The burdens of gender

When you hear the word “gender,” what comes to mind? If you’re like many people, you associate it with gender identity—whether a person is cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary. Gender identity is a person’s internal, psychological sense of identification (or lack thereof) with society’s definition of “woman” or “man.” It’s not about biology and physiology, which is their sex.

Our society and our current political climate create false divisions between people who are deemed “normal” and those who are not with regard to gender. This is the gender binary: a system of classifying people that reflects the underlying assumption that they all should (and do) fit neatly into the “woman” or “man” categories. Simply put, it means your sex should determine how you think and act.

Built into this faulty construct is the assumption that outliers are defective. (Bias and discrimination inevitably follow.) However, the notion that just two genders exist, and that gender is determined by reproductive and sexual anatomy and physiology, is not supported by other cultures around the world. Though it’s the dominant paradigm in industrialized nations like the US, these standards do not reflect objective truth. Other cultures recognize up to five genders and occasionally even more. Anglo-Christian culture has often suppressed gender diversity and enforced the gender binary with propaganda and various degrees of physical, verbal, and emotional violence.

Another important layer of gender is the process by which we learn our gender roles. Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps us put these cultural forces into context by delineating several types of burdens that our parts typically carry. Personal burdens originate from our individual experiences, while legacy burdens are handed down intergenerationally in families. IFS also identifies cultural burdens—extreme beliefs and emotions that originate within cultures in response to such things as racism, individualism, materialism, and patriarchy. Secular Western gender rules, for instance, are essentially an outgrowth of religion-fueled patriarchy.

Gender socialization is imposed on nearly everyone from the instant they’re born (possibly even earlier) when someone looks at our genitals and declares, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Practically everyone’s life is then steamrolled onto the “boy track” or “girl track,” which informs how we are dressed, the toys we are given, the colors in our nursery, and more. Many people are also slapped with gendered behavioral expectations, not to mention the emotional wounds our caregivers unconsciously pass along to us.

So begins a lifetime of gender-based wounds and burdens connected to how we were treated and the programming we received. These burdens compound as they weave together with our gender-based expectations (projections?) of others. Thankfully, however, we have a choice. By getting curious about our parts and welcoming them, we can help them heal. Doing so helps us grow in Self leadership, step out of roles, and stop being the unconscious carriers of society’s gendered values.

My own journey of healing gender burdens is documented in my recent book Gender Unburdening: Using Internal Family Systems to Heal from Gender Socialization (Two Hawks Press, July 2024). This book explores the topic of gender in depth and also includes deep dialogues with a part that carried burdens related to parental and cultural expectations stating that I should feel and act in certain ways due to having been born in a female body. The distress associated with these expectations led this part to declare war on my body when I reached puberty. Using IFS, I was able to help this part release gender-based burdens and find freedom, empowerment, and inner peace.

My experience is just one example of the types of burdens that gender socialization can cause. Others may arise from pressure to join the military (to “toughen up”) or to immerse in the world of beauty pageants; or, as was true of my grandmother, to submit to an arranged marriage. More commonplace situations exist as well. For people born in a male body, they often include pressure to suppress emotions or be sexually aggressive or promiscuous. For those born in a female body, gender socialization can lead to being plagued by diet culture, limiting educational and career aspirations, or silencing themselves with partners or at work.

Identifying the cultural influences that spawn these types of burdens can free us from attempting to address them exclusively as personal burdens. Harness the full range of IFS tools to help release them.