English.Hani.co.kr – Byun Hea-joung, Research Professor, Ewha Womans University?s Korean Women?s Institute
A lot of people want to be able to tell whether the people they meet are women or men. Fortunate for them, there are ways to do this, because between South Korea’s national ID cards and public restrooms, there are a lot of ways to tell. A person’s appearance, clothing, style of speech, and attitude also classify people by their gender. It is all so natural that you don’t even think of sexual identity as being important in the course of your diverse range of relationships. But the world as it has been meticulously structured would certainly become a confused system if there were a lot of people who were undeterminable or who spoke of their sexual identity in different ways.
Recently I came upon some teenagers who were sitting next to someone that had a different appearance from the norm, and they were talking about the person’s gender. Eventually, they concluded the person was “transgendered” and were whispering to each other as they debated whether the individual was originally a man or not. The person must have heard them, but got off at the next station without the slightest reaction. The teenagers giggled as they saw the person walk away. “He’s got to have been a man!” one of them said loudly.