Sociological Analysis of Same-Sex Marriage and Gender Identity

This essay delves into the sociological aspects of same-sex marriage, focusing on the Australian context. It examines the interplay between gender, sexuality, and the social imagination, exploring how societal perceptions and constructs influence these concepts. The essay discusses the legalisation of same-sex marriage, gender inequality, and the challenges faced by transgender individuals, including healthcare access and social acceptance. It analyses various theoretical frameworks, such as the social construct theory, and explores the role of media representations and cultural schemas in shaping public opinion. The research highlights the importance of understanding the diverse experiences and perspectives related to gender and sexuality, advocating for equality and inclusivity. The essay references several academic sources to support its arguments and provides a comprehensive overview of the topic.

Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Discussion........................................................................................................................................2
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................4
References........................................................................................................................................5

Introduction
The concept of same sex marriage has been legalised in Australia, in 2017 and many other parts
of the world have banned this ideology. According to me, there should be no discrimination, and
everyone should have a right to love for whom they feel and wish to spend their life with. Sex
are the biological traits that the societies have used to assign people into the category for the
female and the males, where the focus is on the chromosomes or other physical ascription. The
sociology of gender helps in examining about how the society influence the understanding and
perception of differences mainly in between masculinity and femininity.
Discussion
Sex and gender do not always align and the cis-gender helps the people to define about
biological body when one is born into matching their personal gender identity. The transgender
people undergo the transition which might lead to change in their dressing and presentation style.
Sexuality is about sexual attraction, sexual practices and identity (Copland et al., 2016). Gender,
like all the social identities is mainly socially constructed where the constructionism is one of the
theories that the sociologists use for putting the gender into the historical and the cultural focus.
The theory is about creating social interaction through the things what one does and say to
people. It is the gender which is not a fixed or innate fact, but it varies depending upon the time
and place. The gender norms are learned from birth through the socialisation in childhood. where
one is expected of our gender from what our parents teach us and what we pick from the school,
media and the other social institutions.
The social construct theory is one of the best examples for the circular reasoning which includes:

a. Obscuring the society practices in the non-binary gender.
b. Western and industrialised society tend to practice binary gender.
The report includes the conduct for the four models which includes the relationship measures for
self-definition of marriage, commitment ceremony and the relationship commitment. Like
collective memory, the social imagination needs to be theorized as individual where the
cognitive phenomenon is defined at a micro level and a collective level where the cultural
phenomenon is defined at a macro level (Hart-Brinson, 2016). The collective, cultural and the
social imagination is an ongoing contested process where the social actors create, use and then
modify with challenging the content and collective representation. The analysis is based on
encountering the social imaginary with engaging mainly because the people are oriented to the
mutual understanding in communicative action. The theory includes the social imagination with
understanding processes that generates, validates or challenge the understanding. It represents
the social imagination which is specific through the concepts of collective representation mainly
because it works on the process of imagination and implicit schemas. The existing research is to
determine the analytical value where media representations increasingly help in providing the
details of imagination with advanced globalisation. The social imagination of homosexuality at
the macro level is considered to be a creative collecting process with prototypical understanding
of same sex sexuality. The dominant social imaginary tends to change twice from mental illness
to deviant behaviour and from deviant to collective identity. According to the cross-national
studies, the social policies play an important role to minimise the gender inequality with public
funded childcare that frees up women to participate in the paid world. The idea is to highlight
about cultural variations of gender across the time and place which demonstrate about the gender
changes (Hubbard, Collins & Gorman, 2017). The national representative figure is based on

different set of questions to address about how the transgender people face problems with
different gender inequalities. They lack access to the adequate healthcare and are at a higher risk
of experiencing mental illness with family rejection, bullying and social inclusion. This also
includes a higher rate of sexual harassment where one tends to face discrimination from different
authority groups.
The same sex marriage has been legal in Australia and has also received the royal assent from
the Governor-General. Under the federal law, the same sex couples can be recognized to have a
de facto relationship that provides the rights and responsibilities afforded to the married couples.
As per the analysis, there are relations to social security and general family law, where same sex
couples were not recognized as couple for social security or the family assistance purpose.
(Sherkat, 2017). At micro level, the individual imagination of homosexuality is the implicit
understanding of how one can use to construct explicit discourse to make sense of the world. It
can be done through interactional contexts through metaphorical analysis and by interpreting the
figurative tropes sociologically and then comparing the frequency for using them across groups
(Lee & Mutz, 2018). The social imagination with metaphors tends to operate the cultural
intersection and cognition with essence of understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in
terms of other. The people who imagine homosexuality as identity are likely to fail the
understanding of arguments that are made by those who imagine the behaviour of
homosexuality, where each side talks about different factors. The analysis tends to complicate
the public opinion research on the attribution of homosexuality by describing it deeper with the
set of cultural schemas and prototypes.

Conclusion
The research shows that the transgender people face different inequalities of gender where there
is a major lack to access for adequate healthcare. Apart from this, the experiencing of mental
illness results in family rejection, bullying and social exclusions (Taylor, Kimport, Van Dyke &
Andersen, 2014). The transgender groups have a great stride to increase visibility and rights of
transgender people where the mainstream feminism reticence to take up with the issues that
serves only for perpetuating the gender inequality.
References
Copeland, L., Hasell, A. and Bimber, B., 2016. Collective Action Frames, Advocacy
Organizations, and Protests Over Same-Sex Marriage. International Journal of
Communication, 10, p.23.
Hart-Brinson, P., 2016. The social imagination of homosexuality and the rise of same-sex
marriage in the United States. Socius, 2, p.2378023116630555.
Hubbard, P., Collins, A. and Gorman-Murray, A., 2017. Introduction: Sex, consumption and
commerce in the contemporary city. Urban Studies, 54(3), pp.567-581.
Lee, H.Y. and Mutz, D.C., 2018. Changing Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage: A Three-
Wave Panel Study. Political Behavior, pp.1-22.
Sherkat, D.E., 2017. Intersecting Identities and Support for Same-sex Marriage in the United
States. Social Currents, 4(4), pp.380-400.
Taylor, V., Kimport, K., Van Dyke, N. and Andersen, E.A., 2014. Tactical Repertoires: Same-
Sex Weddings. The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, 12, p.266.