Cultural Transformation: Gender definition
The idea of sex as a biological determinant of the genre has been questioned for more than sixty years. Simone de Beauvoir aroused a controversy that still has no end by saying in 1949 that “Woman is not born: it becomes so. No biological, psychic, economic destiny, defines the image that the human female is in society (of Beauvoir, 1986).
It is currently well accepted by the Academy not only that sex and gender are completely different concepts, but also that sex and its binary characterization is a cultural construction;However, in practical terms societies still live in the dimorphic delirium in which there are two fixed defined genres, with assigned roles, which respond to two sexual anatomies clearly.
In this essay I propose that there is currently a gear of the genre because we are in the midst of a cultural transformation. Institutional definitions on sex and gender have been modified but the rigid concepts that do not allow thinking and intolerant beliefs that cause rejection and violence towards those who represent something different. This rejection and violence affects men and women but the impact of these phenomena is directly related to the sex of the victims.
I will focus on the transsexual and transgender community because they represent the most acute contrast with traditional ideas, and I will explain why I think they are also victims of symbolic violence.
In order to enter the subject, it is important to consider that the categories of sex, gender and role are not static. The role of role could be considered as the most volatile, since there is a direct relationship with the values of the time. Gender has also changed. On the one hand, he was born to express a paradigm change regarding sex, to indicate that biological aspects are not destiny and that man and woman separated from male and female. In that sense, gender is in itself a break of the previous paradigm.
It is believed that the presence of transgender or transsexual subjects has existed since the differences of clothing between men and women began to be institutionalized (Bolich, 2007). Of course we must keep in mind that not only did these concepts exist, but it is possible that ideas around sex and gender have been different in each space and time.
It is important to distinguish the transsexual and transgender terms under which many identities are grouped in a place beyond the traditional binary division;While transsexuals are identified within the binary division, but on the opposite side to that assigned by society (Solana, 2012).
The transsexual collective is deeply misunderstood by society in general and face discrimination in all its forms including the most violent, specifically those men who decide to be women and enter this current violence of gender.
Talia Mae Bettcher attracts attention to a type of violence with which the transsexuals that she calls as imposition of reality coexist daily. This imposition of reality is the requirement for transphobia, since it should be considered that the subject in question is in violation of gender norms, although in the first person the subject considers being in accordance. Therefore, discrimination is a matter of interpretation (Ibid).
The discrimination and violence suffered by the collective should not be taken lightly. To consider transsexuals or transgender, they have gone through an extremely reflective process and are aware of the existence of such terms, which are really created and more recent diffusion. We see here indications of the gap in the face of new gender perspectives: institutions support them, but the institutionalized segrega.
As a conclusion I can say that I maintain that there is currently such a gap between the predominant and institutionalized provisions of society regarding the gender perspective, since there has been a "new truth" that is being incorporated into institutional discourses and thatOpen the possibility of existence to a sector of subjects with updated habitus, and even more, a sector of subjects with physical transformations that challenge residual regulations. Simultaneously, the above provisions still prevail.
Many of the subjects with these avant -garde habitus reject the violence to which they are submitted on a daily basis, but do not refute or problematize the binary categories of sex and gender, and even internalize the inequality of the sexes as part of the roles thatThey must comply.
It seems frustrating that although a new conceptualization begins to flourish on the issues that revolve around gender and society, the impotence of living in a physical environment that still does not integrate discourse must be exhausting. It should also be asked if it is not the normalization of sex and disparity that exists between men and women
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