Gender and Sex

Gender and sex often get conflated. Before taking this woman studies class I did not realize there was a difference. I still sometimes struggle with seeing the difference between the two. Gender is expression and sex is anatomy i.e. sex is male, female and gender is boy, girl. A female person may identify with being a boy, therefore she may regard herself as a boy. In Kessler’s piece she brings to our attention that most people think in binary logic, black/white, boy/girl, male/female, day/night. This is important because not everyone is separated into boy/girl. Intersexed infants are babies that are born with both genitalia, as soon as they are born doctors make choices that will affect the child for the rest of its life. If the child has a micro-penis, that is a penis that is under the normal length, with either an xx chromosome or a xy chromosome the child will be female. If the child has an xx chromosome with an adequate penis the child will be male. Most people would view these babies as handicapped, because they have no specific sex they confuse and scare people. Also because they have no specific sex doctors have to tell parents to bring up their children with the gender that matches their assigned sex.
Bauer talks about a little boy who has GID, Gender Identity Disorder. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders biological gender is gender that matches genitalia at birth. Apparently if you’re not a female who acts like a girl there is something wrong with you. In the world today people who are different are not widely accepted because of discourse. It is not the socially accepted way to act therefore its wrong. What is wrong with little Joey, the boy with GID, putting on a blond wig and acting feminine? Why does this mean that he has GID? What is wrong with exploring and experimenting with your gender at a young age? In the TV show “Friends” there is an episode where one of the characters, Ross, has a little boy, Ben, who picked out a Barbie at a toy store. Ross is at first horrified, but he seems to be the only one, all the women on the show think it is perfectly normal. At the end of the show we learn that Ross, as a little boy, use to dress up in his mother’s cloths and give tea parties and call himself “Bea”. Ross turned out to be a ‘normal’ grown up man, why wont Joey? This episode makes one believe that acting out of gender can be a normal way of expressing oneself. It is odd to think that a female who is a Tom-Boy is widely accepted, however if a boy were to act like a girl there is something wrong with him.
Some people fear that acting out of gender will lead to transgendered people as well as transvestite people. Feinberg calls for an alliance of transgendered people, or a transgendered liberation. According to her, gender is expression not anatomy, just because you do not act like everyone else of your sex does not mean you are not ‘normal’. The most fake sentence in the entire world is ‘perfectly normal’. What is perfect and what is normal, and if we can’t define those terms why is there so much hostility in the world directed at people who aren’t ‘normal’?