Ray on 'The Five Sexes'

  While researching around about Intersex people I found an interesting point that Wikipedia cites from Julius Kaggwa, a prominent intersex and transgender activist and executive director of intersex support organization: Support Initiative for People with atypical sex Development (SIPD), stating that while the gay community "offers us a place of relative safety, it is also oblivious to our specific needs". Despite being considered a part of the LGBTQIA+ community, an intersex person can still be cisgendered and heterosexual and within the community there is sometimes an assumption that trans protections also apply intersex people but this isn't necessarily the case because it is more a matter of sex than gender. I wasn't fully aware what "intersex" even meant before reading this but now that I have a better understanding I can see why that group, even amongst the LGBTQIA+ community, has a unique struggle for awareness and rights even amongst allies. 

Sex and Gender as Social Constructs: Some Very Scattered Thoughts

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."