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Essay 2 Diversity & Power
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Essay 2 Diversity & Power
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D&P Final Essay 2Nina Aalders, 2777843, 897 words
Generally, gender identity is talked about regarding adults and how they experience gender.
In the past years, gender has become more accepted and incorporated into our society,
enough that children are being taught about it in high school and follow courses about it.
However, we do not talk about gender identity in children often, even though it is just as
present in their lives as in the lives of adults. For example, children in the U.S. can now
choose out of 58(!) gender identities when they create a Facebook account.
Children often start as one part of the dichotomy of sex (male versus female), which is also
where the social construction of sex and gender start. Society and a child’s environment help
them develop their gender and give children the ideas about what having a certain sex
entails, how they should act and what they should like as someone of that sex. These are
some descriptions and classifications that have been constructed through parents’ and by
extension their child’s, culture, history and environment (Pels, 2022). Nowadays, children
are taught about gender early on and get lessons in what it means and how they should act
from an early age. They are taught that there are certain activities that are normal for their
sex, as passed down through their parents and grandparents. Through these earlier
generations, the ‘norm’ of what men and women can and cannot do was constructed
(Fausto Sterling, 1995).
During a child’s school time, in primary school, but especially in high school and beyond,
children develop their gender identity and are encouraged to discover more about this and
ask questions. Wijngaarden (2022) makes the joke that a child’s deliberation of their gender
starts when they are still toddlers, but then says that while this may not be true, there is
often a lot of confusion by the time the child gets to high school. The child is confused
because of the influence that its economic, cultural, social and political environment has on
its development and understanding of themselves and the world around them. The
intersectionality of these domains into the lives of people influences what they believe and
how they feel about themselves and others. Crenshaw (1993: 1299) continues on this topic
, to say that maybe it is not as important for the child to know exactly what gender they are
and what category they belong to. Maybe the most important thing is that they begin to
recognize that identity politics take place on sites such as the high school where different
categories or identities intersect. This may be more important than categorizing everyone,
thus allowing them to recognize that there are many different identities and gender roles,
and that not everyone can be put into a category.
As said before, when children begin to discover gender identities, they are often confused by
the different opinions and options. They begin to discover how their biology is not equal to
their gender, how until that moment they thought gender was how they acted as boys or
girls and how this was socially constructed by their society and environment. But they also
discover that there are different opinions on gender and the intersectionality of this. There
are some people who use methodologies that deconstruct analytical categories used to
describe categories, there are others who only use methodologies and categories where
everything has been pre-defined by the people and generations before them, and there are
the people in-between the previous two approaches, who do use categories, but are critical
of them and often focus on people who do not fit exactly in the groups or categories already
present so that they can reveal how complex those people’s experiences are within such
groups (McCall, 2005).
So, the children begin to think about gender and get told that it is something they decide. In
deciding this, they get influenced by different parts of their environment, norms and values,
history, where they live, etc. They get influenced by the intersectionality of gender, while
often not being aware of it. But even though gender is intersectional and you are told to
decide on your gender identity, this is not always as clear-cut. This is because not everyone
agrees that gender identity is something you can decide on, it is not something you are born
with but become, and varies across time and space (Mead, 1928). For example, Butler (1988)
argues that identity is constructed through our actions and performances, and that there is
no gender identity behind our own expressions of gender. She argues that gender is not
something we are, but become and act out through our performances. Sex would then be
gender because as children we are taught that we need to act in a certain way to fit our sex,
our gender role/identity. So, sex would then be gender. While Butler (1988) argues this,
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