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 elephant brought back the conversation of whether or not we chose/choose our gender, and though it seems like another of those questions we will never settle on an answer for (because there is no one answer?) i have a few things i would like to add.

one of the things that we all seemed to question when dealing with this, was what are we counting as gender? this is interesting because we can consider anything from the fact that my parents dressed me in dresses and chose a female pronoun for me, to what clothes i put on every morning as the answer. the first half of that seems more obvious, of course someone else 'chose' my gender when i was incapable of controlling myself in the ways that contribute to perception of gender, but what about now? i think it is interesting that every day i can choose my gender (in a way) just by getting dressed. somedays i wear a dress and long earrings, some days the man pants and giant tshirt win out. all those days i'm still me and identify exactly the same way, but in a simple moment of decision (or you could say fate if i sometimes get dressed based on what's clean...) i change drastically the way in which i am perceived, which is, i think, a major component of gender. this doesn't even have to be a choice of 'which gender am i today?' but even dressing for comfort one day and work the next changes so drastic a thing as where i fall on the gender spectrum. along these lines, something i don't think we consider enough in our discussions is the difference culture makes. choosing my gender in america (or even what my gender itself means) could be drastically different from other parts of the world, or even from other cultures than those i am intimately familiar with. in an anthro class, we read a book 'guests of the sheik' in which a woman follows her new husband to an iraqi village where he is to be doing anthropological work for some time to come. the role and behaviour of women there is very different from what she knows in america, and so she actually has to choose upon arrival how she will conform, or basically, she has to choose her gender. as a foreigner, it would be permitted for her to not wear the traditional female coverings and otherwise act as the village women, however, she would never be seen or treated as a woman in that society. this is originally her choice, but she realizes that acting as a western woman in this village is not a role that has a place, and so she chooses the gender of a woman, adopts the dress and behaviours, and begins to fit securely in her binary...