Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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      Socialization and Variance

      Mack Beggs won his weight class in the Texas state wrestling championships in February 2017—in the girls’ league . . . and he won it again the following year. Mack is an 18-year-old transgender boy, but state rules bar him from competing in the boys’ league. The rules say that boys cannot compete against girls and that students are required to compete as the gender noted on their birth certificate. After Beggs’s final competition in an undefeated season, the crowd erupted in both cheers and boos.

      Beggs, who began transitioning a year and a half prior to the 2017 championship, has been taking testosterone as part of that process. Some felt that he shouldn’t have been competing against girls because the added testosterone gave him an unfair advantage. A few parents even attempted legal injunctions to prevent Beggs from competing. Ignoring the controversy, Beggs credited his success to his teammates, noting that they all worked hard together. While the public, schools, and politicians debate the fluidity of gender, transgender students like Beggs face pressure to fit in with the social expectations of their peers, their families, and the wider world—and the repercussions when they don’t.

      The majority of transgender students from kindergarten through twelfth grade who are out or perceived as transgender while in school experience some form of mistreatment. In 2015, 54 percent acknowledged being verbally harassed, 24 percent said they had been physically attacked, and 13 percent were sexually assaulted because they were transgender. Some (17 percent) experienced such severe treatment that they left school. Such mistreatment due to gender identity or expression is not restricted to peers and schools but may also pervade family and work life. Transgender people have an attempted suicide rate nine times that of the general U.S. population.

      Yet despite sometimes violent disapproval from the dominant society, many transgender people continue to express their gender identity (see Trending box, Chapter 9). Research suggests a biological basis for transgender identity. At the same time, behavior and experiences are as influential as biology. You are who you are because of the people, institutions, and social structures that have surrounded you since birth (and that have been in play even before then). You have been socialized to look, think, act, and interact in ways that allow you to live harmoniously, at least most of the time, with those around you. However, at times you may come into contact with those who socialize you into ways at variance with the dominant culture. In extreme cases, such socialization can lead to actions such as those taken by abusers of transgender people. Discovering how socialization and social interaction shape who we are and how we act, as we do in this chapter, is the most basic level of sociological analysis. But, in fact, sociologists are concerned with everything along the micro–macro continuum, which was introduced in Chapter 1. That includes the individual’s mind and self; interactions among individuals; and interactions within and between groups, formally structured organizations, entire societies, and the world as a whole, as well as all the new global relationships of the “global age.”

      Sociology’s micro–macro continuum means that rather than being clearly distinct, social phenomena tend to blend into one another, often without our noticing. For example, the interaction that takes place in a group is difficult to distinguish from the group itself. The relationships between countries are difficult to distinguish from their regional and even global connections. Everything in the social world, and on the micro–macro continuum, interpenetrates.

      This chapter and the next introduce you, at least briefly, to the full range of sociological concerns along the micro–macro continuum. We start with the smallest-scale social phenomena and work our way to ever larger ones as these two chapters progress.

      The Individual and the Self

      Sociologists study individuals in general but rarely concern themselves with any particular individual. A primary sociological question is what, if anything, distinguishes humans as individuals from other animals. Some argue it stems from characteristics such as a larger brain or an opposable thumb. However, most sociologists believe the essential difference between humans and other animals is the human capability of having distinctive interaction with other humans.

      An important source of this view is data about individuals who grew up in social isolation and did not experience normal human interaction during their development. For instance, we have information on cases in which children have been locked in closets or in single rooms for much or all of their childhoods (Curtiss 1977; Davis 1940, 1947). More recently, five children, ages 2 through 13, were discovered by authorities in York, Pennsylvania. They had lived their entire lives with their parents in a single room in a private home without any functioning utilities; their СКАЧАТЬ