Ellie Moerdyk Psych Perspectives on Gender

"Tia was aspiring to play in the 2020 Olympics of the USA woman’s volleyball team. She had played on men’s teams all her life, but decided it was time to stick up for her and all other trans people around the world." Especially-noteworthy: In the NPR podcast entitled “Becoming Nicole” the parents of a child who was born with male genitalia were speaking about their child identifying as a female from a young age. Nicole’s mother made a statement, “She went through a huge anxiety self hating period when she was 6 or 7 years old.” This was heartbreaking to me that children so young could have such self-hate for themself. This topic of self-hate in young children is a conversation that needs to be had. The conversation in today’s society would be much more accepted, and hopefully the conversation would encourage us (as in society) to bring light to mental health in young children and their gender identity. (For the whole podcast click  here. )  ___...

Crawford defines  sex  “as biological differences in genetic composition and reproductive anatomy and functions.” Crawford then defines  gender as “those characteristics and traits socioculturally considered appropriate to males and females, or the traits that make up masculinity and femininity” (Crawford, 2011, p.25 ). In an Article recently published by “The Guardian” they spoke about a child who was born in Canada with a sex marked “U” on the child’s health card. The title immediately caught my attention, as recently one of my good friend's siblings has been wrestling with their own gender identity. The beginning of the title is “ A child without a gender..” and I knew this was something I needed to read. The overall topic of the article is gender identity and the evolution of this term or idea in the recent years. Knowing now what sex really means and its difference from gender I was intrigued to learn about putting “u” on a birth certification as the sex....

Before studying feminism I didn’t have much of a refined definition of what feminism was. Most likely, I would have defined feminism as a movement of women being overly vocal about their views, and what their rights should be. Today’s society has given feminism a bad rap, and I am one of those people who hadn’t done enough research on my own to learn the history of feminism. Sadly, I have never been passionate about feminism, I just knew about it from the protests I’ve seen, and the very vocal posts on social media. After viewing many videos and readings, I have a much better grasp on what feminism is, and what my personal views are.  (Here is a video that is light hearted, but also very true. Laci Green, does a great job of explaining feminism in a very understandable way. Click  here. )  I would indeed identify myself as a feminist. It’s clear to me, that I personally believe that the future of women, and their equality to men lies i...