Let’s Talk Gender
Gender is a conversation that is difficult to navigate because for so long the term was used for one specific purpose: to determine the behaviors of the sexes and to profit off of those exact behaviors. This idea was so normalized and accepted because it was publicized in a way that the sexes had only seen representation of their “gender” televised as either the damsel in distress or the dominant and broady hero sweeping the damsel in distress off of her feet and carrying her into a life that exists solely in American romcoms and telenovelas. The truth is that dressing “androgynous” or embracing femininity in manhood isn’t a new concept that just recently developed with the spike of social media conglomerates and their aid in platforming the queer. Breaking gender guises isn’t even a political protest. It is a practice outdone by the queer community since the beginning of time. Surfacing with historical figures like Joan of Arc and the gay history of British royals to the Queer movement of Stonewall. The only difference is that now, with the platform of media, gender can now finally be recognized as a term solely used for confinement. It is a term coined by the patriarchy to profit off of internalized misogyny and hyper-masculinity. We have gender to thank for the violent crises in queer communities and the patriarchy to thank for enforcing the societal quo.
Plato’s Symposium
Plato was one of the first historical figures to introduce androgyny as a subculture of love. He hosted a symposium in which he proposed for his attendees to consider the factors of life, to which he answered that the highest form of life was to become a lover of wisdom and philosophy in which men and women both engaged in despite the outer bodily appearance. He particularly distinguishes body from spirit, and explains that to immerse in love is to have a spiritual participation as opposed to a bodily one. In his dissertation the Republic, he explains that if society were to establish gender equality, there would be the few whose anger accounts for the deprecation of the entire movement.
So how can we account for the truth of Plato’s perspective?
Well… isn’t it happening now?
Despite my earlier case that gender fluidity is not a brand new subculture of the 21st century social media outbreak. Social media has undoubtedly aided in the ability for queer people to have platforms in which they can express their personal relationship to gender identity. It has also aided in the other side to rage against those who break the social normatives. The issue of gender has no need to be a political conversation. Our bodies are not political playgrounds whose behavior is constructed by the ancient ideals of what it means to be lady-like. It is no one’s right to be angry at the way another person chooses to identify themselves, and their identity should have no barren in the systems of life. Like…. where to use the bathroom?
Gender is indisputably an impossible subject to define clearly with respect to everyone. It is even a study of academia that graduates spend years and thousands of dollars to understand. Yet still, why is it such a priority to define gender when its only use is that of conformity and why do we consider non-conformists to be menaces to society, when it is indeed the founders of the society and the developers of these social constructs that are the ones inflicting such violence, hatred and outbursts?
There is no room for gender in political discourse, but if we’re going to talk about it then we should start by asking the ones who started the conversation in the first place, the politicians who look in the mirror.