Self Evaluated

This past week in class we talked about relationships; parent attachment, sibling subsystems, same-sex attraction, and gender. I'm gonna start with sibling subsystem. In class we talked about how if we grew up as the opposite gender how that would change how we would have grown up and how it would have effected our family system. Me being a girl, if I had grown up as a boy I can think of a lot of different things that wouldn't be the same. First off, my little brother would have a older brother to look up to seeing as he's the youngest with only two older sisters. I probably wouldn't be as close with my mom. Then there's also the effect it would have on my older sister. Then we talked about same-sex attraction, this subject was pretty interesting to me. I never really thought about it, I mean I had some friends who were gay but I never thought how it could effect the world. One of my favorite things someone mentioned in class is this, "Gay marriage effects both genders. For every gay couple you have two women or men left that will never be a mother or a father.". Another thing mentioned was just because a boy is feminine does not make him gay. which leads into my last point, gender. Growing up until the age of about 9 I was into barbies and dress up but then I transitioned to liking more "tom-boy"ish kind of things. I liked playing outside and didn't mind getting dirty, Bugs didn't bother me, and I got really into Star Wars. While my sister wore blouses and jewelry I wore t-shirts and holy jeans. We were honestly like night and day. But just because I dressed and acted a certain way didn't mean I liked girls. Same for boys. Like I mentioned earlier, my little brother grew up in a house of mostly girls, and yes sometimes he'll goof off and act a little girly but this does not make him gay. This just shows he's in touch with his feminine side, which is not a bad thing. I can count on more then one hand were my brother was able to cheer me up because he kinda understood. He is one of the most thoughtful, caring, sensitive, and understanding guys I know all because he doesn't mind expressing himself. In the world there is a lot of debate on what little girls and boys should play with and how it will effect them. There is this misconception somewhere out there that little girls should only play with dolls and such and little boys should only play with toy cars. Honestly I owned a big ol' bucket of cars as a child and it was AWESOME! Another example is if you hand a little girl a stick most the time she'll see it as a wand or something of the sort, but if you give a little boy the stick most the time he'll see it as a sword or gun or in my little brothers case a wizards staff, lol. Kids will be what they want til people start telling them what to be. Once someone is called gay or childish or in some cases unattractive, that's how they will start to see themselves. This is not okay but sadly this is the world we live in but its up to us to change that.