All You Need To Know About Gender Fluidity
Binaries are social constructs that can exaggerate the differences between us, categories like rich or poor, gay or straight, and masculine or feminine can end up masking the complexity of each and every one of us, by hiding the people who don’t fully identify with either one.
But life and society is much more diverse than being one thing or another and we at 5-Minute Crafts hope to give you a glimpse into this diversity.
Important terms
There are a few key terms that can help understand all things gender:
- Sex: Usually assigned when someone is born, it’s the classification of people as male, female, or intersex.
- Gender identity: It’s someone’s feeling of being a man, a woman, both, or neither, or anything in between. Each person has an individual experience when it comes to this.
- Gender expression: Our behaviors and appearance, like, what we wear, our makeup, or how we choose to speak, are ways of showing our gender identity, as are our names and pronouns. Other people see our gender through these many things.
- Gender spectrum: It can help to imagine gender as a spectrum that goes from male at one end to female at the other. Anyone can move inside it, feeling like a mix and others feel like they don’t fit into the spectrum at all, and they can refer to themselves as non-binary.
What is gender-fluidity?
The term gender fluidity applies when a person’s gender expression or gender identity or both change over the course of their life, hence the word fluid, which means something which is not fixed.
- Someone can consider gender fluidity to be a part of their identity, meaning they never have a fixed gender expression or identity, which can be associated with people who don’t feel like their assigned sex, for example, people who identify as non-binary or are transgender.
- Additionally, it can refer to a period of time when a person is exploring several identities before landing on the one they most identify with.
It’s important to think about gender fluidity and look at it as another beautiful part of the diversity in humans, we should always respect everyone around us, and this acceptance is essential for younger people going through experiences related to their gender.
Gender expression is part of someone’s identity, and it can change, and shouldn’t be seen as “going through a phase,” it’s crucial for people’s mental health to have it respected and accepted.
Other terms
