The situation of the environment around the world is truly in shambles and there is a Clarion call to end the harm that we have been meting out to Mother Nature. The United Nations sustainable development organization is working towards the betterment of this issue including an attempt at the gender equality along with making a treatise to help the people understand the difference between the commonly misconstrued terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex'. In a nutshell, sex is defined and refer to as biologically identifying characteristics of an individual that is mostly anatomically visible, as a result of the process of biological reproduction, which in turn is a part of biological essentialism. To make the matters more clear and precise, the sex of a person is usually determined during her/his birth.

On the contrary, the term ‘gender' is truly bounded by more or less a social construct that mostly relates to the phenomenon of masculinity or feminity. This sphere has now been more enhanced and enlarged to include the domain of LGBTQIA+ community that includes a gender which a person associates with herself or himself and that might be different then the six assigned to the person during her/his birth. This feature takes into account the behavioural characteristics of a person in response to her/his surroundings than the anatomical or physical features that the person has been blessed with while being a foetus inside the womb of mother. The individual might associate with oneself as to being a man or a woman or as someone not willing to associate with any gender or might belong to any spectrum the person feels an urge from within to associate with. 

The domain of differentiation between the terms 'sex' and ‘gender’ has always been a debatable issue do some, who failed to perceive how ‘gender’ is totally unrelated to ‘sex’ and how the former is entirely a fluid concept, allowing the individual the freedom of her all his choices. Here, the person is not bound to enclose himself within the rigorous definition of pre-decided socially constructed categories, bounded into water-tight compartments. The toxicity increases when people become snooty towards these individuals, cringing at the gender identity that a person professors and freely associates with it. The immediate harm this causes is on the mental health of a person, which she/he fears to come up with. In certain cases, the traumatic experience is truly hellish when people around turn homophobic or transphobic.

Time has come that the education Department should really be concerned regarding this matter. This issue should be addressed from a grassroot level and made the compulsory part of the school curriculum so that the new and upcoming generations are made aware of this normalcy, which is not something people would stare at and in turn ridicule an individual increasing his mental health issues. A number of noteworthy measures are undertaken by the Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Organization to try and bring about a change in the mindset of the people through various online and offline curriculum modes. But this introduction is not enough. We as individuals need to come forward to make the best use of these resources in order to make the world a better place, thereby adding to the confident blossoming of each individual, with special reference to her or his mental peace — because this domain cannot be confined to trending hashtags Ann long social media peaces, which in turn amounts to nothing.


- Srijani Pukrait


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