The class discussion we had following our reading on sex as a social construct brought up a lot of thoughts for me. It left me sort of questioning everything I know, which I guess is usually a good thing. When I think of sex, I think of the way we classify a person's biological, anatomical, or chromosol configuration. And I understand there are many different ways these traits can intersect or differ depending on how you interpret them. That being said, I think the problem is that sex is assigned by a doctor upon a child's birth and many doctor's are not trained on how to deal with people who are intersex, and even with cisgender newborns, they immediately project their binary way of thinking onto children.
There is no room for fluidity or ambiguity, it has to be one way or another. Male or Female. And with the emergence of these terms for intersex people (hermaphrodites, fermaphrodites, and mermaphrodites), there's more room for self discovery and less rigidity than under a binary structure. Funnily enough, we were talking about sex in my Critical Theories of Sexuality class on the same day as in this class. We watched a documentary about the harm of experiments like John Moneys' on David Rimer and how not giving intersex people agency over their own bodies when it comes to their physical traits attributed to their sex is incredibly dehumanizing and destructive. The documentary just confirmed what I already thought: that binary systems and categories and detrimental to everyone involved, as the human experience is never linear. People shouldn't have to be forced into a box in any sense of the phrase, and forcing binary's onto people will only ever yield negative results.
But I think a part the reason why it's so hard for me to wrap my mind around this idea of sex is because it's so ingrained within the fabric of modern Western society, where you can change your gender identity but sex is biological, it's literally how you were born. So deconstructing that idea is difficult for me.
Also, another thing (unrelated to sex), I found it really interesting that during our discussion and readings about gender as a social construct, there was no mention of nonbinary. Even in our class, a binary (this one of man and woman) was being centered in discussion, leaving out a large group of people and enforcing the idea of "there can only be two."
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You know, a thought that kept going around my head was whether or not being born intersex was considered a "birth defect" and why I had never heard of it up to this point but now, more to what you said about the social constructs ingrained in our minds, I realize that that's not even the point here. The thought of someone's sex being ambiguous and therefore their gender being ambiguous is so threatening to the binary gender roles in our society that doctors and parents making these large decisions to have their children "corrected", whether intentionally or not, really suppresses intersex voices and the social consciousness of intersex people, even today! It was a shock to me to learn how common being born intersex actually is and I'm kind of disappointed both in myself and in even today's media for how long it took me to know that there were more than 2 sexes!
It is also hard for me to think of sex as a social construct. I understand and think of gender as a social construct, but sex seems more rigid and factual. Bringing intersex people into the equation makes it even more confusing to me with learning about how doctors learn to put people in boxes based on the physical aspects that are present at birth (which I think is messed up by the way!). Overall, this topic was interesting to me and brought up many thoughts.
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