After reading only twenty pages from “Beyond the Gender Binary” I learned so much that I was pretty amazed that I could gain that much information from such a small excerpt. There was also a lot of shocking information “Take, for instance when the Department of Justice announced that trans and gender nonconforming workers are not protected by civil rights law. Or when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention censored the word transgender” (Alok 15). I had no knowledge of these incidents until reading the text. There were other occurences as well, “we have seen an onslaught of legislation…targeting gender non-conforming people by…banning us from public accomodations, denying us access to legal protections at work, and barring our access to healthcare” (Alok 14).

Alok also brought to my attention that as a society there are so many inescapable aspects of gender that are pushed onto us even before we’re born. These aspects are found in gender reveal parties for babies, on our drivers license and IDs, the colors we associate, how we speak, act and react, even our clothing and how we present ourselves. Just like the text refers, these things become invisible as we implement them to every aspect of our lives, it didn’t really hit me how much gender plays a big role until I read that all listed out. When I think of gender I think of the assigned bathrooms, or seperate college dormitories. But gender is so much more complex and a gender conformity completely more restricting than we as a society choose to acknowledge.