Yeah. Until it became relevant to people I actually know, I had just taken the male/female binary as a fact. But it's just as constructed as a child/adult binary or South Africa's former white/colored/black trinary. Or the 7 colors of the spectrum I learned as a kid, rather than the continuous span of wavelengths that exist in the real world, filtered through our particular biology and the cultural heritages that shape color perception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term
But when I started paying attention and without being too invested in the notions I'd been handed, gender turns out to be more complicated than a boolean. Like you, I think the question is what we then do about it.
But when I started paying attention and without being too invested in the notions I'd been handed, gender turns out to be more complicated than a boolean. Like you, I think the question is what we then do about it.