Friday, June 24, 2011

Whats in a Gender?

I was reading this NPR article the other day and thought I'd share in on here for anyone who has interest regarding the discussions surrounding gender. While the article is calculated to shock and, I'm sure, somewhat frighten main-streamers, I have to say that the Linton Weeks sidebar is more in line with what I see. But I live in Utah.
Two points concerning this article:
1. Everyone should care about the discussion and trends going on surrounding gender. No matter how we try to get away from it, in most situations it functions as our master status, ie the most important part of how we identify ourselves and then relate ourselves to a given situation, station etc. Think about it, if you go to the store and see someone in the line and you can't tell their ethnicity, height, weight, religion or socio-economic status, you probably won't blink twice. Now imagine you see someone whose gender you aren't sure of. Yeah, you blinked a couple times.
2. If I were a devil, I'd probably be pretty happy to move from people misusing the instincts of their biological imperative to people having no idea what their biological (and from a gospel standpoint, eternal) imperative is. Just saying.

2 comments:

Lauren said...

That was a very interesting article (I read the whole thing). It really does scare me where this world is headed. I wish people would think about what this means for our future if no one knows their gender or anyone else's.

Gdub said...

Didn't have time to read the article, but had listened to a bit of it earlier one morning.

I remember years ago being an 18 year old in an Elders Quorum full of old guys, discussing the Proclamation on the Family. It struck me that gender is an essential and eternal part of identity. It didn't say "sex", it said, "gender", which makes it even more interesting when you consider that Gender is not just the physical makeup, but a self-identified status.

I remarked how I thought this would be something we'd see disrupted in the future, because I was already seeing it among friends at the time. Al the old dudes kind of shrugged my comment off, and even I'm surprised to see how true that statement proved to be.