The gender patrol

A couple weeks ago Newsweek had a cover story written by E.J Graff on what might be next in the gay-rights movement. The author poses the "What's next?" question because gay and lesbian acceptance is well underway and the marriage equality battle is down to time and hard work.

We're mostly accepting of sexual orientation. Seeing a guy love a guy isn't so squeamish or icky anymore (though that varies considerably by location). We still have lots of problems with gender expression. We still want our men to look and act like men and our women to look and act like women.

So what is next is acceptance of transgender people. These are people who are gender variant and do not easily pass for male or female. They fall in between or the body doesn't match the presentation. There is still a lot of discrimination.

And after that it is time to disband the gender patrol. There should be no girl's toys and boy's toys. Only toys played with by whatever children who wish to. That would be followed by getting rid of women's work and men's work, replaced with work done by whoever wants to and is qualified to do.

Lori Duron, in her blog Raising My Rainbow shares stories about her gender creative son. Alas, I can't link to a specific blog entry. She related the story that when her son started kindergarten she alerted the teacher. The teacher caught on and said this year we aren't lining up in a girl's line and boy's line. We're all in one line. It took the assisting mothers a while to get it. They kept wanting to separate genders. Time to disband the gender patrol.