Unlearning Gender

Tasaffy Hossain draws on the work of the Bangladeshi organization Bonhishikha—Unlearn Gender to examine how people are taught masculinity and femininity through family, school, media, language, and everyday reward or punishment. ‘Unlearning’ does not mean pretending gender has no material consequences. It means recognizing that norms acquire power through repetition and can therefore be interrupted.

The organization’s use of personal stories and theatre creates room to discuss topics that abstract equality language often leaves untouched: men’s emotional restriction, women’s respectability, sexual double standards, and the fear of crossing assigned roles. Public performance makes private rules visible and allows audiences to notice how they participate in maintaining them.

A gender-neutral future can sound universal while overlooking unequal exposure to violence, and a binary focus requires expansion through queer and trans perspectives. The talk is best treated as an invitation to method rather than a complete theory. Its feminist insight is that transformation needs practice: institutions must change, but people also need collective spaces in which inherited behavior can be named, rehearsed differently, and held accountable without treating shame as the only teacher.