The tabloids, in the usual vulture-on-a-carcass manner, are tearing apart Bruce Jenner and his supposed decision to biologically become a woman. While Jenner himself has remained silent concerning the news, there's something to become said about our society's response to the potential truth.
You may have noticed that I emphasized two rather important words above: “biologically,” and, “woman.” That is because there is a critical distinction regarding sexuality, sex categorization and gender our otherwise intelligent and progressive society fails to make everyday. Gender is a social construction, purely crafted as a result of people.
To fully understand this conversation, we need some key phrases to become defined. Sex is decided through the use of socially agreed-upon biological criteria for classifying people as boy or girl, male or female. These criteria can include the presence of anatomy at birth, or chromosomal typing before birth. Sex categorization is achieved by a credit card applicatoin of sex coupled with everyday actions that show that one is apart of this sex category (for example, a little girl having fun with a doll, which has been deemed something merely a girl would enjoy). Gender is the activity of managing behavior under the influence of attitudes and activities deemed right for one's sex category.[1]
According towards the definitions I gave, your biological criterion determines if you are sexually considered male or female, that is your sex category. However, your sex category isn't necessarily symbolic of your sex. In addition, however your gender is just the way you decide to act, how you decide to interact with society. Since our society constructed gender into a binary, several major social constructions are influenced by the existence of gender, such as public washrooms. This places a pressure on people to choose from being simply male or female, but for many, it is anything but black and white.
You might be asking, what does this have to do with Bruce Jenner? If you Google his name right now, you'll find more than 20 news articles exploring his potential transsexuality. Almost every one suggests that he's confusing, disgusting as well as downright wrong for going through the possibility of his identity as a woman. These headlines really are a product of misunderstanding the difference between sex and gender, and they're further stigmatizing the notion of transsexuality as inferior.
What I want to let you know here's this reaction is immature, uninformed and simply unacceptable. Why do considered wrong for all of us to be racist, but it's appropriate for us to scrutinize a person when they don't seem to be either a man or a woman? Why do okay for a bunch of people on TMZ to stand around, referring to Jenner's apparent manicure and taking advantage of what gender and sex as though they're interchangeable?
What Bruce Jenner is experiencing is scientifically common, and no other person should provide a damn about his situation. If we feel the need to comment on his physical differences, it should be with happiness that we congratulate someone else for visiting understand their body despite what societal norms let them know by what is accepted and what's not.
[1] West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Chapter 5 in The Gendered Society Reader
