I am not a woman. Are you?

I realized this very recently, when several factors forced gender into awareness. In a psychology course a few quarters back, the professor asked the class to list the groups to which we each thought we belonged. My list looked something like this: “Student; Intellectual; Atheist; Independent; Skeptic; Young Adult”. As students read off their answers, I noticed a big glaring gap in my own response: gender. Most women had mentioned that they saw themselves as “women”. In fact, “women” was usually the group at the top of the list. I wrote this off as an example of how much I value my intellectual life over my more superficial life-on-paper. Or something.

Then one day, I became ensnared in one of my Hillary-Clinton-supporting roommate’s little tirades about women and power. He considers himself a big feminist, and he loves powerful women and the gender questions it creates. At one point he said something like, “When people look at you as a a woman-” and I quickly, instinctively replied, “But I don’t really think of myself as a woman.” He seemed to understand what I meant instantly- I see myself as a person.

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Are you having difficulty figuring out who you are ? Then take an inventory of your friends.

Periodically, I become a bit disoriented in the swirl of life, which gives rise to the question: “Who am I?”  We aren’t static beings, of course.  We are complex adaptive systems, communities of relatively simple cellular life that number in the trillions.  Many of “our” cells (in fact, the great…

Continue ReadingAre you having difficulty figuring out who you are ? Then take an inventory of your friends.