ABSTRACT
Humanity developed gender and sexual identity, and domination arose out o f the inability to recognize, appreciate and nurture differences, not simply out o f the failure to see all as same. Society developed the symbolic attributes for classifying people, which grew under patriarchy for several reasons: 1. The allocation of rights and responsibilities; 2. The maintenance of civil order and morality; 3. The identity of members; and 4. The aggregation of demographic statistics in the census.1 Gender rightly identifies the persistence of asymmetric power relations, rather than natural anatomic differences, with women occupying the lesser o f dual pairs between man and woman.2 Justice encompasses several aspirations: 1. The reconciliation of diversities into a new unity of difference; 2. The reciprocity of shared authority and the mutuality of decisions, precluding domination; 3. The recognition of the legitimacy of others and the identification with others; and 4. The judgment process seeing things from the other’s point of view of empathy, logic and objectivity.3 Though all women are women, no woman is only a woman. Thus, gender can be seen as a dichotomy, since one does not necessarily conform to the ascribed character, and can also be seen as a hierarchy within society whereby one gender rules over the other. In believing that the concepts of equality and difference are manifestations of male dominance, ‘gender is an inequality of power....Only derivatively is it a difference’.4 In all, equality does not mean the elimination of difference, and difference does not preclude equality.
