One of my favorite high school teacher's favorite sayings was "You don't know what you don't know." I think this saying is especially prevalent in reflecting on this past week's texts. Too often, I find myself wondering what the other side of the stories are, or what stories I am blinded from entirely. These past week's readings forced me to take off my cultural lens and focus in on subjects that are both ignored and not accepted by society: intersexuality and transgender. Reading and discussing both greatly aided in helping to expand my understanding of how sex, gender, and society relate with each other, and also helped to widen my perception of diversity in sex and gender overall.
Last week, our class came to understand that sex and gender are not one in the same. Instead, while sex is a biological tribute, gender is not natural, and is something that is almost purely constructed by society and one's personal experiences. Therefore, although sex may contribute to the way society perceives one's gender, female does not equal woman and male does not equal man. This point was reinforced this week through a gender topic I had not considered: transgender. In her article "Beards, Breasts, and Bodies," Raine Dozier writes that many female to male transgendered adults she extensively studied experienced a shift in the way they are treated once they became a male. For instance, one of Dozier's subjects shared that, since becoming a man, he is receiving more attention when speaking. Instead of being considered an outspoken women, he feels that he is viewed as a wise man with thoughtful opinions. (Gendered Bodies 146). In addition, another shared that he had work to change his behavior after he transitioned because "skills that [were] needed to survive as a butch woman...made [him] look like a really obnoxious guy" (146). By this, we can see that society demands a performance based on one's physically perceived sexual identity of either femininity or masculinity. In other words, society's understanding and perception of a person's behavior is dependent on their perceived sex. As a result, it is clear by these examples that sex does not equal gender. However, we can go beyond that and conclude that sex and gender DO have a relationship. As Dozier concluded in the final paragraph of her article, "Sex is a crucial aspect of gender...the gendered meaning of a person's behavior is based on sex attribution" (148).
Although sex, as in male and female, has come to be understood as the "natural" when recognizing the difference between sex and gender, we were presented with opposition to this notion through this week's study of intersexuals. Intersexuals, people having both male and female anatomical characteristics and genes, show us that sex is not always black and white and gender doesn't have to conform to society's expectations. Since, by definition of their sex, they are both female and male, some intersexed activists have worked to destabilize the overbearing relationship of sex and gender made by society. For instance, some have chosen to live in contrast to the gender role expected of them by society. After living like this, one such activist points out that ""I am...a person that doesn't have to conform because in my very DNA I don't agree with the societal norm...It's been a really freeing experience. I'm a lot happier" (Lorber and Moore 153). Perhaps we can take away from this that just because society demands a genderized role for us, we aren't forced to live in that. The possibility for being truly happy lies in living beyond the boundaries of gender as created by society. As said by an intersexual named Tiger, "No matter what you think of how I look or how I speak, no matter what I've done to fit into this world, I am not male or I am not female. And probably neither are you" (153).
For my reflection this week, I chose to make a photo/text collage on a watercolor painted design. In case it is hard for you to read the words on the collage here is what it says:
Dear Society...
- I like pink
- I like dresses
- I watch "chick-flics"
- I scream around bugs
- Flowers are pretty
DOES THIS MAKE ME GIRL?
- My favorite movie is 300
- I love lifting weights
- I hate playing with dolls
- I wish I could play football
- I like being muddy
- I don't often cry
- I love winning...I HATE losing
DOES THIS MAKE ME BOY?
This piece of work was mainly in response to the definition of "Gender Identity Disorder" we briefly covered in class, as well as thoughts that were spurred as I discovered the stories of intersexuals and transgenders and came to understand a new way of seeing the construction of gender.
