Save Cashier Gender with airSlate SignNow

Save cashier gender

you when I was a child I was told I could be anything that I could be president that I could change the world when I got into the real world I realized that some of my sort of girly qualities weren't as prize to some other people's boy qualities and I spent a lot of time thinking about my appearance or thoughts on personal safety and a certain element of frustration related to treatment or issues of being a woman and then I became a mom now I have a five-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl and they are the most intelligent perfect fabulous extraordinary inspiring creative little creatures on the planet of course that's a fact I'm not saying it's all easy but and sometimes I actually think that phrase should be adjusted to say that the years go by so quickly but days can sure seemed interminable however I really wanted these children very very much and they have changed my life and I my heart sort of burst with joy regularly because they're in it so I noticed immediately though from birth how they were quickly divided into two distinct gendered camps how when I brought my newborn in a green onesie to the dentist to my dentist he admired what a big strapping boy he was and how he could be a future Buckeye when I finally said oh actually that's a girl he immediately switched to say how delicate her features were and what a beautiful little princess she was now I like pink and I like ruffles and lace and so I dressed her in those things and along with green and yellow and a wonderful slate gray outfit that my sister had handed me down from someone in Europe I also noticed then though how with my son my own reactions were different how when he has to have a clip in his hair like his sister to match her I sort of steered him away from it or when it's tried right he was three years old we went to buy shoes and he came up to me and he holding these pink jewel encrusted bling bling Dorothy we are definitely not in Kansas anymore shoes and said mama aren't they beautiful I said oh yeah honey those are really beautiful shoes they're too big for you and I let him over to the section of boy shoes which were seven shades of brown if my daughter could have provided the soundtrack at that moment she would have loved it because it kind of sounded like wah-wah I really something right in that moment that there's this binary division that we give our children from the moment of birth and even as babies we are telling them things that they can and can't do in ways they can and can't be I mean I was raised free to be you and me but then there's a complexity in it because I for instance a lot of my son to hit things with a stick say more than I kind of felt a gut socialised reaction to let my daughter do that and that though is complicated because I have to raise them to be in our society which expects them to act a certain way as of a girl and a boy and then as a woman and a man I have to parent them to be in our culture well in between sort of juggling work with school schedules and making lunches and trying to find the d'haran library books and sort of negotiating with my husband about who was going to do the children's brushing of teeth that night my husband and I actually went out to a date night all right I want you all to close your eyes for a moment everybody you in the back do too and I want you to imagine this red sequined dress brown hair swept into an up - impeccable makeup if I do say so myself and I'll pick out a couple adjectives seductive and sultry and then next to that I want you to imagine a crisp white jacket black shirt aviator sunglasses and fedora hat pectorals puffed up sleek and confident now open your eyes is this what you were imagining so my husband's in my date night it was a drag show it was all new to us and it was definitely not what we expected but I'll tell you if you haven't gone to a drag show in Columbus you should definitely get tickets it is a remarkable explosion of creativity on stage and a wonderful way to spend an evening so two and a half years ago I decided to make a documentary film about drag kings and drag queens and transgender performers here in Columbus Ohio I will give you a few insights into Columbus drag culture now no one can speak to everything and it's a you know imagine this is my personal opinion and a snapshot in a moment in time Columbus serves as a kind of beacon for the LGBTQ community in Ohio and that it's a good-sized city with multiple universities and colleges it has corporations with progressive benefit packages and so generally you can walk down High Street without fear holding your partner's hand without fear of someone intolerant saying something or attacking you as a drag king Topher right put it it's a wonderful gay bubble it is small but it's here it's queer and we're already used to it Columbus is kind of a unique culture and style of drag it's a collaborative culture where multiple performers come together on stage doing group numbers it also is you could say they're arguably competitive performers who come together regularly to put on shows this leads to thousands of dollars being raised for charities and fundraisers every single year by these performers coming together one could say that the more professional a drag performer is the less time they spend a drag and what I mean by this is that drag is a job like anyone's uniform once the jobs over the uniform comes off so these performers show up at a dressing room looking like you or me they transform themselves into a creative persona and once the show's over off comes the duct tape the makeup the wig and they go home drag is essentially a full-time job for many of these people and yet it's very hard to make a living so only one performer can make Allah is able to make a living full-time doing drag the others are retail workers academics bankers salespeople and so forth it can cost up to $5,000 to put on a large show from the performers own money they have handmade puppetry original videos lighting design multiple group choreographed numbers its weeks and months of rehearsal the truth is it really is a labor of love and an art form drag is anything but sexual this is something else when people get mixed up the truth is these performers are in layers of duct tape or binders padding pantyhose wigs facial hair they have glue on their face it is hot it's uncomfortable and every single one I've interviewed has said it is the farthest thing from a sexual experience but rather is an experience of gender of politics or theatrical per sorry theatrical performing for every 50 different people you ask you will get 50 different answers of what exactly drag is what it means and why they do it I followed the Royal renegades drag King troupe here and I've also interviewed the people from the West family and so each of these troops includes the following categories there are drag queens who are men who dress up as women there are drag kings who are women who dress up as men there are boy dancers who are men who perform heightened masculinity there are films who are women who perform heightened femininity on stage and there are transgender performers and the interesting thing about this group is that they're not always necessarily performing drag some of them are just doing theater the Royal renegades also include genderqueer performers and burlesque now drag can be really funny whether it be the rudolph special replete with heat miser and snow miser or the parody on the movie saw dancing to the song Footloose it can be it can sort of push you out of your comfort zone or it can be a place of complete acceptance it can be two hours of just sheer entertainment or a way to sing your favorite pop tune really really loudly with your friends through it all whether or not it's even the imper former's intention drag turns gender on its head because it makes us think and question what we thought we knew so why does gender matter really well I can give you a small example I took my kids to buy Legos and the man in the store explained that Legos has aligned specifically for girls these figurines do not fit in with any other LEGO sets they are in a color palette that is predominantly pink and purple the sets focus on horse farms Beauty Salons cooking that sort of thing and the figures themselves are female they their legs don't move they have breasts and they are skinny now I actually hadn't even noticed that regular LEGO sets do have only an occasional female until my nephew asked his sister my sister his mother how Legos procreate when they're all meant my daughter actually in that Lego store after the man's explanation felt really uncomfortable and she felt like we were breaking the rules because we were not shopping in the girls section see we can say that it's all in fun or we just think these are toys but actually kids really pick up on these things and it does matter dozens of studies have been done showing how increased media exposure and marketing actually influenced stereotypes the children hold about occupations and individuals there is great research being done now by dr. Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg School and at the Geena Davis Institute on gender and media additionally meta-analysis at done by scholars at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan have correlated that an increased media exposure relates for instance negatively to satisfaction with women's bodies so back to the shopping mall via computer apps that we buy clothing or toys in essence what we're doing is we're segregating our children we're saying boys on this side girls on that side or maybe boys in that section of the store and girls shop in that section if this were any other type of segregation would we allow it so freely ourselves and enforce it so willingly the problem with it is it's based on a binary model you are one thing or you are another you are a boy or you are a girl you are masculine or you are feminine you are heterosexual or you are homosexual the truth is these things are a lot more complicated so let's start look at the look at those three elements of human cabinent personalities the first would be boy girl that's your biological sex the second is sexuality which would be homosexual heterosexual and the third is masculine feminine that's your gender so let's take the first one that's your biological sex now this is really easy right here a boy or you're a girl actually it's a little more complicated we all know that there are intersex people for instance who are born with unclear or both sets of genitalia and there are transgender people who enter self-image does not match their physicality additionally there are people who are born with as of or a girl but then their hormones respond differently to estrogen and testosterone and that actually can impact their biological sex identity for most of us here we generally can fall into one camp or another and survive socially but for those who can't they either transition to the other sex or they commit suicide or they transcend meaning they'll live as neither or both so we can see that there is somewhat of a spectrum on this sexuality okay your you might be straight emic straight arson or you might be a hundred percent homosexual or you might be heterosexual and every so often feel attracted to someone of your own sex sexuality is very complicated because it's an interplay of pheromones physicality personal experience culture hormone reception and all these things and so you can kind of understand there's a fluidity in this the third category is gender expression now that's how you dress how you do your hair how you present yourself to the world so generally it's masculine or feminine we all can relate to this because we all know people who are cowboys or women who love shoe shopping and getting manicures or rugby playing women or men who care a lot about their clothing and hair this is a continuum that's in real shift because as people's behavior changes so does our image of what these things mean so for instance men being more hands-on and parenting or emotionally distant demonstrative changes what we imagine is masculinity at the same time this is something that's becoming dangerously more extreme in its division in marketing and media and it's sexual ization and earlier in earlier ages for children your gender expression does not determine your sexuality and this is something that's often conflated for instance if a boy likes bow is interested in doing ballet he might be bullied as gay or if a girl is athletic or aggressive some people might say she's a lesbian well that's totally not true and I'm sure we all know examples where that isn't true and so the truth is that doesn't have one thing to do with another and likewise your sexuality does not determine your gender expression a similar note to this is that on forms you will often see gender as a - for the biological sex these things - have nothing to do with each other and that's just simply a mistaken idea so let's imagine these three things as parallel lines they do not intersect you intersect anywhere on those three lines and I have to grab my form because this parts a little complicated you can be a super masculine totally attracted only to women dude a long curly haired lipstick wearing lesbian female say a metrosexual heterosexual male I'm not super girly not at all masculine bisexual woman a feminine heterosexual trans man a butch gay man a sometime suit wearing sometimes dress wearing lesbian trans woman a cultured it's insensitive gay man where's that guy just European the point is the possibilities are endless as you can see here now this has also been further developed by Sam Kellerman with a gender bred person figure which divides it into four categories separating out your biological sex identity that you know from the equipment you were born with and that is separate obviously from the people that you are attracted to and the way that you express yourself in the world all of us have elements that cross over sort of traditional gender role differentiation the truth is gender isn't male or female it's sort of like we're all cake mixes and we're not made from a box so some might have a little more flour some a little more sugar so might be vanilla bean some might be chocolate the possibilities are all there or you might end up looking like my son's birthday cake so the facts are there that the world is not black or white in this realm and we need to allow it to be more complex as we know if only from the title of a best-selling book there are many many shades of gray I'm hoping that by my not assuming that every animal I now see in the world of the hee or by being mindful to offer my children an entire color palette of all the Y colors that are available rather than just pink or blue or perhaps my signing the petition at my tea girl org to ask Toys R Us to stopped categorizing its toys based on biological sex but to start doing it on maybe something more useful like theme or use that maybe by doing these tiny things that I will offer a world for myself and my children that has a richer sense of possibility and I'll end with a story a few weeks ago my car was broken into and I broke the news to my kids and said this robber had rummaged through the cassette collection our extensive children's book on cassette collection I have an old car and and after that he had taken my cup of plastic cup with pencils and their Chucky Cheese tokens and tickets they'd been saving up and I was really worried that they'd feel sort of violated or like they couldn't leave things in the car anymore but instead my daughter's reaction surprised me she said mom how do you know the robber was a man now no parent knows what they're doing and everyday is an invention just as it is in life no one is in complete control but in that moment I thought wow we all can change the world thank you