Introduction

According to the Ecology Global Network there are approximately 360,000 births per day in this world. When someone is born in a hospital one of the first things the doctors do is assign the child a sex based off of the biological parts present. From there the rest of the world takes over in making assumptions about the child’s gender based off of the assigned sex. As Sam Killerman said in The Social Justice Advocate’s Handbook: A Guide to Gender, “Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society.” Gender is a socially constructed idea and often in this society it is assumed that one’s gender matches their assigned sex, or it is assumed that both of the previous match up with the individual’s gender expression. From there people also assume that one’s sexual or romantic orientations fit into neat normative boxes that coincide with gender expression and identity, and sex. In actuality though, these assumptions just are not reliable. With 360,000 births a day there will be some babies that are not born just male or female, there will be some babies that don’t identify as men or women, and there will be some babies that are not attracted to the opposite sex. The goal of this blog is to define and discuss a few of the many identities and orientations that people possess and to show that as a society we simplify topics we should not. There is beauty in diversity, so let’s shine a light upon it.


http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/

Monday, April 13, 2015

Non-binary

                The prevailing idea out there is that gender consists of two categories, man and woman, and that gender expression is either masculine or feminine. This is an intense oversimplification though. As Lorber states in her 1994 piece “Night to His Day”, “Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes.”  The binary system splits the overarching concept of gender into two pieces, when it is actually a whole spectrum. Categorizing people as either men or women overall excludes a large portion of the population that do not identify as one of those two genders. Some individuals identify as non-binary, which means that they are either somewhere in the middle on the spectrum or they do not identify with any gender. Non-binary is the umbrella term for this, but there are many identities across the spectrum that are more specific.



http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/oct/15/non-binary-transgender-teacher-closeted
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