I've touched on gender issues before ( [1] [2] [3] ) But this past week made some of the questions more salient. One of the funny things about the poetry slam was that if someone asked you "Hey, did you see the guy wearing the dress?" you actually had ask "Which one?" (There were at least 3). Also, several of the poets would have identified themselves as transgendered. One was an Asian person who was at the very very beginning of a female to male transformation. So they had not undergone any surgery or hormone treatments, but they were still asking people to refer to "him" with the masculine pronoun. This person wore something under their clothes to flatten their breasts and was considering a hysterectomy.
It raises all sorts of questions: What does it mean to say a person is "male" or "female"? Is it genetic (XX or XY)? Is it anatomical? Is it a matter of external behavior? Is it internal psychology? If you are interacting with an individual who has a different definition of gender than you do, are you a bigot if you act according to your own definition instead of theirs? Does it matter if we are talking about bathrooms and locker rooms instead of the grocery store?
But I wonder, right now, society is in the middle of a transition when it comes to our collective understanding of sex and gender. What are the implications of all those changes? At the end of the day when all the dust has settled will we see all these changes as positive overall or something else? In one of his books, I think that S.H. Nasr describes Islam as a patriarchal religion (presumably he intends this in a "good" way). Is it possible that some stability and "rigidity" in gender roles is healthy? Or is a society where people freely play with gender lines closer to the ideal?
No comments:
Post a Comment