, he or she will adapt to that automatically. When children join schools, they are automatically on the same thinking pattern that was taught by their parents. Hence, social and environmental factors play an important role when it comes to gender identification of students.

 3.      Everyone seems to believe that chromosomes help us identify our genders. Whereas, this might not be true for some people. The most famous example recently of Caitlyn Jenner, who was previously known as Bruce Jenner should be kept in mind before we jump to conclusion. She spent most of her life fighting the voices in her mind meanwhile trying to balance her so-called normal life. But in reality, she knew the truth all along. It wasn’t because of her chromosomes that she switched from male to female. It was mere because of how she felt. That feeling leads to her making a life-altering decision after so many years. Students are generally oppressed and feel scared to share their feeling with someone. Gender identity can develop at any time for anyone. The reasons can be a change in a chromosome, environmental factors or just on how a person feels or relates to.

 Whatever you decide to be; male or female, you should be happy and content with your decision. Students should be helped if they are facing identity crises on early stages as they are the pillars of our society. Parents should not force their children to fit in to one category. This can lead to serious problems like depression, anxiety or suicide.

 Author bio: This article was written by Liza John, who is a doctor by profession, who also likes to write in her free time.And She help to medical students in their task and if they assignment writing service she assists free.

[nandinisniche]

What Sarees Can Teach Cis Feminists About Trans* Solidarity

(This article was originally published on Medium on June 11, 2015.)

Stop Saying Caitlyn Jenner Is Doing Femininity Wrong

In the midst of America’s earnest “trans moment”, a strong call for opposition is making itself heard even in progressive — and feminist — media.

It’s coming from inside the house

Trans* acceptance was never going to be a slam dunk, not even with the stupendous combined charm of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner, nor with the help of that old reliable — airbrushed sex appeal — thrust at us from magazine covers to proclaim their inauguration into True American Womanhood™. Nothing about upending gender expectations is ever that easy.

So this is where we are. The more we publicly the celebrate transgender acceptance, the more anti-trans worms continue to crawl out of the patriarchal woodwork. This is no surprise. To do my bit as a cis ally to trans people, I was ready to write to, reason with, and educate the haters. What is surprising is that so many of the haters are fellow feminists.

Meet the TERFs

Like many Tumblr-toting Roxane-Gay-quoting internet feminists, I had been under the impression that the old guard Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists — TERFs — were a dying breed. The internet circles I lurk in are trans-friendly spaces, at least in name. My Twitter feed was full of trans-positive articles even before Laverne Cox hit the front pages of American media. My favorite reddit communities ban on sight anyone who suggests that trans men aren’t really men, or that it would be dangerous to allow trans women into ladies’ toilets.

But about a week ago, I began to see some startlingly transphobic articles being shared on my carefully culled Facebook feed. Several feminists that I admired were openly disparaging the manner and style and details of Caitlyn Jenner’s public transition.

Some of them went the unabashedly bigoted route, linking to articles like Matt Walsh’s screed, “Calling Bruce Jenner A Woman Is An insult To Women”. Such hatefulness and incoherence is easy to refute (though not defeat). It’s difficult for progressives to take a christian conservative cis white man seriously when he says Caitlyn Jenner is “Disgusting, frankly.” Chalk it up to yet another thing Matt Walsh is wrong about today, and move on.

Other feminists have taken the more subtly transphobic path, criticizing Ms Jenner for playing up stereotypes about femininity. Today an NYT op-ed by Elinor Burkett, for example, is outraged at Chelsea Manning for saying she feels more emotionally sensitive since transitioning, and takes Ms Jenner to task for looking forward to wearing nail polish openly in public after her transition. These attacks are so much harder to deal with because they grow from a germ of truth. Most women alive today grew up battling these stereotypical, insulting assumptions about femininity by the world at large: that women are “too emotional”, that women are obsessed with superficialities like make-up and nail polish, that women are biologically hardwired this way and therefore calling women silly or superficial is not sexism!When we see these insults being given new life by the statements of transgender women in the public eye, we wince.

Yes, I admit it. I winced too.

But then I remembered the sarees.

The story of the sarees

This is where I tell you a little about my roots. I am from India. I grew up in Bengaluru in the ‘80s and ‘90s, back when it was still Bangalore and quite a lot more socially conservative than it is today, though much more liberal than many other parts of India. 

One of the fiercest battles I waged then was against the dress code imposed on me: traditionalism first, modesty a close second, to hell with my personal choice, and don’t even dare breathe the word ‘fashion’ for fear of being branded whorish[1]. Even after my family moved overseas, this dress code persisted, made me choke, made me seethe. My parents and I had screaming fights over my tight jeans. My underwear was scrutinized for possible covert sluttiness[2]. I wasn’t allowed to wear spaghetti strap tops even in my 20s.

I became quite the expert in the art of secret outfit changes when away at school and college. I also grew to hate the traditional Indian clothes that were constantly held up to me as markers of good virtue. Enforced modesty taught me to see every saree as a symbol of oppression[3].

Can you imagine my state of mind when I saw my peers both in real life and in the media embrace sarees as liberating fashion statements? I saw many South Asian women ‘reclaiming’ the saree as sensual, religious, feminine, traditional, and kickass all at once (and I doubt they had ever collectively lost their claim to begin with). Many desi girls and women overseas embraced sarees as defiant, joyous expressions of their minority cultural identity. I saw my school friends wear their sarees happily and stylishly, and I got thoroughly pissed off at them.

I thought they were stupid for welcoming their own oppression. I thought they were betraying me, betraying all the battles that I and every other Indian feminist had fought to escape our compulsory-desi-outfit shackles. I raged at them for giving ammunition to all the people who pressured me to dress traditionally: now they were able to point to all these other girls and say, See? See how happy they are in traditional clothes? Why can’t you be like that?

But most diasporan desi girls and women never fought the battles I fought, and don’t have the same associations with sarees that I do. Their life experiences allowed them to take a pleasure in sarees that will probably always be alien to me. For some of them, donning a saree was even something of a defiance. 

I had a dance instructor in junior college who was called to the Bar in London, and at one of the formal ceremonies that followed, instead of wearing the expected black robes, she wore a lace-edged black saree. She said she was telling the British to stuff it. I was stunned. I believe that was the first time I allowed that maybe, just maybe, sarees are not oppression for everyone all the time.

Not just sarees

No doubt other ethnic and religious groups have experienced a similar dissnoance. I have an Iranian friend who chafes under the laws that impose headscarves on her whenever she goes back home, and her journey has been toward understanding why American hijabis exist: to understand that for some American muslimahs, wearing the hijab is as radical an act as it is for my Iranian friend to take hers off.[4]

The moral of the story

What the saree can teach cis feminists is this: context matters. Our life experiences matter. The symbols and methods we choose for self-expression have particular meanings for ourselves, and we should not insist that our meaning is THE universal meaning.

For some women, nail polish is a symbol of all the dreary, expensive, time-consuming hoops women are expected to jump through to adequately perform our femininity. For other women, especially those who have spent their entire lives longing for and being forcibly denied any expression of femininity, nail polish may be a powerful and triumphant symbol of self expression.

How can the former among us take offence at the latter? It is well within our rights to interrogate the patriarchal rules surrounding nail polish from a critical perspective, but how can we justify interrogating trans women like that?

Can we even imagine how it must feel to be ‘officially’ allowed to wear nail polish after 65 years of being denied it? I want to throw Caitlyn Jenner the glitteriest mani-pedi party when I think about it, and I’m the kind of person that’s owned exactly four bottles of nail polish ever in all my life. (So… I guess we will be hiring professional manicurists for the party because I would paint her knuckles as likely as nails.)

Beyond the cis perspective

So far I’ve only considered trans women’s choices from a resolutely cis lens. But what if we tried looking at the performance of femininity from the perspective of trans women themselves? Would we see merely choice and triumph? Or would we see something more nuanced, and decidedly darker?

Consider: violence against transgender women is an epidemic. Even though trans women are only 10% of all LGBTQ people who report incidents of hate directed at them, they are 45% of murder victims in the same group. Passing as female can be a matter of life or death for trans women. In light of this, is there any way to see cis feminists’ criticism of trans women for “trying to hard” to be feminine as anything other than terrifying, hateful, or at least deeply misguided? I don’t think so.

Consider: trans people are more deeply and thoroughly scrutinized for their performance of gender than cis people like myself can ever fathom. The pressure on trans people to surgically feminize their appearance in order to “pass”, or in order to be more acceptable as romantic partners, is extremely strong even when they personally would rather not get surgery. (Yes, that’s right, not all trans people want surgery.) This pressure and scrutiny has extremely damaging effects on trans people — for example, over 40% of transgender people attempt suicide, compared to 4.6% in the general population and around 15% among LGB people. Should cis feminists really be piling on trans people for supposedly “over”performing gender, thus adding to the toxic culture of overscrutinizing trans people? I definitely don’t think so.

A better way to fight

Here’s what I think cis feminists should be doing instead:

#1 (for the Meets Minimum Standards of Human Decency badge) Unequivocally support and encourage trans people’s chosen manner of gender expression. It’s a battle they have fought long and hard for, and feminists of all people should not be in the business of yelling them for somehow “doing it wrong”. They are doing it right, because they get to decide what’s right for them. Period.

#2 (for the Feminist 101 badge) Support the efforts of trans activists who want to build a safer and more equal world for transgender people. This means reading trans feminist writing (good places to start include Laverne Cox, Zinnia Jones, Model View Culture, and if you’re feeling academic, Radical TransFeminist). This means educating ourselves on the specific obstacles to equality faced by the trans community: safety, access to healthcare, equal opportunity in employment, equal access to public toilets, etc.

#3 (for the Intersectional Feminist badge) Recognize that if there is a reason why media portrayals of famous trans people is problematic, it is because of the way this affects THE TRANS COMMUNITY, not cis women! The inimitable Laverne Cox says:

A year ago when my Time magazine cover came out I saw posts from many trans folks saying that I am “drop dead gorgeous” and that that doesn’t represent most trans people. (It was news to be that I am drop dead gorgeous but I’ll certainly take it). But what I think they meant is that in certain lighting, at certain angles I am able to embody certain cisnormative beauty standards. Now, there are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them and we shouldn’t have to to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves . It is important to note that these standards are also infomed by race, class and ability among other intersections.

In the spirit of #3, I highly recommend browsing the amazing Twitter hashtag, #MyVanityFairCover, where ordinary non-celebrity transgender people are creating their own “Call Me Caitlyn” style cover shots.

And finally, every time we feel anger or outrage stirring in response to something a trans woman says or does about her femininity, we need to remember the story of the sarees.

[1] & [2]: These were the terms used at me, and yes, they are extremely disparaging to sex workers.

[3]: Make no mistake: for hundreds of thousands of Indian girls and women, these clothes are indeed an oppression. Traditional dress codes are commonly imposed on Indian women to this day. I personally know far too many married women living in urban, upper class, highly educated joint families who do not have ‘permission’ from their in-laws to wear jeans.

[4]: Note that I am not suggesting that any choice whatsoever is feminist/radical just because it is a choice. Choice feminism is deeply flawed. What I am saying is, any symbol or act can be radical or oppressive depending upon personal and social context.

#trans solidarity cis cis-feminism caitlynjenner