Intersectionality is a very important concept that many people in society need to understand. This concept essentially means how an individual if affected by multiple identities at one time. An example would be an older, non able bodied, african american woman, and how all of these identities affect her life. This is an important concept for everyone to understand because everyone has opinions, as this is human, and these opinions tend to affect how we view other people. I have personally dealt with intersectionality due to identifying as a women and non abled bodied. This has affected me in life because people assume many things about me due to these identities. For example, people assume I cannot do many physical activities because of my autoimmune disease, and in return try and do them for me or do not ask me to do such activities. I have also always been told that a woman is supposed to be a certain way and I have been ridiculed for the way I act or dress. This being said, this expectation of what a women should be affects not just me, but all women, especially transgender women like Caitlyn Jenner. 

Caitlyn Jenner has gone through much of these biases as she breaks the societal norm of what a ‘normal’ woman should look like. For this post, I have chosen to focus on Caitlyn Jenner’s struggle to answer the question: What visual cues do we use to determine someone’s gender? And, what has shaped your ideas of  gender that inform how you perceive someone’s gender identity? 

In the case of Jenner, other people and himself have identified Bruce as a man his whole life. This being due to the fact that he has had the appearance that society deems as a man, such as facial hair, bone structure, a deep voice, etc, these things in which Jenner has removed or changed to become more feminine from physical appearance (Burkett 2015) In Bruce’s interview with Diane Sawyer, he states that even though he has all the physical aspects of a man i.e. genitalia, he still identifies as a woman because to him, gender is not confined to physical attributes, more, gender is more associated with ones’ thought process, and how their mind perceives themselves (Dooley et al. 2015). From Jenner’s story, we can expect that a person associates a person with a group of individuals it best resembles; in this case, Jenner has male genitalia and other typical male attributes, and thus is associated and labeled as a man, whom people can identify him as, however wrong that may be.

The way Caitlyn Jenner has been labeled as either a man or a woman is primarily due to the individual ideas of what each gender consists of. Personally, I think that overall education of gender and gender identities along with belief in pluralism has affected how I perceive someone’s gender identity. For starters, pluralism is a concept I first became aware of, at least in name, from a show called The West Wing. Essentially, it’s the belief in more than one idea. A belief that my way of life and understanding may not be the same as someone else’s. In regard to gender I think this belief has been extremely helpful to me because it has allowed me to understand and accept that not everyone has the same ideas I do about gender. For instance, someone may have been born a specific way, for the sake of this example we’ll say they were born with female genitalia. Though they were born with female parts, they themselves might not identify as a female, they may identify as a male. At first glance, if they have not undergone surgery, one may not notice this, and thus would be inclined to associate them with the gender they most resemble. Where this comes back to pluralism is that I see that as completely normal and okay, and am completely accepting of their thoughts and beliefs, regardless of my initial perceptions.

The other part of my perception is the education I have received. I think that education is a fundamental and extremely essential tool in every part of our lives. An education has allowed me to become knowledgeable in the different types of genders and identities one may have, and through that I have become more accepting of a person’s choice to choose. Brain chemistry is different for everyone, and make up fundamentally who we are, and that’s something that can’t be changed, it’s just innate. 

Works Cited

Burkett, E. (2015, June 06). What Makes a Woman? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html

Dooley, S., Dawson, M., Ng, C., Effron, L., & Keneally, M. (2015, April 24). Bruce Jenner: When Did He Know. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/bruce-jenner/story?id=30570567