Kamila, Age 1: Sleeping without mommy, school of crying

Kamila Age 2: Potty training, school of hello kitty mini toilet seat

Kamila Age 3: Eating without getting anything on myself, school of sage old person aka grandma

Kamila Age 4:  First plane ride, school of mommy's lap

Kamila Age 5: learning english, school of mommy

Kamila Age 6: adding and subtracting, school of candy

Kamila Age 7: pretending my halloween costume didn't rip during the halloween costume parade, school of life

...

Kamila Age 16: How to drive, school of worried father and 

Kamila Age 17: How to pretend that I love learning about the same things we learned about on college tours,

school of senioritis.

There are many milestones missing but only because those were my VERY active years. Everyday I learned something new. As things calmed down, the learning process slowed down as well but bigger things were explored, life skills. School was my place for learning theoritical things not practical things, thus I have no major memories of it.

Education in school pales in comparison to education in the real world. There are things that cannot be learned from a book but must be learned the hard way. Self confidence for one, one cannot learn self confidence from a book, one must learn self confidence from life experiences (and hard knocks). I, like every teenage girl, struggled with my self image for that brief horrible time in my adolesence. It took not school but personal experiences to teach me that I indeed was beautiful.

This is something that Aybala50 said as we popped outside English House for a quick breath of fresh air. We think of things in boxes, or categories. It's difficult to imagine a world without them.

But what is it about categorizing that provokes such negative responses? I feel that it's the connotations that we associate with the categories. I honestly don't believe that we can live in a world that has no categories - it takes away from who and what we are individually. If there is no way to describe in words what we are, then who are we?

However, is the category system flawed? Sure. We've seen various examples of this. Our modern day definitions of categories in terms of race, gender and religion have evolved over time. What may have been something at one point in history is now something else. Those that may "cross barriers" at this point in time may find a specific category to fill in the future.

But it categorization necessarily bad? I don't think so. I feel we dislike categorizing people because of the connotations that each category holds. To say that we should eradicate all categories for the sake of social justice and equality  seems to be a little extreme. What we should be working on instead is to make these categories seem less negative.

In class we started to discuss Wilchin's question (one of many): Why do a gender at all? However, we didn't get very far in our answer. I noticed that many of us were focusing on potential individual actions, and kept getting stuck on the fact that any of our actions, no matter how unique or transgressive, would inevitably be read through the “slits” of the gender binary. This seemed to mean that none of our actions could lead to the option to not do a gender at all.

Thinking about this topic later, I was struck by a huge misunderstanding in my approach to the question. I think the foundation of not “doing” a gender has nothing at all to do with individual actions, and everything to do with observation. To not “do” a gender, I don't have to change my way of behaving-- in fact, I could change my way of walking, my way of speaking, my way of dressing and it wouldn't make the slightest difference. To not do gender, and to allow others to not do gender, I have to change my way of seeing.

The issue of gender is fundamentally an issue of the observer. If none of us observed gender, it wouldn't exist. I look at the pink, dresses, dolls and lipstick and see symbols. After learning to instantaneously recognize and interpret these symbols, it's nearly impossible for me to step back and see only a color, a piece of fabric, a toy and a red paste. Trying to unsee gender is like looking at a typed page and trying to see abstract art instead of language. I'm not even sure that I can.