Like most of my books, this one starts from the idea that cultural pressures around gender are a huge part of the struggles we have in this area. It unpacks how gender is viewed in the world around us, and encourages readers to think about their own genders within this through a series of activities and reflections. The book draws on Alex and my own experiences of gender as well as the anonymised experiences of people we’ve worked with over the years, to give examples of the very diverse ways there are of experiencing, identifying, and expressing gender.

People often imagine that gender is only relevant to women, and/or perhaps trans people. However recent writing on the impact of toxic masculinity on men, and rigid gender norms on cisgender people, have highlighted that it’s a vital topic for everyone to explore. For that reason, How to Understand Your Gender isn’t aimed at people of any particular gender – or agender – identity or experience. Instead it aims to provide a route-map for anybody who’s thinking about their own gender, or struggling to navigate the constantly shifting terrain of gender that’s out there at the moment.

Gender hardly ever seems to be out of the news at the moment. Just in the past month, for example, The BBC show No More Boys and Girls showed how highly gendered schools and families are, and the impact of this on children as young as seven who believe that ‘boys are better’, that girls should be pretty and can’t be successful, and that boys shouldn’t show any emotions except anger. Robert Webb publicised his book How Not To Be a Boy about the damaging impact that dominant ideals of masculinity had on him. John Lewis announced that it wouldn’t label children’s clothes ‘for boys’ and ‘for girls’ any more which resulted in a huge backlash. A couple were interviewed in the media because they had threatened to sue their child’s school for allowing a child who was assigned male at birth to wear dresses. Talk show host James O’Brien responded in spectacular fashion to both these news stories. L’Oreal’s first trans model Munroe Bergdorff was fired for pointing out white privilege and structural racism. And Piers Morgan continued his ongoing campaign against non-binary and gender fluidity in conversation with Julian Clary.

How to Understand Your Gender takes an intersectional approach to explore how our genders are  interwoven with race, culture, class, age, generation, disability and many other aspects of our identity and experience. In this way hopefully it will provide some helpful signposts for thinking through these kinds of news stories, as well as being useful for considering how the issues they raise resonate through our own lives.

Find out more:

You can buy the book via Amazon, Waterstones, or Jessica Kingsley’s own website.

You can hear a podcast with me and Alex talking about the book over on megjohnandjustin.com.

If you’re in London you can come and here me talk about the book, and gender, on Wednesday 4th October at Conway Hall. Details here.

The post How to understand your gender appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

That hasn’t always been the case for me, and it’s also vital to remember that it very much isn’t the case for everyone. Part of the reason that it’s important that people are out about their experiences in these areas (and others) is that it helps to create the circumstances in which it is safer for other people to be open about all that they are too. Nobody should ever be pressured to be out when it doesn’t feel safe enough for them.

However, I have noticed recently that – despite me being open about it – some people seem to struggle to remember, and to understand, my non-binary gender. So here’s a Q&A to make it clearer.

Non-binary gender: What’s that then?

Non-binary gender, or genderqueer, is a big umbrella term used to refer to people who don’t experience themselves within the gender binary. In other words we don’t feel that we really fit into either the ‘man’ or ‘woman’ categories.

Isn’t that incredibly rare? Surely most people are either men or woman.

Not as rare as you might think. Although the idea of identifying as in some way non-binary is quite a new thing in western cultures – perhaps around 0.4% of people at the moment – an awful lot of people experience themselves in this way. One study found that over a third of people felt they were, to some extent, both genders, neither gender, or the ‘other’ gender. Recently in a YouGov survey 19% of people disagreed with the statement ‘you are either a man or a woman’, and a further 7% were not sure.

Is being non-binary a kind of trans?

Yep. Trans is an umbrella term referring to people who don’t remain in the gender they were assigned at birth. Given that most people at birth are described as being a boy or a girl, non-binary people definitely count as trans. However not all non-binary people see themselves as being trans, perhaps because the word trans has mostly been associated – in the past – with transitioning to being a woman or a man, and/or with medical interventions which not all non-binary people have.

What about you?

I personally regard myself as trans. I’m not living in the gender I was assigned at birth; this has involved a transition for me; and – as an activist – I share a lot in common with the agendas of other trans activists (binary and non-binary).

Also it’s worth pointing out here that even if somebody does identify themselves as a man or a woman, that doesn’t mean that they believe that gender is binary (that only those two things are possible).

And what about medical interventions?

As Laverne Cox nicely pointed out last year, people get far too fixated on trans people’s bodies and on surgeries and that can feel very intrusive and objectifying, so this generally isn’t a cool question to ask people.

Non-binary people make a whole range of different decisions – at different times in their lives – about whether to make bodily shifts that reflect their gender experience, or not. For myself, after a lot of reflection, I am getting surgery to flatten my chest later this year. It feels important and very fortunate to me to have that option as it’s having a big impact on how comfortable I feel in the world.

I’m also part of a few projects which are gathering information and expertise to hopefully make it easier for non-binary people to access these kinds of services in future.

And what about your name. I’m confused. Some of your books were published under ‘Meg Barker’ but now you often use ‘Meg-John’ and you sign your emails ‘MJ’. What should I use?

I changed my name officially last year to Meg John Barker because the name John is very meaningful to me for lots of reasons, and I kept hold of the Meg because that also feels like me. I like using Meg-John (with or without the hyphen) because it includes names that are generally seen as both feminine and masculine. I also like MJ for being completely neutral. I’m happy with other people using whichever of Meg-John or MJ feels best to them.

What if I get it wrong? Will you be really offended?

Not at all. It always takes some time to remember when somebody has made a change like this. It also took me a little time myself of hearing people use different versions of my name to figure out what worked best for me. As somebody who has significant cognitive difficulties in matching names to faces and in remembering how I know people out of context, I have a lot of sympathy with people struggling in this kind of area. It never bothers me if somebody has to keep correcting themselves for a while.

What does feel hard to me is if people don’t bother at all even after I’ve told them a few times. That can begin to feel like maybe they’re doing it to make a point, so it becomes harder to stay open and to keep gently reminding them.

And the pronoun thing? That I find really complicated.

As with names, non-binary people make a whole range of different decisions about which pronouns feel comfortable to them. Some use he or she, or alternate between the two, some choose alternative pronouns that have been developed, and some – like me – use they.

But isn’t that grammatically incorrect?

Short answer: nope. There’s a great youtube by a linguist explaining why not. We use the singular they all the time when we’re not sure about the gender of a person. For example, when we’re discussing Bake Off before we know who has won but we want to speculate about how they will feel or what their showstopper will look like.

Sometimes it can feel like people focus on issues of grammatical correctness when what they’re really uncomfortable about is the idea of non-binary gender. It certainly becomes quite tiring having to answer this question over and over again!

It feels too difficult to shift to using such an unfamiliar pronoun for you. Do I have to?

Again different people feel differently about this so I can’t speak for every non-binary person. Generally though it is respectful to use the pronoun that the person themselves uses. They pronouns feel a good fit for me. It feels really affirming to me when people use them. As with the name I don’t mind at all people when people get it wrong and correct themselves. It does feel hard when people decide not to do it at all, or when they refuse to use ‘they’ for me in a certain context because they don’t think that other people will like it.

If you’re struggling with it I’d suggest practising more. I find it helps, for example, to use they pronouns for animals so that they become more familiar. Also make sure you use they pronouns when talking about the person when they aren’t around so that you get more practised at referring to them in that way.

If you don’t know somebody’s pronoun it’s fine to check it out with them. The same applies if there’s other words you might need to shift in order to refer to them (e.g. like ‘sibling’ instead of ‘brother/sister’, or if they’re at an event where people would tend to be welcomed with ‘ladies and gentlemen’ – ‘friends and colleagues’ is a good alternative).

Listen what I really don’t get is why you can’t be who you are and stay within the category of woman (or man). Shouldn’t we be expanding what can count as a woman or man, rather than inventing new gender categories?

Absolutely I agree that it’s a great idea to expand out what things can be regarded as masculine or feminine, and how people can be as a woman or as a man. Rigid categories are bad for everyone. I think it’s fab that some people are remaining within those identities and expanding them, and that others are finding other ways to express and label their experience. Seeing gender as diverse and multifaceted, on a number of dimensions, feels like a great way forward to me.

So is non-binary just a political thing for you then?

Again all these things are different for different non-binary people (I really can’t stress that enough!) For me the personal is definitely political. I think that it’s really important that we stop assuming things about people, and restricting them so much, because of their gender. I think that pointing out how gender isn’t a simple binary is one good way of challenging that. Partly for me it is about walking the walk of the gender ideas that I have.

At the same time my non-binary gender is also a lot about my own personal experience. When I was young I went to a school where all the people who had the same interests and tastes as me were boys, and where gender was so segregated that I wasn’t able to hang out with them or to become friends with them. It was super painful to be able to see a place where I might belong, but not to be able to access it. It was also painful to learn that I had to ‘do’ a certain kind of femininity which didn’t fit me at all in order to be accepted or loved. Forcing myself to do that felt unkind, objectifying of myself, even violent at times. But I still did it.

It’s taken a very long time indeed to unlearn all the habits I learnt in order to fit in and to be approved of. Having done a lot of that work I was left with not feeling like I was a woman, but equally not feeling that I was a man. When I came across other non-binary people I experienced that sense of fit. It felt right to me. And it felt like an important kindness to myself to allow myself to be openly non-binary.

But aren’t you a queer activist/writer person? Surely that’s all about getting away from identities?

Yes it’s true that queer theory and queer activism aims to get away from identity politics (fighting for our rights on the basis of identity). Fixed identity terms often fail to capture the fluidity, diversity, or complexity of experience. And identity politics is often about gaining rights for some groups at the expense of others: redrawing the line between who is culturally accepted and who is not.

My own aim would be for a world where all the diverse experiences of gender are all equally accepted and valued. Non-binary and genderqueer feel like good broad terms for expressing my experience of gender given that it feels like it is between and/or beyond what our culture generally assumes is meant by ‘woman’ or ‘man’.

The psychologist Sandra Bem used to say that there were two ways out of the massive gender inequality we currently have in so many areas. One was dialling down the importance of gender – just treating people as people. The other was dialling it up to the point that we had thousands of different gender terms to capture the full range of gender experience. Her view was that the former approach didn’t really work out, so we needed to shift to the latter. I think she may have had a point.

In so many ways it’s important to move towards an intersectional approach where we understand every person as being at a unique intersection point of their gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, generation, geographical location, disability, etc. etc. etc. We need to see each person in all that complexity, and to develop a better understanding of how all these areas operate structurally in combination to create the view that some people are more valuable than others. Then we need to try to shift those structures so that is no longer the case.

Find out more

There’s more on all of this in my book How to Understand Your Gender.

Download our non-binary gender factsheet!

Here are links to:

• Beyond the Binary (online non-binary magazine)
• Trans media watch guidelines on non-binary gender
• Everyday Feminism on Non-Binary
• CN Lester’s blog
• A talk I did a couple of years back on youtube
• Jay Stewart’s TED talk

The post Coming out day: Non-binary gender Q&A appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Is gender real or constructed?

Both! Like all aspects of experience gender is biopsychosocial: a long word which means that it is made up of biological, psychological and social strands all of which are woven together in complex ways.

For example, genetic information from our parents determines that we are born with certain genitals. The ideas which are present in our culture about what it means to have certain genitals have a big impact on how we are treated and the expectations that others have of us. That treatment means that we get positive or negative responses from others for certain behaviours, and this impacts on the connections that our brains make and the feelings that we have. All of this make us more or less likely to make certain choices in life, and those choices feed back on our brains and bodies, and on the wider society around us.

So our gender is shaped by the ‘constructions’ present in the world around us (about what it means to be masculine or feminine for example). At the same time we have a very real experience of our gender because it is laid down in our brains and bodies and psyches over years of life experience. That doesn’t mean that gender isn’t fluid or changeable however: things alter as we make choices in our lives, and the world around us also shifts over time in the way it views gender.

Why do we stereotype different gender roles?

I suspect that there are many reasons. There seems to be a human tendency to put people in boxes in order to create simple rules of how to operate. However, of course, in different times and places we emphasise different aspects of people and in different ways (e.g. gender, race, class, etc.). We have a long history of our society being set up in a certain way, which benefits those in positions of power, and many of the gender stereotypes help to perpetuate that system: for example men being seen as better at business, and women as better at nurturing roles which are less highly valued.

What are the key differences?/Are men and women really that different?

The evidence is that there are relatively few gender differences which are consistent throughout the research. The differences between people of the same gender across cultures are far greater than the differences between people of different genders within the same culture. Also, it is very hard to know which of the differences that do seem to be present would still be there if people weren’t treated radically differently on account of their gender from an early age.

What do we perceive to be the characteristics pertinent to men, and to women?

Generally, in our culture at the moment, we divide gender into two (men and women). This is not the case for all cultures, some of which have more recognition of the diversity within the genders and/or recognition of intersex people and other genders. In our culture at present men are perceived to be more rational, less emotional, physically stronger, more aggressive, more focused, and having more agency and responsibility. Women are perceived to be more emotional, more nurturing, more concerned about other people, and better at multitasking, but less able to take risks.

How does this prejudice translate in a workplace environment?

It can mean that certain jobs are seen as being more appropriate to men, or to women, and we know that such biases do impact on who is chosen for the job, even if interviewers are trying to treat all applicants equally and to judge them without taking account of gender.

Does society place more importance on having masculine behaviour general? And in the office? If so, why?

Some of the stereotypes of masculinity are seen as being the things that are necessary to do well in the office – such as being unemotional, able to take risks, and focused on tasks. However, of course, many of the stereotypes associated with femininity are also valuable in managers and high up roles, for example multi-tasking and being good with people. Also there are many men who display more stereotypically feminine traits, and vice versa.

What issues, if any, arise from women adopting masculine personas in the office and vice versa?

Women are often placed in a double bind at work. If they adopt ‘feminine’ characteristics then these are undervalued culturally and they are given less well rewarded positions. However, if they adopt ‘masculine’ characteristics they are often seen as un-feminine and criticized for this (e.g. a man is seen as assertive while a women is seen as domineering, a man is seen as rational while a woman is seen as cold, etc.)

How can we reach a point when both types of characteristics are viewed equally?

I think it’s a matter of detaching the characteristics from gender as much as possible, and society learning to value all these characteristics more equally rather than rewarding some far more than others. This is not just important for gender (where nurturing jobs are valued less than technical ones, for example), it is also important in relation to class (where manual labour is valued less than office work, for example).

The post Gender in the workplace appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The focus on lesbian, bisexual and queer women is appropriate because both women, and lesbian, bisexual and queer people, are particularly highly diagnosed with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety (when compared with men, on the one hand, and heterosexual people on the other). They also self-report higher levels of distress and lower levels of happiness and well-being than other groups.

My brief presentation at the event focused on the social aspects of such suffering. Women’s experiences of depression have been linked, for example, to the ways in which women are socially expected to demonstrate distress (sadness and fear, rather than anger), and to aspects of conventional femininity such as having identities which are strongly bound up with other people’s well-being and feeling a lack of agency over their own lives. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people have higher rates of such problems because of the challenges of living within a heteronormative world and related experiences of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Recent research has found that rates of depression, self-harm and suicide are particularly high amongst bisexual and queer people, which is likely linked to their lack of visibility in wider culture. It is difficult indeed to have one’s identity questioned, ridiculed, and/or disregarded by heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities alike.

Suffering is often exacerbated when distress which has such a strong social component is regarded as being something which is internal to the individual themselves. Currently there is a powerful cultural tendency to see all distress as being internally caused. Many people believe that when they are depressed or anxious there are only two possible ways of understanding this: Either they are ill, and they need help, but at least this means that it is not their fault. Or they are not ill, and therefore don’t need help, but this means that they are to blame for their own suffering (the ‘pull your socks up’ attitude). Both of these understandings are internal: either there is something physically wrong, or there is some kind of personal deficiency on the part of the individual. Such understandings can prevent us from seeing – and addressing – any social element to our suffering. They also catch us in a double bind whereby we have to accept that there is something wrong with us or that we are blameworthy, neither of which is a great outcome. Also, either understanding continues to haunt the other even if we dismiss it. If we accept that we are ill we often worry that somebody will discover that we are not really ill and will be ‘found out’ for faking in some way. If we accept that it is up to us to deal with our problems we often fear that there might really be something wrong with us and that that will be exposed.

An alternative to this internal perspective is to see all forms of human distress as complexly biopsychosocial. Of course there are some physical vulnerabilities which we have to experience distress in certain ways, and social experiences like being the victim of prejudice write themselves on our psychology and biology in various ways (affecting brain chemistry, thought patterns, and the way neurons wire up, for example). However, our biology is intrinsically interwoven with the ways in which we experience the world, and the ways in which it treats us. The statistics on mental health problems in women and LGBT people alert us to just how important these social aspects can be, and may leave us asking whether ‘depression’ or ‘oppression’ is the more useful word to apply. Opening up the possible role of social forces also opens up potential for other ways of addressing struggles than the common individual modes of drugs or therapy. Both community involvement and activism because important possibilities to consider.

This finally leads us to the H-word and why I find it somewhat troubling. We hear a lot at the moment about the importance of individuals achieving happiness through positive psychology. However, there is a real danger that this throws us back into an internal understanding of such things: ‘Everyone should be happy and here are some techniques you can use to achieve it. If you can’t achieve it then there is something wrong with you’.

In her book, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed talks about the ways in which happiness may be more available to some rather than others (often those who can more easily conform to the ‘norm’). She suggests that we require ‘feminist killjoys’ and ‘unhappy queers’ if we are to reach a more equal society where pleasure isn’t always found at the expense of others or by conforming to problematic power hierarchies.

There is a related idea in the mindfulness approach which I find useful. Buddhists believe that it is actually the craving for happiness which is the cause of suffering. Our consumer culture constantly tells us what we need to be happy (more money, fame and success, the perfect partner, the ideal body, the product they are selling etc.). As Sara Ahmed points out, such things are more accessible to some than others, but even for those who can get them they are never enough. Mindfulness advocates an alternative approach of bringing our attention to the here-and-now, rather than constantly striving after whatever we think we need to be happy. It also advocates being with whatever emotions we’re experiencing rather than privileging one (happiness) over all others.

I was interested that the H-word event description talked about finding ‘happier, more meaningful lives’ as if these two things necessarily go together. From another perspective we might regard constantly grasping after happiness as the very thing which will prevent us from achieving it. It might be that in order to have a meaningful life we need to let go of the quest for happiness. If we turn our focus to welcoming all emotional states and what they have to tell us, and to compassionately seeking to improve society through mutual support, perhaps we may find that happiness sneaks up on us after all.

Find out more:

There are more blog posts by me on happiness here and here.

The post The H-word: Happiness appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman.

Perhaps the most famous quote from de Beauvoir’s writing on gender, The Second Sex, is this one. Here she is arguing, from autobiographical experience and from the available evidence at the time, that the things associated with womenhood (such as being passive, concerned with appearance, childlike and in need of protection, and wanting to care for others) are imposed upon women by society rather than being innate characteristics they are born with.

Current understandings of gender view it – like so much of human behaviour – as a complex biopsychosocial interweaving rather than something that can be simplistically put down to ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’. Gender theory alerts us to the diversity of possible gendered identities and roles available, whilst emphasising the limited patterns of masculinity and femininity which we are pushed to repeat and repeat until they feel ‘natural’. Biological findings on neuroplasticity reveal that the likely underlying brain processes are neural pathways which are strengthened by such repetitions. So we could say that gendered identity is a process of narrowing down from the possibilities which are available at birth.

There are, of course, some biological limits on what is possible from the start, which differ from person to person, but de Beauvoir emphasises the social limits which constrain these. Her focus here is on freedom, the fact of humanity that her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasised in his work. Sartre highlighted the importance in life of becoming aware of the meanings which are imposed upon us by others (societal assumptions about what people like us should be like, or family expectations about what we are going to do) and breaking free of these. De Beauvoir pointed out that such breaking through of ‘the ceiling which is stretched over their heads’ is easier for some than for others. Embracing one’s freedom may be virtually impossible for those who are enslaved, and may be easier for some than others even in times and places where everyone is regarded as ‘free’.

The lie to which the adolescent girl is condemned is that she must pretend to be an object, and a fascinating one, when she senses herself as an uncertain, dissociated being, well aware of her blemishes.

De Beauvoir argues that, at the stage in life when boys are encouraged to become ‘little men’ and to become independent and to ‘dominate nature’ with their bodies. Girls are taught, through playing with dolls, through being complimented and critiqued on their appearance, and through being warned about various dangers of life, to be passive, that their body is something to beautify, and that the world is something to be scared of.

Focusing on this aspect of ‘being an object’ in particular, we can see that women are still regarded very much in terms of their appearance, although these days they are encouraged to beautify themselves for their own pleasure and ‘fun’ rather than explicitly for the pleasure of others. However, it is often difficult to disentangle the pleasure derived from feeling one looks good from the pleasure derived because someone else thinks you look good. Appearance is a key focus of women’s magazines, and the ideals of feminine beauty are so narrow that many are excluded from it, and even minor deviations from it are remarkable (as in the recent Guardian article about models who ‘break the mould’).

The other focus in women’s magazines, and in movies and TV shows aimed at women, are relationships with men. De Beauvoir comments that ‘a great many adolescent girls when asked about their plans for the future, reply . . . “I want to get married”. But no young man considers marriage as his fundamental project’. Miranda on Sex and The City echoed this concern several decades later when she stormed out of a café complaining that all that her (very successful) friends talked about was men, but it is revealed later in the episode that she was only upset because she wasn’t really over her ex-boyfriend.

The less she exercises her freedom to understand, to grasp and discover the world about her, the less resources will she find within herself, the less will she dare to affirm herself as a subject.

De Beauvoir argues that, in such ways, women are encouraged into ‘being for others’ rather than ‘being for themselves’. Many women struggle to tune into their own desires and needs due to seeing pleasure as something to be gained from pleasing others, and put themselves through unhappiness or pain feeling that this is what they are supposed to do.

Of course we can question the benefits of both the ‘for others’ and ‘for themselves’ sides of the binary. It is problematic to feel that our only identity is in the role that we have in other people’s lives (as many women find when they lose such roles), and troubling to have to constantly monitor their body and self to ensure that they are pleasing to others. On the other hand, as de Beauvoir pointed out, there are benefits to such a position: not having to feel responsible for your actions because you don’t believe that you have power to affect the world, and real pleasure when you are approved of or desired. Being ‘for themselves’ (as men are encouraged to be) involves the weight of responsibility which comes from being called upon to make autonomous choices and to be self-sufficient and protective of others, when we may well actually feel scared, incapable and vulnerable ourselves. Also, as de Beauvoir suggested, mutual relationships are very difficult indeed if one person needs to be constantly affirmed as a beautiful object, or one person is constantly denying the other the freedom and responsibility that they have themselves.

De Beauvoir further (and perhaps controversially) highlights the role of women in limiting other women. She points out what a threat it can be for a mother to see a daughter breaking through and embracing their freedom and resisting the roles being thrust upon them in ways they were unable to do themselves. Perhaps we can relate this to the women-produced magazines that still welcome women in to a self-scrutinising, appearance and relationship obsessed world; as well as the tendency to point to the lack of freedom of women in ‘other’ places as a way of obscuring our own situation.

Inspiring futures

If people become their gender rather than being born into them, and if we regard freedom to become, without limitations, as a vital part of the picture, perhaps the important thing to do is open up possibilities for becoming as much as we can.

We could link this to recent pressures from intersex activists who have argued for intersex people (the 1-2% of people who are born with anatomy or physiology which differs from contemporary ideals of ‘normal’ male and female) to be able to make their own choices about the gendering (or not) of their bodies later in life, rather than having this imposed upon them with surgeries in childhood which often have no medical necessity, as has previously been the case.

There has been a furore in the media recently about families who have made similar decisions about apparently non-intersex children, demanding their right to decide upon their own gender later on in life rather than having it imposed upon them from birth. Many commentators have seen this as deeply problematic or even abusive. However, we could – from de Beauvoir’s perspective – view it in another way: locating the problem in a society that enforces particular ideals of gender onto children; thus limiting what they are able to become.

Find out more:

All these ideas are explored further in my book How to Understand Your Gender.

The following books all raise interesting issues in these ongoing discussions:

Caitlin Moran: How to be a woman

Norah Vincent: Self made man

Kate Bornstein: My gender workbook

Cordelia Fine: Delusions of gender

The post Becoming a woman: The gender theories of Simone de Beauvoir appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.