I think the conversation started when we were discussing Viginia's Woolf's writing in chapter 3. We were trying to understand why she turned orlando into a girl. As we were flipping through the pages, we saw the passage that discusses that Orlando hasn't changed, but her sex has. This sparked quite the discussion.
At the beginning of the discussion, I thought that sex and gender were the same things. Sex is if you're guy or a girl, that's what gender is too. After trying to fight out the discrepancy we looked the two words up in the dictionary. Sex is someones genetic makeup of XX or XY. Gender is the state of being male or female with reference to cultural or social differences rather than biological ones.
Like I said, before we looked up the definitions, I thought that Gender and sex were the same. I feel that if your genetic makeup says your a guy, then your sex or gender is male. That doesn't mean that you don't/ can't have feminine mannerisms, or be gay, it's just different from your gender or sex.
I think that it is safe to say that your environment definitely effects your gender. I think it was Nish who brought up the "letting the child pick their gender," but I think that it's really impossible to pick your gender, because the way that you are raised, and the people around you definitely effect how you act, no matter if your biologically male or female.
While we were discussing this, it made me think of how we as humans are so easily categorized. We're categorized by what activities we're envolved in, our gender, our sex, our income, our race, where we live, etc. I think that this is a product of our world today. It's naive to think that it wasn't always like this, because it most likely was. It's natural to place people in categories. It probably wasn't as bad 200 years ago, but there's always been segregation of people in one way or another.
~jordan
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