A Therapist's Treatise on Social Issues, Part 4: Gender and Generational Norms
Continued from part 3
Within this series, A therapist's treatise on social issues, we now enter a sub-series on gender, which I will approach across the next several posts, covering, respectively: generational norms; adolescent development; sex and gender definitions; medical necessity for treatment; overt values and covert motives; and wisdom and responsibility in an era of deception. The first few are very focused on sex and gender, while as the series progresses, it expands to include other topics.
Gender and generational norms
Activists of previous generations fought hard to win equal opportunity for all regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation. When it comes to sex and gender, we live in a time of tremendous freedom, relative to almost any time and place in history. Women can drive trucks, wear overalls, and wrestle. We can practice medicine, law, or entrepreneurship. Men can wear pink, care for babies, pursue nursing, or dance ballet. Anyone is free to marry whomever they like, whether their spouse be of a different race, or the same sex.
As for me, I like to dance and wear my hair long, but I would rather find my fingernails caked with garden soil than nail polish, and I’ll take hiking boots over high heels any day. None of these traits or interests have ever been cause for me to question whether I am a woman.
I hope those of younger generations will try to understand, therefore, why many of us over 30 find the current definitions of sex and gender roles regressive when they indicate that anyone but the femmest of females and the machoest of males might not actually be their birth sex. I would like to live in a world where there is no right or wrong way to be a woman or a man, a boy or a girl. No right or wrong way to speak, move, dress, act, learn, or create.
Read on to part 5.
