Diversity and Culture- LGBT Dialogue Session

Recently in class I attended a Safe Zone Dialogue Session which highlighted the lives of those in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans gender community. For me, this was a very enlightening experience because I have never had many personal experiences with individuals such as these, or so I thought. Within our session we had two panelists, one a student here at UAB who is gay, and another who is an academic adviser at UAB who is a lesbian.
I was able to connect a lot of topics discussed in the dialogue group with concepts learned in my anthropology class. Before understanding these ideas, I really thought that someone’s sex and gender was the same thing, and to me it was simply a box that you fill in on standardized tests and really didn’t have much meaning beyond that. However, I learned otherwise. Sex is the determination of whether something is male or female. As humans, we have the need to put it in either one box or the other. Gender is the way that sex is interpreted and expected to behave. Sexual identity is orientation, defining yourself as gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, lesbian or any other category that may exist.
Gender is something that is socially and culturally constructed, and this concept was reinforced by the student panelist from our session. While his college friends and even his siblings knew that he was gay, he had not come out to his parents yet, and addressed the fact that his father would probably exhibit some feelings of disappointment. It had never occurred to me the stereotypes that we place on certain genders within society. Males are expected to be athletic and tough, and any male who exhibits interest in arts or is emotional is automatically labeled as being gay, even if they are not.
I was interested to learn that in different cultures, who are more primitive than America and have to forage or hunt for their food, duties are often divided based on the woman’s physical abilities and need to be able to child rear while performing a task. While the men may conduct the more laborious work, the food gathered by the women often accounts for more of the caloric value. This shows that although men are often labeled as providers, women are also a vital role in survival of the community. Because of these differences, each instance of gender roles is culturally relative.
Also, I was able to exercise the practice of cultural relativism in this situation, which means understanding another culture on its own terms. Having never really been in contact with anyone with a sexual orientation different from my own, I was not even familiar on terms that were acceptable and those that would be offensive. I felt that this experience allowed me so much insight into a world that is often very disconnected from the general public.