Race & Gender Indentity

I started to have interest in culture since I became a Buddy Student 2 years ago,
I'm fascinated by how different cultures can be so when I saw the culture anthropology course offered by UBC, I took it.
and now, I'm loving it although I'm positive I wont get an A out of it but I'm having fun.
Cultural anthropology has opened up my mind to a whole different perspective that I never knew existed.

Last week was about race and this week, we're discussing gender identity.
I'm sure most of us think that gender, like race, is biological determined. Yes, men and women are biological different in the body structure way, but basically, that's the about it.
Those so called " masculinity and femininity" are not biological related, those are the labels society put on us, stereotyping and determining how men and women should behave that men should be masculine and women should be feminine.
That men are generally aggressive, overpowering women and women are generally passive and caring and should stay home and do household work but gender identities are vastly different in various societies, we just couldn't care less.
Nowadays, with feminist movement getting stronger and more women's voice are heard doesn't mean that we women should be grateful that we are born into this generation because all humans have both masculine and feminine qualities, just that we are brought up to behave in a certain way that fits the norm of the society, behaviour that is acceptable. The difference is the difference in rights, back in the male dominance society, women are shaped into behaving how men wanted us to behave, women were considered the weaker gender. Women who are strong and independent were not acceptable because they are threats to the male species.
Who determines how we should behave as a woman, we can be both feminine and strong at the same time, look at Hilary Clinton!!
The point is, how we behave are strongly shaped by culture,masculinity and femininity has nothing to do with biology. The same thing goes with race, race is just a border created by society to categorise people into different groups but biologically speaking, race doesnt exist.
Those characteristics that we think only certain races have are strongly shaped by their culture.
That some race is just born lazy and uncivilized or some race is just born more superior than others, these are all stereotypes. One of my classmates boyfriend is a Korean, he was born as a korean by adopted by a canadian family since he was 8 months old, he was raised like a white man, he doesnt speak korean, he's nothing like a Korean except the way he looks. Its undeniable that we look different, we have different skin color, facial structure etc but those are caused by geographic difference.
Human origin traces back to Africa, people migrated and started to mutate accordingly to environment in order to survive but that's about it. Race is rather an idea that we prescribe to biology but genetically we are among the most similar species, even flies are more genetically differently among themselves than we do!!!
We are obviously different, but saying that we are born different and race is in our gene, or men and women are just born to behave differently or men and women just have different qualities, these assumptions are as absurd as saying the planet is flat.

Think about it.

Aint my course fascinating??? ^^