Week 10 / Gender, Race, and Ethnicity / Kiara Juliane Annisa

1.     Summary :

What is gender? Based on the Wikipedia, gender refers to a person attempts to signify a masculine or feminine self as well as an attempt to categorized someone else in terms of their presentation. So gender is basically how you want to be viewed by other people and also you’re behavior. Not to confused with sex, gender is something that people can choose, meanwhile sex is something that has been assigned to you since birth. In sex there’s only two type of sex which is male and female, the differentiation between this 2 sex is on their genitalia and their physical appearance. For gender itself there is so many type of it that people identify with, for example CIS (people who remains the same as their biological appearance) and Trans (people who change their gender based on what they feel not from their appearance, and some of them seeks to change their sex too in order to match it with the gender they identify with ).

The second one we’re going to talk about is Race and Ethnicity. In one sight sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between these two terms, but in fact there’s many differences in them. Based on the Wikipedia race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into category generally viewed as distinct by the society. In some times race is more leaning towards the physical appearance of someone. In another hand ethnicity is referring to social traits, not the physical characteristics of someone. Your race might not presents your ethnicity and vice versa, because ethnicity is a culture that you gain in your environment (location, language, religion, customs, heritage). For example, an Asian born American person might not identify themselves as an Asian but rather American.  

2.     What interesting/what did you learn :

I read a research examples of how gender affects a FTM (female-to-male) person’s life on how they get treated after they had undergone a sex-change and how they got a better treatment as a male in their workplace. I think this is really interesting how the social differences between male and female can be really clear. But at the same time I also kind of feel that it’s unfair to judge someone’s work based on their gender alone.

3.     Discussion point :

I want to know how many gender that exist out there? And how’s the world view a different gender? Which country is the most tolerant and intolerant towards people who doesn’t define themselves as a different gender than their sex?  I also heard that some people is calling a certain gender (such as trans) as a mental or biological problem, is it proven by a facts or it’s just only their judgement?