Prior to attending Leeds Metropolitan University I had a three year gap from education. During this time I performed as a Visual Display Artist for Selfridges department store in Manchester, before eventually becoming a Graphic Designer for the NHS North West. During my time at Selfridges I worked within a team of five creatives. Together we would develop and create ideas and concepts; including Graphics, Typography and Display Art, that would be implemented in both the store windows and internal department site-displays. Eventually, I became a Graphic Designer for the NHS. I worked with my team members, creating a marketing plan, alongside engaging, informative material, that was compliant with brand guidelines, reaching each member of staff within the North West region.

 

“Gender”

 

Gender is something we all learn about as children, but we learn a very limited concept, of a concept that’s truly unlimited. Two options to describe every person in this world? That’s 7 billion individual identities simplified into two. Gender isn’t that simple.

 

While biological sex is something that exists in a uniformed and predictable way, you can’t say the same thing about gender. Gender is relative, cultural, and the way we express and understand it, changes over time. But we still connect biological sex to gender. If somebody is born with a penis, he is a male, he is a he and we raise him to be a him. If somebody is born with a vagina, she is a female, she is a she, and we raise her to be a her.

 

When we aren’t sure, if someone is born intersex, with ambiguous genitalia, we guess. We guess if he is a she, or if she is a he, and based on that guess we raise him to be a him, or her to be a her. Gender isn’t the parts that make up your body, it’s what’s in your head. Gender identity is rooted in sociology, it’s rooted in gender-norms and the way we perpetuate and reinforce those ideas in society. Your gender identity is how you make sense of yourself in your head, and how much you align, or don’t align with what you understand the options for gender to be. Gender identity is, at it’s root, a way of classifying personality. But we have a lot more than just two personalities, so why do we settle for gender options that are binary?

 

I’m a man who wears concealer when his skin isn’t so great, I’m quite sensitive and I’m particular about the clothes I wear. I’m a man and nobody doubts my male-identity, but people laugh when I call myself manly because, even though they don’t question my “man-ness”, they question my masculinity. The reason for this is the difference between gender identity, and gender expression.

 

We tend to think of gender expression consisting on a scale of masculine to feminine. When in reality, it’s two separate scales and a measurement on each of them. On one scale we can measure how we express femininity, but on the other scale we measure how we express masculinity. Does me growing a beard make the concealer I just purchased less girly?

 

A lot of people express the gender that aligns with their gender identity, some people don’t. Whether it’s for comfort, pleasure or personal creativity. Some people see gender expression as a performance, a display of hyper masculinity or femininity, we call them Drag Kings and Drag Queens.

 

Contact:

Email: chad.odare@gmail.com