Several news stories within the last week have brought to light the very gray area of gender itself.
First, a brief review of definitions:
Sex= The physical make-up of a person that generally gets "male" or "female" stamped on their birth certificate. Sex characteristics include genitalia, one's ability to bear children, and the presence of hormones like testosterone or estrogen.
Gender= A person's sense of themselves as male or female.
As I mentioned in my previous post about tennis star Sarah Gronert, many individuals feel that their gender is different from their sex. (A great explanation of the resulting "transgender" label can be found here.)
Well, last week, another athlete's genitals were subjected to scrutiny, but this time with allegations that the athlete herself was not fully informed about the test's intent. 18-year-old Caster Semenya has spent much of her life fending off comments about her masculine nature. Now, the media has outed her as a hermaphrodite, someone carrying both male and female physical traits. In this case, her sex does not fit into our tidy categories, despite the fact that in her mind, her gender was always pretty clear. For a beautiful explanation of the term "hermaphrodite" and "intersexed," I highly recommend Hida Viloria's first person reflection on this story.
Also in last week's news, a 12-year-old boy in England returned to his school as a girl after summer vacation. The school held an emergency assembly to inform students of the change but were criticized for offering "too little too late" in terms of preparation. As a result of not adequately readying teachers, peer groups, and family members to accept this change more fluidly, bullying and intolerance occurred.
These two examples seem so parallel in that both reflect our insistence on neat, mutually-exclusive categories when it comes to gender. When people don't fit these tidy classifications, we criticize them as being "other" instead of rethinking our categories.
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3 comments:
When I was young, my dad -- who has made his career as a medical photographer -- worked at Children's Hospital in Boston, documenting different medical cases, among them babies who were born with missing/malformed/dual genitalia. I remember him commenting that such cases are far, far more common than anyone realizes, and he advised us to always remember this when encountering someone whose gender and sex might not obviously intersect or be immediately clear. I can't help but wonder how many "silent" cases there are for every public "outing" that occurs, such as with these athletes.
A: Fascinating perspective. I first learned the term "intersexed" in college and was amazed that such a clear reality for so many people was just swept under the rug. We are a society that is truly in denial about this reality.
Gender = a person's sense of themself as male or female.
Debatable. Gender includes a lot of culturally instructed behavior, traditionally associated with male or female primary and secondary sexual characteristics, themselves imitable, but can be dissociated from biology; often is. Brazilian travestis are reported to have fully feminized self-presentations while describing themselves as gay men.
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