Having gender is NOT the problem!
— The real problem is the associations our society has assigned to it.
Words are abstract. We are responsible for associating negative or positive meanings to words that are actually just simple descriptions. Let’s talk about gender as an example. What is gender as an abstract word? Gender is the state of being a female or a male, in which a male has a penis and a female has a vagina. If you happen to have both genitals, you are called hermaphrodite. Gender is just the behavioral and cultural traits associated with our sex. Now, here is where it gets a little complicated. Because there are only two different kinds of sex, given that there are only two kinds of genitals, a gender of being feminine and masculine becomes insufficient to describe all other state of beings. As we know there are gays, who are males attracted to other males; lesbians, who are females attracted to other females and bisexuals, who are people attracted to both sexes; transgenders, who have the opposite gender identity to their phenotypical sex.
If gender is just a word used to describe our state of being (whether it be female, male, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender), then why are people trying so hard to create a genderless society?
According to this article, raising a genderless child can help our society be blind to gender inequalities by “giving all kids a chance to figure out what gender means (which) might be better than offering them a set of expectations to conform to.” These parents’ plan is to name their kids a unisex name, not to tell kids their gender and to let them figure it out on their own as they grow older. Is this what parenting has come to? Are we that afraid of gender that we are willing to let our babies figure it out on their own? In what world do our babies not need their parents’ guidance?! Having a gender is NOT the issue here. It is the associations our patriarchal society has assigned to each gender, where males are to be associated with strength, females with vulnerability, gays with derogatory words such as “fag”, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender with all these things that are bad and are the reason they get bullied! Gender is not supposed to do that though. It’s just supposed to make our lives easier by using a word to describe what you identify with. Instead of creating a genderless society, why not accept the qualities of each gender? Embrace each others’ differences, I say!
If you continue reading this article to the end, a professor from UC Berkeley says, “a better strategy in her mind is for parents to initiate conversations about gender and to expose their children to a wide variety of stories, people, toys and other influences.” Now, I believe this is a real solution that actually tackles down our problem, where we do not have to abandon our children to learn on their own what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. WE can change our society’s perception of males dominating and females being inferior. Naming our kids with unisex names and erasing gender is just running away from the real problem — we tend to bully people who are out of our society’s norms. Well, we can recreate those norms by making it trend as a group of people in a society. This time though, let’s recreate it by not having males be perceived as superior to all mankind.
In this quote from Vaughan, she claims giving our babies opposite gender names is the greatest (and smallest) mistake humanity has made. She compares it to innocent misinterpretations that have lead to horrors such as genocide, rape, genocidal rape, child rape and battery and the horror list goes on. I completely disagree. Genocide did NOT originate from an “innocent misinterpretation”, just as gender is NOT the innocent misinterpretation that has caused anything terrible in this world. Can you imagine what will happen if we completely take gender out of the picture in our society right now? Let’s say that the parents from the genderless article above wins, and children has no gender, everyone shares a genderless, public bathroom, everybody’s name is now unisex and we all grow up not knowing our own gender. Do people honestly believe rapists will disappear then? And that genocide, environmental destruction and other horrors will not exist anymore? Genocide is not caused by any simple or innocent misinterpretation, AT ALL. It is caused by greed and longing for more power hidden on social structures with their own secret agendas. So NO! I refuse to believe that gendered names is our biggest problem here. We just have to stop associating these gender words with such horrible and ignorant meanings. Be your name Amanda, Alexander or Pop, be nice to other people and let’s all enjoy finding oursleves and purpose in this world.
