Blog 2
Everyone goes through a performance in a way every single day of their lives by performing their gender. This performance is what everyone else that they interact with sees and is what those people use to determine your gender, your personality, and basically just who you are as a person. This performance is one of the things that allows other people to say, “Oh, she's a girl.� or “He's a boy.�. This performance gives all of us an identity that others can associate with and use to group us into our sex categories. This performance is something that is ingrained into our being from the day we are born. Children learn by watching what those around them are doing and they very quickly learn what is the 'right' thing for their sex to do and what is the 'wrong' thing to do and then continue to perform those right and wrong things to prove that they are in fact a girl or a boy until they don't notice it anymore.
This performance also provides a bit of insight on how a person is treated socially. Everyone is treated differently depending on whether they are a man, woman, child, transsexual, etc. which is a label or grouping that everyone is given pretty much as soon as they are seen by anyone else. This starts to create a social cycle. Other people give us labels or groups and expect us to perform these groups naturally. We therefore conform to these groups without thinking because it is expected of us and in turn, we expect that these other people perform their gender and fit into their group just as much as we fit in ours. If anyone was to perform outside of the norm of their grouping or their gender they would be treated differently. People in general don't seem to know how to deal with a change in something that seemed concrete in the past and therefore will either treat this change with a completely different attitude or try their best to continue to fit this change into its original category.
Changing the way we do gender, therefore, definitely can change our social conditions. For example, a person that has been performing to be a woman their whole life and ends up starting to perform something that would be defined as a man trait would be treated differently, because other people no longer can find that concrete 'woman' group for this person. They went outside of the norm and now have to be reassociated with another group...either the same one or a different one, but either way they will be treated a little differently I think.