Gender, Gender And Gender Identity - 1113 Words

Set with the task of interviewing three people about their life experiences and perceptions in hopes of gleaming a bit of insight into gender identity, I had several people say to me that gender was not an issue in their life, and I should just find someone else. Most people never think about their gender or how they express it, or they think that gender and sex are the synonyms ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013). That is, until confronted with a significantly different culturally expressed gender role, or unless your gender identity is not accepted as normal. Therefore the three individuals I ended up choosing Hector, Amy and Leta, are somewhat diverse but also similar in many ways in which one should be able to appreciate but the†¦show more content†¦His father was in and out of jail, and he really didn’t involve himself much with the family, â€Å"Dad’s job was to make money, any way he could, if that meant working twelve hours a day, and selling som e drugs on the side to make ends meet the so be it.† Hector said that his mother was quiet when his dad was around; she wasn’t allowed to express her opinion. Once he said that she mentioned that one of his dad’s friends seemed â€Å"shady† and his dad told her to shut her mouth before he broke it. I asked him if he thought it was alright for a man to hit a woman, and he looked at me again with that â€Å"What are you stupid† look and replied, â€Å"Well just like my kids, if they need to be corrected it is my job to do it.† He told me that he has never wash a dish or cleaned the house, â€Å"that’s women’s work,† he stated proudly. â€Å"This is what it means to be a man, we work and party, we do what we want and no woman can tell a real man any of the who’s, what’s when’s and where’s of live, machismo.† In contrast to Hector, there is Amy, a twenty-two-year-old woman who grew up in rural Iowa. She is of Caucasian descent and grew up on a farm with â€Å"traditional Mid-Western values.† She said that she was 15 when she got into a fight with her father over â€Å"women’s work† and she ran away from home soon after. She spent the next five years traveling with some hippies unit she got