Loosening Gender Ties

Loosening Gender Ties

When we take a close look at society in the past centuries it’s almost absurd to imagine how so many social norms have changed. Although we still struggle with the rise in individuality amongst our society, it is becoming much more accepting. Sexuality is a very personal topic and has been defined by what society creates “gender” to be. If you’re biologically a male you’re automatically supposed to prefer a female for a partner, and the other way around. Back in the day you would never encounter a man dressed as a women or vice versa, you would hardly ever even hear about someone being gay or lesbian because it just wasn’t acceptable. This was largely because religion was much more prominent throughout society than it is now. The most common was Catholicism and Christianity or other branches of them, and so it was always preached that man should lie with women and other conservative rules. Due to this strong religious influence our society shut out anyone who was remotely “different” and that’s why you would never see anyone expressing himself or herself if it was in anyway different from what society accepted.

Now, it’s the 21^st century and we have genuinely made some good progress. One aspect of this change would have to be the acceptance of more and more transsexuals. We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of people who are self-identifying as the opposite gender that they were born into because they feel they were born into the wrong body. This seems like a very far-fetched concept but it is obviously affects hundreds of individuals throughout our country. The unfortunate part is that so many transsexuals have had to hide their true self their entire lives and that only causes dissatisfaction with one’s life and long term depression. But, with the overall influence of religion on society decreasing, more people are becoming open-minded and accepting those who are viewed as “different”. A prime example of this is Bruce Jenner.

An Olympic champion, reality TV star, and dad, Bruce Jenner was always viewed as a family man and very confident in who he is. Well, as you all probably know, he just release an interview of himself telling the world who he really is. Bruce Jenner is biologically male but is now admitting to the world he has known he is really a woman inside since he was a young adult. Bruce said that he started secretly cross-dressing around the age of thirty and has been on sex hormones since around then as well. He expressed that he will be undergoing a full gender transformation in the near future and is just so relieved that everyone knows who he really wants to be. Although he wants to become a woman, Bruce made it clear that your gender does not always affect your sexual orientation, because in his case he is still attracted and prefers women. Whether you want to classify that as lesbian or straight I guess is left up to you, but this is just another aspect of this complex transformation. The deeper message I want to highlight here is that Bruce was courageous enough to come out to the entire world, and unlike in the past, society’s response was incredible. The overwhelming majority of people have been extremely supportive and very accepting of Bruce’s change. There is widespread encouragement through social media of Bruce and his interview, which truly shows how our society is being more socialized to accept these differences amongst people. We clearly still have a long way to go, but hopefully Bruce and his story will advocate more change and further acceptance for anyone in these situations.

-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=778zKBBjpk0 (The interview)

-http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/22/transgender-primer-manning/2687869/