Gender
...female, and the point of existence is for males and females to find each other and experience romantic and erotic bliss. Thus, everything in the world clothes, public toilets, movies, identities, human rights, health services, love songs, shoes, family, socialization processes, magazines, laws, is designed with the heterosexual male and the heterosexual female in mind.
Some people have already realised the enormous mistake of the sex/gender/orientation binaries. But because of the pervasiveness and almost invisible quality of structural forms of violence, which is what heteronormativity is, it is sometimes too easy to forget that there are other people in this world who are neither straight male nor straight female.
In the Philippines by age 2 or 3, a child starts to develop gender identity. This awareness is what gives them the sense of being a male or female. At this age, a toddler starts to understand the difference between boys and girls, and can identify himself or herself as one or the other. Gender identity is biologically determined by the presence or absence of the Y chromosome but to a certain extent, it may also be the product of a child’s environment (Singson, 2008).
Kids at this age also begin to associate certain behaviors related to being male or female, called gender roles. We teach them that girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks, planes, cars and guns. Our culture dictates what is masculine or what is feminine, how boys behave versus girls. However, much has changed in society about gender roles because women are becoming pilots, car racers and truck drivers.
More and more men are participating in child rearing which was once a mother’s turf, and some are role reversing with the fathers as “housebands” and wives going out to work. Therefore, it’s ok for boys to play with dolls and for girls to play with the boy’s toys so you...
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