Written by Kiana Neemeh
January 22, 2020
When women grow up thinking their role is solely to care for their loved ones, it risks building weak foundations in their character. Why? Because their worth inevitably becomes tied to the gathered bits and pieces they gave to others. They end up defining themselves based on the acknowledgement and the rewards they see in their loved ones’ lives. Instead of being strong, independent, and refusing to let people step on their toes, they grow up seeking validation from others and eventually this translates into their professional and personal lives, perpetuating the dependence they have on their surroundings. If one does not know their worth as a whole person, this leads to a highly fluctuating inner peace, since they search for that feeling extrinsically rather than reaching for it from within.
So much of this has to do with the power and the importance we attribute to social constructs. We almost forget them as such. You’re a woman, so you should be at home caring for your child, or, you’re the man of the house, shouldn’t you be providing for your family? It goes both ways, and the judgment related to gender roles is also felt by both parties. They tell a woman that is choosing not to bear children that she’s not fulfilling her inherent purpose, or that if she chooses to work, then she should at least be working a job that involves caring for others. For a man, he should be choosing a job that would allow him to provide for his family, because men should be the ones doing so. These constructs infuriate me. It’s so unfair that people have this fear of not living up to a certain standard established by a historically white male-dominated society, and that people are born having to meet pre-determined expectations to avoid being viewed as less than another.
Gendering the world is an issue. Especially in the bigender world we live in, where you are either a man or you are a woman. This is why some people choose to identify as non-binary, because they don’t want to conform to the rules imposed by these socially constructed categories, and because they don’t want to be perceived as the stereotypical female or male that instinctively comes to mind. This whole gender concept is antithetic to diversity. It contributes to assimilating and standardizing people, and ultimately leads to huge drops in confidence for children growing up who realize they don’t particularly belong to a gender or another according to pre-determined rules and definitions.
If you ask me, these social constructs we’ve grown to rely on are purely discriminatory. They are non-inclusive. They cause harm in lots of lives. Ultimately, they serve nothing but the human desire to classify everything to feel like we’ve got it all under control, when really, we know nothing. We completely neglect the whole gender spectrum by categorizing so rigidly. People who don’t feel as though they fall in one of two distinct categories are neglected, and it becomes difficult for them to integrate into our standardized society as “easily” without a distinctively defined role in it. Pink-collar jobs for women, blue and white-collar jobs for men, but what about the others – the “deviant” genders?
It’s too easy to fall back on these constructs and feel at ease with the structure of our society. It’s satisfying to our primal human instincts to have specifically defined parts that complete each other, but really, it’s satisfying for those who have no problem conforming. It’s satisfying to those served by the system, to those who don’t have to question it. For the others, however, it discredits their wishes and the paths they set out to pursue – take Caster Semenya’s example, a female South African middle-distance runner whose body naturally secreted too much testosterone according to female norms, and who was categorized as “biologically male” because of this. As a result, she became blocked from competing in the World Championships in Doha unless she agreed to take testosterone-reducing medication. She refused to do so, and in doing this, was unable to defend her championship title.
While yes, though the biology of her body may have been different than the “average” woman, the way the championship officials dealt with the situation attacked her fundamental human rights. This is the result of the strictly defined norms we impose on our society. Those who do not conform are belittled, neglected, even tossed aside. We search for stability to such an extent that we fear anyone that could rock the system. In doing this, we forget that the stereotypical man or woman doesn’t provide a reference point for every single individual.
I want to say that as women, we have the right to do anything we want and have the right to choose to be anything we want to be; but that would be me falling in the exact gendering trap I’ve critiqued throughout this article. Everyone deserves the right to choose whatever makes them happy. No one should have their future fated by their “gender” upon birth, and no one should feel like they’re failing their purpose because they don’t fit into the generic categorization of what a woman or a man should be like.
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