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ENDER DYSPHORIA
By: Vivi Quan V Nguyen
Phenotype My high school had a restriction against boys having long hair, in fact, most schools up to high school where I’m from in Vietnam have this rule. After an intimidating and arduous process to fight the school’s rule, I kept my hair. But, ever swince I grew out my hair, I found a lot of people have trouble referring to me, even past the walls of my former highschool. If being a “man” or a “woman” relies on factors as silly as hair, what does it mean to be a “man” or a “woman?” I quite enjoy the confusion, I feel a certain liberation not being associated with any one gender. Division A bio-essentialists might argue that gender is divided by an essential, inherent physiological line. But the truth is, this division is less a border and more of a gradient. Advanced biology and the existence of intersex people disprove the clarity of a gender binary. An argument of the reproductive system won’t hold water either; how would this argument categorize infertile people? Theories of gender equality and feminism disprove any actions or characters as exclusiveto any gender. Metaphysically speaking, gender equality means all genders are equal, the same, interchangeable, one might go as far as to say all genders are one…
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