Gender Socialization: How I Became A Girl

Essay by j_babymsHigh School, 12th gradeA, March 2004

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How I Became A "Girl"

I, as a human being, am a parasite. I am continuously latching on and feeding off that which surrounds me. When my available resources have been used up, I move on--alike most of the members of today's Western society. I mean this in such context of my mothers' breast, which from my day of birth, I used, until no longer could it supply for me what I needed to grow and flourish into the complex member of the gender socialized society that has been a deputy to myself and my upbringing. I was born into a society of conformity, a society I would continue to grow in and conform to. Since my first breath of life, I have been moulded into a girl. Although I was born a female, my culture and upbringing would determine the characteristics of boy or girl. The pressures placed upon the classification of my gender by my parents, schools and the media, would from the moment I was released from my mother's womb, be seemingly insurmountable.

The pink blanket and clothes I was so excessively placed in for the first, to my assumption, five years of my life would be the beginning of my process of socialization into a gender. As if my being biologically a female and the stamping of the letter "F" on the bracelet devouring my tiny wrists during my first days of life, wasn't proof enough of my sex, I began to conform into my class, with the pink garments I was clothed in. After all, I wouldn't have wanted to experience any feelings of displacement from all the other new born baby girls. As I grew and began to experience new things, I was soon conditioned into what a proper "girl" should be. My...