Interestingly, the questions and debates evoked by both Ali and Sam are questions I have been mulling over all weekend. More and more I am beginning to see the way dichotomized gender and sex roles affect my own life and the lives of others.
Though at the moment our readings have moved slightly away from discussions of gender and more toward the role of sex in determining our futures, the two topics are nevertheless intrinsically intertwined. As I consider myself a very open minded person, I am shocked of late at my highly attuned notions of masculine and feminine. I find myself saying things like, "He's so effeminate" and adhering to very narrow and socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity. Had I not taken this class, I might have never thought about that.
While this could mean nothing to most, the fact that I am relatively closed minded about what I consider to be appropriately masculine and feminine worries me. I do not want to exclude guys that I could potentially have a relationship with because they do not meet my standards of masculinity. When I reflect upon why I even hold these notions dear, I can't really understand it. I have been socialized this way and it is increasingly worrisome to think of all of the ways I have been socialized to think about things that could have been entirely different had I a) grown up in a different society or b) grown up on my own in the wilderness.
Obviously, as Sam and Ali have so eloquently stated, the same thing has happened for our conceptions of sex. This weekend, my friend Lindsey asked me, "What would you do if you had an intersex child?" There's no easy answer. If there were no health complications with my child's condition, I would like to think that I would raise him/her (THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE!) as an intersex person. Understanding the social repercussions of such a decision, the next choice would probably be to assign my child the sex that is most represented by their physiology. In all scenarios, the hope is that my child would grow up to accept themselves or to feel like they had the power to change themselves as they desired; to be whoever they wanted to be.
This discussion, of course, leads us back to the limitations of our language to not even be able to describe an intersex person with an appropriate pronoun or to have meaningful dialogues on sex and its implications -- what it means for one's identity and what it doesn't. Hopefully by the time I have children, more resources will be out there for raising an intersex child to be who they want to be.
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I agree with Alexandra’s comments based on the readings. I think the gender divisions that society has constructed needs to be challenged. I think this will take a long time but it is interesting to see what the future may bring. My hope is that at some point if people choose to be gender neutral that they are not immediately cast as an outsider, but rather accepted for who they are. People must understand each other not by judging them by their sex, but rather by their personality. As easy as it is for me to say this doesn’t necessarily it will mean it is easy to happen (which it certainly is not). What adds to feelings about intersex people is that fact that this isn’t an issue at the forefront of debates. In normal day-to-day conversations the issue of intersex individuals is not something typically addressed. Maybe if we bring this issue out of the back burner and openly discuss it more, change can slowly happen. Raising awareness of the issue will greatly aid in educating people.
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