Gender as a Decision

Until a certain age, I grew up with the notion that girls were their own entity and boys resided on the opposite side of the spectrum, in their own separate sphere. Concepts like "transgender," "transsexual," "homosexual," and "cross-dresser" were unheard of in my cranial dictionary and were only cleared up by the openness of my education.

Gender, I realize, is not something we can classify into two categories. Upon my experience and knowledge, gender is what one makes of it. Gender, just like a marriage partner, religion, or major, is an individual's choice--a decision, if you will. Girls may be classically noted as having their own end of the spectrum, and boys may indeed rule in their own opposing realm, but so much of what they are overlaps. It is in this grey area that gender becomes a double-edged sword. If we do classify girls and boys, respectively, as the only two categories of gender, that is like saying we only have two things to choose from in our closets. Before you jump to point out the various loopholes in my analogy, think about how cross-dressers came to be. One person felt comfortable in the clothes of the "opposite gender," and broke social barriers by embodying this gender simply through clothes. This was a conscious decision made by a human being, just like us; if a man cross-dresses, it does not mean he has biologically transformed himself into a woman, but he definitely embodies a woman, and has made the choice of being a man in woman's clothes. That is just one example of many that classify the grey area between the two socially accepted poles of gender. I am a girl, yes, but that does not mean that I cannot choose to be a man tomorrow--physically, mentally, sexually, emotionally, or just by changing my clothes. Gender is a choice that every human has the right to make, despite the body he or she was born into.