After watching "The Illusion of Gender" Ted Talk by Lara Americo, I was both compelled and intrigued by what the actual definition and meaning of gender is, versus what society tends to paint it as. The main purpose of the video is Lara explaining why she's always felt like a woman since her youth, despite both being born a male and receiving a lack of value from her father for her femininity. But despite the home environment around Lara during her childhood, she claims her femininity was something inescapable, as she saw it as a genuine expression she legitimately felt was an aspect of her own identity. An identity she knew did not correlate with her biological sex, since Lara's gender was the opposite of her assigned male status at birth. …show more content…
To summarize the words of Baur and Crooks in the class textbook, stereotypes form when expectations and beliefs regarding any specific group become generalized, based on any thoughts and ideas made entirely by us as humans (Baur and Crooks 128). To illustrate, men possess independent and assertive roles, which are judgments we've made about men that became stereotypes, because of society's wide social acceptance of these stereotypes. Not to mention, Lara's discussion reinforced a fact I already knew prior to viewing the video, which is the difference between sex and gender. Referring back to the textbook, sex (or biological sex) accounts for the physical, biological characteristics we're given at birth, with specific terminology consisting of male, female, or intersex. On the other hand, gender consists of the identity we subjectively feel about ourselves and how we chose to express such an identity, with identities ranging from man, woman, or a transgender person (Baur and Crooks 107). So for Lara, her transgender identity was constructed through a social lens and not a physical lens, because while she was born a male, her social expression is through femininity in a identity going against her biological birth status. In other words, gender is also a social construct and differs from