On Tuesday we talked about intersexed children and the effects of the binary 2-sex gender system that our society adopts. I have really been thinking on this subject and it’s kind of hard to take a strictly academic look at this subject. The difficulty lies in my own identification as a woman and as a future mother. I feel as if we have been socialized to think that this is more of an anomaly than it is. We discussed the issue of this as a natural occurrence. If it is natural then it undermines the binary system that is in place and there would be the need to add categories that fit the bodies that are actually created rather that the ones that Western society deems as “good.”
What Fausto-Sterling is suggesting is that parents should stop making decisions on the sex of intersexed children at birth because of the physical and psychological issues that they would have to deal with later. She is in favor of the 5 sex system as it would be far more inclusive of transsexual people. I am on the fence about my personal feelings about whether a parent should raise a child intersexed as such. Fausto-Sterling makes a really powerful statement when she says, “We protest the practice of genital mutilation in other cultures, but tolerate them at home.” (125) Can we really draw parallels between these two things? I truly don’t think you can because a parent isn’t seeking to stop the sexual satisfaction of the child as much as it trying to save them the pain of living in a sexually ambiguous body. The society we live in currently makes it difficult to raise an intersexed child because we deem their body as an ambiguity because we can’t easily identify it as one or the other and if we create a category in which they could belong, we’d have to completely reconstruct a social system in which they are no longer “the other” or anomalous being. It seems to be that they parents choice is to choose between the lesser of two evils. Do I want to save my child from having to explain themselves for being sexually different and having to choose where they identify in their adolescence or do I choose for them and risk them feeling like an outsider in their own body? This choice is so difficult because it forces you to choose between allowing your child to foster their own sense of self or making it easier for them to socialize with the possibility that they don’t end up identifying with their gender.
Who’s to say whether these bodies are ambiguous? If we say that they are a “natural occurrence” then have we not already undermined the binary system by admitting that they are a less frequent biological norm? The floor is yours. It is written.
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I agree with your last point, that by saying intersexed children are a natural occurrence we automatically give language to the debate that nullifies it entirely. The question we've been asking in class, 'Should there only be two sexes?' seems to have an obvious oversight in it that for me answers the question in itself. There are more than two sexes, so why are we asking if there should only be two?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Armanda that there are more than two sexes but I don't think the complication comes from not asking if there should only be two sexes but rather with the language we have to consider in answering the question. As posted, the social structure in place provides "the other" as a default. By possibly creating an acceptable, less derogatory, term for ambiguous children society could break both the restrictive binary system and term "the other."
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