Born and Raised

All my life I’ve been exposed to different types of people with different personalities and different outlooks on life. Growing up in New York, being exposed to a wide range of people who were straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, the “differences” amongst people, didn’t seem so different to me. Yes I thought it was strange but it wasn’t some foreign act I hadn’t seen before. I grew up in a household full of woman: my mother, my aunt and my sisters. Sharing a room with my sister, colors like pink and purple and pictures with ballerinas and princesses dominated our room. My mom wouldn’t have it any other way because that is how her parents raised her. Not noticing at the time, I was slowly getting shaped into the gender role game. 
   

Guys hear “man up” and girls hear “act like a lady”. Now, what does that really mean? What does “man up and act like a lady” really mean? Even though I never paid much attention to “gender roles”, I am now aware that sexism and stereotypes play a huge part in these roles we are so accustomed to see. Before reading articles such as, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story” and “Toys Start the Gender Equality Rift,” I didn’t really think about gender issues. However, I now understand that these are serious issues people face everyday.

Such a story is told about a child who is brought up with the twist of not being born into a specific gender. In the story, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story”, the child was known as Baby X. Baby X’s sex remained unknown to “society” throughout the whole story. Of course, with not knowing what sex this baby was, came many problems. While buying clothes for Baby X a problem occurred such as “everything in the store [being] piled up in sections marked ‘ Boys’ or ‘Girls’. There were ‘Boys pajamas’ and ‘ Girls underwear’ and ‘Boys fire engines’ and ‘girls housekeeping sets’”(Gould 1). In this instance, gender roles seem to come out. Boys are being related to have engines and girls are being related to having housekeeping gifts. These items are being bought for the child meaning that gender differences are started way before the child even knows what is going on. Although parents buy these items and blame society, I feel that the only people they should be blaming are themselves because we as a whole create society.

Another problem Baby X encountered was at school and the activities it wanted to be a part of. Baby X asked the boys to do “girl things” and vise versa. Because “It seemed as if other children would never want an X for a friend” (Gould 4), Baby X felt alone. The reactions of the other children were normal because that was not what they saw as “normal”. At the end of the story people become more accepting of Baby X and not knowing its sex although they did have many questions as to what it was. “ By the time X’s sex matters, it won’t be a secret anymore”(Gould 6). Just like the kids in the story, I too used to find it different seeing someone taking part of something usually seen by the opposite sex. When something isn’t of your norm, it strikes a thought in your mind because that is what you’re used to seeing. Seeing how the students in the beginning were not accepting of Baby X to changing their mindsets about it shows you how people adapt to change and just because something is different does not mean it is out of the element.  Gender gaps are the main problem in this. Just because one sex is seen to do something more than the other does not mean that that sex should not do what it wants.

An example of this can be shown in the newspaper article “Toys Start the Gender Equality Rift” by Katrin Bennhold. The article is about an incident that occurred in London at the famous Hamleys store when a woman was looking for a present for her niece in the new gender-neutral store (Bennhold 1). The article continues on about a neuroscientist named Laura Nelson who advocates about the gender differences in the store. “Girls toys are often about beauty and the home, while toys for boys are mostly about being active, building things and having adventures,” said Laura Nelson (Bennhold 1). I agree that most stores are based on gender and sex, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people do not believe that this is an issue more especially to those that do not associate themselves with a specific gender based on their sex. What I agree most with what Ms. Nelson claimed was that “some things have changed. Most girls these days do play with Lego, and some boys love their play stoves”(Bennhold 2). As a child I never really saw children playing with toys  “outside” their gender. Even if girls did ride on trucks, the trucks were pink and had Barbie on it. Back in the days, it was typically wrong to see a male with a toy stove just like it was wrong to see a female with a toy truck. Nowadays, it seems as if we are becoming more excepting of gender differences. 

Now, leading into the “man up” and “ act like a lady” aspect, Nelson has a better outlook on how this problem can be made soluble such as attracting women into engineering jobs and breaking down and making space for the caring male such as a nurse or a caregiver (Bennhold 3). In reading this, I learned that gender variances are not easily broken apart but if we gave the situation a chance to show that gender does not prove the abilities of what someone has to offer then we could all learn from each other and the differences would soon dissipate and will no longer be a rising issue.

In learning about the different standpoints on how gender and sex are perceived, I now realize that just because a correlation may exists between each other, does not mean that they must cause each other to do specific things. Just because you are born male does not mean you must love to play with toy trucks just as if you are born female that you must love to play with dolls. At first glance, I didn’t seem to know about how serious this issue might affect some people because it did not directly affect me, but on closer inspection I noticed that gender variance is an important issue that should be taken more seriously.