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Identity, gender, and sexuality
The past few weeks Krispin has been exploring the strategic developmental stages of both toddlerhood and adolescence, and how autonomy and identity formation were targeted by religious authoritarians for strategic political purposes.
While we will continue to discuss ways to develop, connect with, and express our autonomy in the coming months, today we wanted to give a prompt for folks who are beginning to explore gender and sexual identity.
If you come from a RAP background, there is a good chance you received explicit and implicit messages regarding gender essentialism and heteronormativity. While these messages might permeate the wider culture at large, in RAP homes there was extra pressure to conform to the roles assigned people: male, female, and destined for heteronormative patriarchal families.
Gender roles and heteronormative sexuality were of paramount importance to religious authoritarians because the patriarchy is the backbone of their ordering of society.