Getting gender right

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad - At Wednesday’s consultation with religious bodies on the 2012 draft national policy on gender and development, Leela Ramdeen, chair of the Catholic Commission for Social Justice, raised a curious argument regarding the definition of gender in the document. After acknowledging the strengths of the policy document, Ms Ramdeen described the definition of gender as “socially constructed and learned through the socialisation process” as a “slippery slope.” Ms Ramdeen prefers the definition of gender offered by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which constricts the meaning of the word to two sexes, male and female. While the ICC definition is understandably satisfactory to the Catholic Commission, it ignores the realities of modern human relations and the important inroads which have been made in expanding social tolerance for differences based on race, religion, gender and yes, sexuality, over the last fifty years.