The Martlet

Gender.

What is the root of its social relevance?

And why, we ask at a time like the Trans Day of Remembrance, does it have so much power?

Social constructions and the meanings built around the concept of gender are culturally relative. Throughout the spectrum of time and locale, different groups of people have assigned, construed, built, codified, understood, disrupted and rebuilt meaning around the lines of gender. What would it mean to conceptualize your world in terms of eight genders instead of two? What about four or 16?

Let’s stretch out the sinews of our brains and potentiate seeing things differently.

Trans Day of Remembrance is about remembering people who have been killed, violently, because they didn’t measure up to a culturally-implanted notion of gender normalcy. Heavy stuff — and real.

It is well worth taking the time to reflect on how hetero-normative discourse and cis-genderism (put very simply, the system of female = feminine and male = masculine) work together to create such plagues of violence and discrimination.

Many, if not most, queer bashings are motivated by a sense of gender policing.

When an anonymous queer bashing happens, how does the attacker “know” that the victim is queer? Often because of the victim’s gender expression.

It is brave to exist as a transgender person in a world that would often like to erase the space for our existence. Why, we ask, this forced control over a way of being that doesn’t work for so many (or, as I would venture, that doesn’t truly work for anyone)? Because it means that we all have to cut a part of ourselves off.

As men, we have to toe the line, police ourselves and control our impulses.

The trade-off and backbone of our power as men is that we can’t show vulnerability.

If we’re women, our power is relegated to the sphere of attracting. We beautify, please, relate.

We’re not allowed to wield the same kind of control over our lives that men do.

Patriarchy is founded on the paradigm of the gender binary, for without a two-split division between the realms of the feminine and the masculine, this power structure cannot exist.

Trans-feminism unites feminist thought and transgender politics to point out the ways in which these struggles are deeply linked.

Even if “women” don’t represent and express femininity, and “men” don’t express and represent masculinity, our cultural meanings are still inscribed with a hierarchy that degrades and punishes femininity and venerates masculinity.

Trans Day of Remembrance. People killed for being who they are. Us remembering, honouring, raising awareness so that it doesn’t continue to happen this way.

We can all do our part in spreading the word, and being open to learning, dialoguing, acting and reacting to what goes on around us in the world.

Let’s learn liberation together.