Originally posted by: return_to_hades
Gender identity is important because of how society functions. There is a certain level of social conditioning to how genders behave and interact. In an ideal world we would all be human and gender would be subordinate to personality and human qualities. But it is impossible to have a society completely devoid of gender identity. The best we can do is make a sincere attempt for gender equity and ending gender stereotypes.
I don't know how important gender identity really is. Many of my best friends growing up were boys. So I've been a tom boy with boyish qualities since I was a kid. I don't mind being perceived as androgynous or boyish. But at the end of the day, I'm still a girl and I do place some relative importance on being seen as a girl.
To a large extent, I think we identify with and embrace our biology and have an affinity to it. It may not be an expression of oneself, but it is one part of self expression. Gender, nationality, language, culture, race, religion, class, income, social status and a plethora of other things collectively form self expression.
Sometimes gender seems trivial, but when we see transgender children/people struggle to fit in and gain an identity ' we realize how important it really is in society. Perhaps the world would be better without so much gender emphasis ' but it's a double edged sword. Can we really strip away all these little identifiers that make who we are. Without it we would all be nothing but one carbon compound life form indistinguishable from the other.
I have always believed that people learn to be women and men vs what they are born as! We tend to confuse sex with gender, while sex is your biological and physiological characteristic which defines a person from male to female vs gender is where society sets the rules to your behavior. If such rules weren't set would we have been different people all together?
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