Gender? I Hardly Know Her: Culture and The Construction of Gender Identity

the vibe

🌈 Is gender a fixed truth to discover or a story shaped by culture, power, and history? Across cultures and eras, human societies have organized gender in wildly different ways. Some recognized three, four, or even more genders long before Western medicine ever entered the conversation. In this lecture, Alex Lindsay, a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of San Francisco, traces how colonization flattened these plural traditions into rigid binaries, and how psychiatry later turned gender diversity into a diagnosis. Drawing on trans history, anthropology, clinical psychology, and critical theory, Alex examines who gets to decide which identities are considered real, legitimate, or worthy of care. Their work as a clinician specializing in queer-affirming therapy, combined with dissertation research on the pathologization of trans identities, gives them a front row seat to how these questions play out in real people's lives. This talk asks us to reconsider gender not as something fixed inside us, but as something built, contested, and constantly redefined by the institutions around us. ✨ 📵 A No-Phone Lecture 📵 This event is a special one: we are asking attendees not to use their phones during the duration of the event (7-9pm). After you check in, we will ask you to turn your phone off and slip it into an envelope provided at the door. We won’t take your phone or lock it away, but the goal is to create a space where we can all be present together,…