gender identity

On The Issues Magazine's piece on society's strict definition of male and female got me thinking about my own struggle dealing with gender identity.  When I was living in SF on Castro Street in the early seventies, I first encountered the concept of androgyny. Not the idea of being both male and female; hermaphroditic, but a person with both masculine and feminine characteristics in terms of behaviour.

I embraced the idea of dressing more in masculine attire and shaved my head. I was often treated like a "little guy." I learned a lot about what we then called "sex roles" that are based upon social constructs. Sex roles became gender, a word I still don't like as well as sex roles. I talk about this in my memoir so stay tuned.