On Gender, Sex, and Homophobia

Because my last lecture was cancelled due to an illness, I thought I offer my thoughts on the lecture before that, the one on sex and gender. I doubt that social conservatives will like this so move on if you are. But if you are gay, lesbian, transgender, or so forth, you will find the next few words of mine reassuring and welcoming. First...

Sex and Gender are DIFFERENT!

Many of us (including me) tend to use the words "sex" and "gender" interchangeably. Yet those terms (like "mass" and "weight," believe it or not) are quite different in meaning.

Sex is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the two main categories of many living creatures (including humans) as defined by their reproductive organs. It's absolutely true that there are only two sexes, male and female. 

On the other hand, gender is identified as the social, cultural, behavioural and psychological traits of humans. It's quite fluid and occasionally vague, especially with the case androgyny. Or put in simple wording, GENDER IS BEHAVIOUR!

Also worthy of clarification is the fact that there is absolutely no fluid connection between gender stereotypes and one's sex. I learned that we learn about how to act from our parents, teachers and anyone else we interact with. In a sense, we are conditioned to perform in a certain way based on the ideologies we live around (the hegemony I talked about a few posts ago).

Did you know that there are actually nine genders?

Stereotypes

So why do we mix sex and gender? it's because we tend to associate one's behaviour with their sex. For example, a girl will play with dolls and a boy will want to head out to watch Star Wars.

We have specific behavioural associations with certain sexes. Masculinity tends to be associated with strength and power. Femininity is associated with grace and beauty. In the past, men and women all acted with their unique behaviours and no behaviour criss-crossed with another, until recently.

Leftovers

Then who's gonna stop them from swapping roles? Hey, there's a huge cult following for the animates series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and a good chunk of that fan base is male. Let me remind you that show is intended for the all-girl demographic that plays with My Little Pony toys.

Some of these stereotypes can get negative. Women are often denied a spot in male executive and engineering jobs because of the fact women aren't usually associated with such jobs. 1 in 3 Canadian women will be assaulted in Canada in their lifetime. It's even worse for transgender people, who often don't have a washroom they can go to. Gay people are often left alone, isolated from the rest.

Worse, there has been experiments among social conservatives to force such outliers to comply with the rest. That has been a problem when it comes to dealing with those that identify themselves within the LGBTQ community. Popular culture often rejects the idea of gays and lesbians. not only does this allow for bullying, but it also means that bystanders may not even try to intervene against such harassment.

The concept of gender is seen as a spectrum, a fluid position, not just two set categories in the case of sex. People will perform their gender roles based on their opinions and what the feel is right. As a result, we have these gender alignments that seem outlandish to some, and possibly you, but we're going have to respect that.

Gays have been around for quite a while. The area around Church and Wellesley in Toronto, was where a Briton that was homosexual but didn't want to face issues of being gay lived there. Today, we know what happens there. It's the gay village and it's where the big gay pride parade rolls into town.

The huge pride movement surfaces from the fact that the LGBTQ community is proud of their gender, and they're not afraid to show that.

I hope you're confused after reading this, and for a good reason. The LGBTQ community wants all to know that they're human, just like us. The thing is that sex and gender, although used interchangeably, are in fact two completely different things, and that by breaking the misconception, we can respect the fact that gays and transgendered individuals do exist.

Discourse, Text, and the University

As a university student, I’ve been asked to participate in a conversation on society and its underpinnings. The whole concept of the university has been based on the idea that we will be talking about ideas and spreading information. So how does discourse actually work? And how do we know what they mean?

Discourse is based on communications, language, symbols and signs. Signs indicate the presence or occurrence of anything else, such as an image of a man or a woman indicating a washroom. Symbols stand in for something else.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols as well as their interpretations. In this context, a word could be considered a sign, since it's in place of the actual object.

Now, signs and symbols are arbitrary and therefore have different meanings in different contexts. They became what they mean by random. This makes sense, because there are so many languages
out there and we can therefore call glue in more than a thousand ways, including the French "colle."

Signs therefore, only make sense when they are in place within a set system. Signs can also have different meanings when placed in different contexts. The swastika could be a holy symbol of good luck in India, and it could be a unholy symbol among German Jews as the insignia of the Nazis.

The idea of signs and symbols being arbitrary also leads to the fact that hey can be shaped by ideologies, as in the case of the Nazi's above. These ideologies and viewpoints can change the meaning of a symbol immediately.

Now, let's talk about text. It is based on semiotics as I just mentioned. They are "linguistic structures" made up of words and phrases woven together into understandable statements.

There's another term, and it's "Text" with a capital T to boot. It stands for all text that has ever been written. Don't confuse the two.

The two are related with work, which is essentially a piece of literary expression, like a story. Work has a set meaning. That mans it has to make sense.  That "Buffalo" one is perhaps so confusing.

As our language changes, so does our work, and it can change the meaning of it as well. Text is a social space for discussion, as in academic discourse.

Also notable is the death of the author. With multiple reader interpretations, its up to the reader to determine the text. Therefore, the role of the author is now meaningless as the author no longer conveys meaning.

And that's the beauty of the university. It allows us to interpret the meaning of what's discussed each and every day by every one of us. We see text and we must determine what it actually means, and how others will see it. In fact, this applies to anything the university engages in. From here, we can fix society by lifting prejudices on one another.

This is just one of the many ways we can see the importance of the university. There are countless many others. But you can see here that all centres on one thing, the issue of discourse. It is the whole base of the concept  of the university.