So since we just posted a really, really long post about the many issues surrounding transgenderism in our society and the world today, here are just a few more additions to the "gender train" on which we're chugging along.
The first relates to a story from Monday, December 12, 2011, about two identical twins where one of the twins is a transgender female and the other is male. And the twins are currently 14 years old. Stories like that of these two children raise really interesting implications for scientists and geneticists trying to understand how human sexuality and gender work and develop, but these stories also point to where our sociopolitical and cultural understanding of sexuality and gender norms is going as well. For example, the parents of these twins chose to make their family's story public "in the hopes that their story might shed light on the struggle of others." As is obvious from our previous post, there are still many obstacles that our society as a whole has placed in the path of our LGBT members, but the fact that this family and others like them are supportive, brave, and vocal enough to share their personal stories publicly is indicative hopefully of some level of growing tolerance or awareness of the critical need to address these issues and promote acceptance and understanding of one another. More power to this family and all the others with similar experiences.
"Our America with Lisa Ling," a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, did an episode a while ago on being a transgender individual in the United States. Every episode that Ling has made were all so good that each really deserves several blogs dedicated specifically to it, but the story of a young transgender child and her family was particularly interesting (and relevant to the present discussion - look forward to more posts with Lisa Ling clips in the future and check out the show, for real).
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Moving right along on the rails, this story came out today on Yahoo News. Apparently, Lego (one of my all-time favorite things ever as a child) is launching a new product line geared toward girls. And I'm sure you can guess what the color scheme is. This is not to call out Lego specifically but again one of those shout outs to society about what's up with stuff like this. When I was a little girl, I remember going to Toys'R'Us with my parents one day to find out that the store had been completely re-arranged into "boys" and "girls" toys. I remember being really angry and frustrated because now instead of all the toys I liked to play with being in one area of the store, they were scattered all over these different boys and girls sections. What about playing with Legos makes them inherently masculine and "boys only" so much so that Legos has to design a brand new product to "appeal" to girls? Or dolls being called "Barbies" for girls and "action figures" for boys? I mean let's be real here, GI Joes are dolls - dolls that are just about as unrealistic as Barbies and, like Barbies, are one way of teaching boys and girls gender norms for men and women. And the same can be said of many, many other products for children. We even go so far as to attach gender to things as arbitrary and inanimate as colors.
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| fight that stereotype! |
Continuing with the Legos example, I loved playing with Legos because they allowed me to be really creative - I could build houses and play with the people and horses, or my friends and I could pool our Lego collections together to design intergalactic super-space stations with control rooms and spaceship launchpads (trust me, they were awesome). When Lego came out with their version of Indiana Jones, I just about died because now I could take my childhood dream of being Egypt's Minister of Antiquities (my second grade self would have killed for Zahi Hawass' job) and integrate that with one of my favorite toys.
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| twenty-some years later, yeah, I still have this set. and I know you're jealous. |
If my parents had prevented me from playing with Legos because it was a "boy's toy," I would have missed out on the unique and fun ways for a child to develop his or her creativity and imagination that Legos give a kid. Sure, there are tons of other toys that allow a child to develop similar skills, but my broader point is that we restrict our own development by categorizing things into strict "boys" or "girls" only categories that are superficial and arbitrary. We as a society should be better than that.
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