Gender

In our last class we talked about gender.  Gender is defined as how you associate yourself with being male or female.  It has two primary aspects, identity and performance.  Gender identity is based on individual self concept of their sex role.  The performance side of gender is based on perception.  Your gender identity is not tied to a person’s sex and can result in transgenderism, where gender performance is often a mix between masculine and feminine performances.  After we learned the difference between gender identity and gender performances, we were asked as a class if we were competitive.  Many of my classmates raised their hands, including girls.  We were told by our teacher that being competitive is a masculine trait.  It is common for females to have masculine traits and males to have feminine traits.  The difference is that we have these traits only for certain things such as competitiveness.   I found the gender learning in this class to be not only interesting, but familiar to me because I have learned about this in one of my other psychology classes.  Since I am working on getting my major in psychology, this is important for me to understand gender identity and performance.  I want to work with children so I definitely want to learn more about them.