Doing Gender

Sexes, such as male and female, are biological factors. But gender is a social construct. Based on anatomy, men and women are expected to act, say, and dress according to certain standards and ideals placed by society. For example, if a person is born with a vagina, then that must mean they are a woman. They do “feminine” things, or things that a woman does.

They wear women’s clothes like dresses, frilly blouses and flat, use women’s products like make-up, floral fragrances, vanilla body wash or strawberry shampoo, they speak like a woman with a soft tone, but they don’t talk too much. They are delicate, gentle and sweet.

And if they have a penis, then they are a man. A tough, burly, manly man who hunts on the weekends, who wears suits and ties, or maybe baseball caps.

A man who drinks beer and watches sports, or drives a big truck. If someone has a penis they don’t do the things that people with vaginas do. How we as a society practice these expectations, or rather, how people do gender, is even more interesting.

For example, every morning, I wake at approximately 5:45 to get ready for a class that starts at 8:00 a.m. I don’t get up that early so that I can make it to class on time. Don’t get me wrong, punctuality reduces my morning anxiety by a large percentage, but I wake up early so I can put on makeup and do my hair. Yes, I do other things like drink coffee, brush my teeth, eat breakfast, etc. But most of my morning energy goes towards my appearance.

As much as I enjoy caking my face, I do find it to be a burden. And it’s not as if I don’t have a choice. But it feels that way. It’s like I have to put on make-up and fix my hair, otherwise I feel naked. It feels like an expectation to an extent, or pressure. I feel pressured to cover my blemishes. I feel pressured to wear something feminine. I describe my style as flirty/soft, because that’s what girls are supposed to be, right? Then I ponder: how amazing would it feel to not wake up that early: to just roll out of bed, throw on whatever, place my hair into a bun and leave the house. How cool would it be to care less? Care less about what? The answer is simple. As a person who identifies as woman, I therefore am creating the image of what I think a woman should represent by wearing make-up, certain clothes, etc. But that’s me.

I’ve recently come to realize gender is a spectrum, and wherever a person falls, that becomes their identity. That becomes the person they introduce to the world. And there are so many different identities from which people can express themselves. Believe it or not, someone who happens to have a penis, can identify as a man, but express themselves in a way that society deems as “feminine”, even though they aren’t. A person born with a vagina may physically look” masculine” due to hormonal differences, and society will call her “manly” even though she personally identifies as a woman. Transsexuals, in particular, face struggles with gender expressions and gender identities—and, unfortunately, society struggles with expressing transsexuals, or not expressing them.