Gender, Intersectionality, and Sex

 

In the picture above, we see an image from the “Simpsons” and the description reads “The ones with eyelashes are girls; boys don’t have eyelashes”. A four-year-old already has a sense of gender or should I say sex, and this is how she illustrates or represents it in a drawing. It is interesting to see how gender is defined in the movies that we watch from birth, and I think that’s where our sense of gender is from. Every little girl believes they are a princess and every little boy the prince charming. I also find it intriguing how women are being referred to in many eras in time, from the “other sex”, “opposite sex”, etc. The most surprising to me is the seventeenth-century European view that men and women were better and worse versions of the same sex. “Women are but men turned outside-in”. It is surprising to think that these were the same group of people fighting for distinction in society and stopped wearing heels because women and “common” people started wearing them.  Even though gender distinction is good in some ways for society, it is also important to note that there are a lot of similarities between men and women and we’re not so opposite.  

Fausto Sterling says that we should have five sexes, instead of two. she brings in the idea of intersex people being left out of the equation. Society has a box of males and females and intersex people must fit in even though they face a totally different situation.  In her piece titled “The Five Sexes”, she says “In its place, I suggested a five-sex system. In addition to males and females, I included “herms” (named after true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary); “merms” (male pseudohermaphrodites, who are born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia); and “ferms” (female pseudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia).  

  The idea of having five sexes can be a bit far-fetched but is it unattainable? I ask this question because the standards of society and the gender binary are so strictly constructed that I doubt there is room for a five-sex scheme. 

Notwithstanding this earlier argument, society has come a long way when it comes to these issues. Fausto-Sterling talks about a doctor who was refused an audience some years back and finally got the audience she requested. This shows that we are growing, and change is happening, though very small. Activism has played a significant role in this regard. The relentlessness of people who have suffered and those who even haven’t has helped shed light on the issue of intersex people.

I particularly like how McCullough puts it in the article. “Finally, McCullough urges physicians to abandon their practice of treating the birth of a child with genital ambiguity as a medical or social emergency. Instead, they should take the time to perform a thorough medical workup and should disclose everything to the parents, including the uncertainties about the outcome. The treatment mantra, in other words, should be therapy, not surgery.”

This statement I think is the best-proffered step in the right direction, if not the solution. Doctors need to educate themselves in this field in other to help parents make the best decision possible for their kids. Parents must also do their due diligence before taking such life-altering decisions for their kids.

 There is a thin line between saying we are opposites or the same is thought-provoking, in the sense that when you analyze the evidence for each argument, you find an iota of truth in there. It is therefore confusing that Wade and Ferree point out that some of these views are wrong. “Seventeenth-century anatomists were wrong, of course”.  I see it from the perspective of “we’re cut from the same cloth”. In the subsequent paragraphs, they talk about a lot of biological similarities between men and women. “The penis and scrotum do have something in common with the female anatomy. The same tissue that becomes the scrotum in males becomes the outer labia in females…This in my opinion points out that the seventeenth-century anatomist was not entirely wrong after all.

Men and women are different but also similar in many ways. Diversity is beauty, and as humans, we must embrace it all.

References

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. (2000). The Five Sexes, Revisited.

Wade, Lisa, and Ferree, Myra Marx. (2019). Ideas. Gender: Ideas, Interactions, and Institutions. (pp 9-36)