Even before birth, gender norms are thrust on all of us, from gender reveal parties to pink and blue blankets. Gender has traditionally been treated as a foundational building block of our identities. From early childhood through adolescence, gender creates separation and definition that provides a cultural yardstick for measuring our adherence to this same-said societal norm: feminine qualities (cultural norms of soft, gentle, nurturing) and masculine qualities (cultural norms of dominant, strong, aggressive), creating an echo chamber of confirmation bias.
Consequently, people who demonstrate gender traits that fly in the face of their biological sex have historically been marginalized and scorned for their lack of adherence to these gender “rules.” Abandoning social norms and opting to adopt an individualized meaning of gender has created a cultural movement that, without digging into the rich and important sociological and political implications, has been coined by marketers as gender fluidity. Often defined as the fluid shifting of gender expression between masculine and feminine, gender fluidity has surfaced as a reflection of our era of self-critique: a postmodern state of being.