BLOG III: Gender Attribution

I want to first start off by saying that at this point in my life and education, being a 21 year old undergraduate student, I believe that “sex”and “gender” are not interchangeable.  In my opinion “sex” is a  biological attribute and “gender” is a socially constructed identity. I wanted to point this out because Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, authors of Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, propose that “sex” is the activity and “gender” is the taxonomy (biological and/or socio-cultural-psychological). This was the first time I have ever read “sex” and “gender” defend this way, which was pretty interesting. I mentioned my point in life because five years from now I could think something else, as society evolves by accepting new ideas, or by the end of this course. 

Gender attribution is the process of deciding which gender someone is when you first meet them. Kessler and McKenna argue that we constantly attribute gender to people we meet, oftentimes without even realizing it. Usually, we are not aware of this until we come across a point in which we have difficulty attributing traditional masculine and feminine traits, or the absence of them (Dea,19).  Most people generally assume that others are either male or female, but not necessarily both or neither.  While Kessler and McKenna argue the previous statement, I actually think that in today's society,  especially in Gen Z, when we attribute gender most of us do not necessarily think of the binary male or female. I think a lot of us think of the possibility of others being neither or both. Almost always we first think if male or female, but my point is that we do not dismiss the possibility of anything else. 

With that said, we beg the question- Is it possible to meet or interact with someone without performing a gender attribution? Is it possible ? Yes. Is it widely practiced in our current society? No. I think that in the near future we may be able to meet someone new without performing a gender attribution. Many of us already do so now, which is a great start. I think now more than ever it's easier to be aware of how we attribute gender. I will say that a big driver of this shift is the media. Media has the power to greatly influence society ( as George Orwell predicted when we wrote 1984). There are so many platforms in which people can learn the ideas of sex and gender studies researchers, as well as people from the LGBTQ+  communities sharing about their lives. Also courses like this class open the platform for ideas and opinions to be discussed.  It all depends on the effort we as humans have for knowledge and compassion. I can only think of one time that I met someone new and did not attribute their gender, but I think that was mainly because of the absence of traditional masculine and feminine cues. I am aware of my inability to 100% break away from these traditional social norms, so it's something that I am working on. I think as we continue to have these conversations, read about sex and gender, we may be able to eventually meet new people without performing gender attributions. 

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