Gender Identity And Its Effects On Mental And Physical Health

People tend to judge the outside of someone before they can see what is on the inside. In reality, they are missing out because these people that are different tend to be very good, generous people. As for the people who refuse to give them a chance, they are typically the ignorant people that are close-minded and are not the most considerate people.

First, it is shocking that some people will not even know if they are intersex. There have been occurrences where people have lived their entire lives without knowing they were intersex. Another interesting point on the site is that men can have “aphallia”, which means that they are born without a penis but have typical male anatomy (http://www.isna.org/faq/conditions/aphalia). Lastly, it was very surprising that in the past, doctors operated on children without consent to make them either male or female because they felt it was “necessary”

This is why my initial decision might have been to do what Dr. Gared recommended: consent to the surgery and raise my baby like a girl. Naturally, if we were to do that, we would rear him or her as a girl, and except him or her to behave like a normal girl. This is a phenomenon known as forced gender socialization, and defined as the tendency for boys and girls to be socialized differently. Indeed, like any mother would, I would dress “her” up like a doll and set up play dates for “her” with the neighbor’s four-year old daughter. I would read “her” bedtime stories about princesses. Family, friends, teachers, and kids at school, would also treat our baby like a girl, thus enforcing gender socialization. However, our child might not grow up like any other little girl. Even if Dr. Gared were to remove the testes, there exists research that proves that “sex chromosomes contribute to sex differences in behavior and brain morphology” (Arnold and McCarthy, 15). This means that my child, with XY chromosomes, could grow up thinking and feeling more like a boy. Pamela Crawford, an intersex child’s adoptive mother says that her “child, now 8 years old, feels more like a boy and wants to be a normal boy” (Sutton, 1). Raised as a girl, the child struggled against her girlhood from the start. This can actually be a rather traumatic experience for intersex children

By having the responsibility of gender assignment belong to the medical professional of children at birth, children and their parents have suffered after the details of their physical beings had been disclosed. The results of this inappropriate use of genital surgeries for gender assignment usually lead to bullying, gender identity disorder, self-harm, and suicide. However, when this treatment came into practiced, doctors had believed that it would be traumatic for a child to remain intersexed. It was also widely believed that by fixing the child’s gender immediately after birth that the child would have a better chance at becoming “normalized.”

When it comes to gender identity, I identify myself as a masculine or a man. As a masculine I’m going to play the role of a female where I would go to a neighborhood close to where I live, wear a wedding dress, and see how people around the block reacting to my kind of behavior. Base of my moral norm, I think it would be shameful, and I expect people to feel disgusting by it because that’s how I would feel if I were the public. As we all know when it comes to the behaviors between men and women, there is a lot of thing women can do but man can’t do because if a man does it, it would look weird or shock the society. For instance, throughout the weekend I was thinking about an experiment to see what exactly a woman can do which would be normal,

The choice to perform surgeries on intersex bodies are not only violent but continue to institutionalize gender roles and norms. 1 in 1,500 children are born with atypical genitalia (“How Common Is Intersex”) and about 10,829 children are born each day, causing 7 intersex babies to be born daily (“How Many Babies are Born Each Day”). As doctors continuously choose to implement surgical procedures to “correct” intersex infant’s genitalia, doctors are also choosing to further marginalize the intersex population. Many children who undergo gender corrective surgeries are never told about the procedures, with the idea that it will help the children more easily conform to their newly assigned gender. However, by decreasing the population of intersex

Steensma et al. (2010) conducted a qualitative study based on biographical interviews on twenty-five adolescents who were diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder in childhood. From the ages of 10 to 13 years old, they considered that time period to be crucial for adolescents with persisting gender dysphoria and adolescents with desisting gender dysphoria. Both persisters and desisters claimed that the factors that influenced their gender-related interests and behavior and feelings of gender discomfort and gender identification were the changes in their social environment, the anticipated and actual feminization or masculinization of their bodies, and the first experiences of falling in love and sexual attraction. Persisters are defined in

Although I think that a strong gender identity is necessary for a healthy and fulfilling life, I also think that that identity is developed and strengthen as we grow, as our bodies developed following the hormones direction. Intersex children are born with a sexual anatomy that does not fit the typical characterization of male or female. Their bodies and the way their hormones work is not completely female or male, because they may have both sexes living together. Sometimes their genitals look like a regular boy or a regular girl, however, their internal sex organs may not coincide with the external. On some babies, the condition is clearly identified at birth and for others, the transsexualism is not discovered until puberty.

Gender Dysphoria, formerly known as Gender Identity Disorder, is described by the DSM-IV as a persistent and strong cross-gender identification and a persistent unease with ones sex. However, gender identity is not diagnosed as such if it is comorbid with a physical intersex condition. Gender dysphoria is not to be confused with sexual orientation, as people with gender dysphoria could be attracted to men, women, or both.

Society has a tremendous effect on the way people see themselves as well as the way they see others. When it comes to sex and gender, these two words are used interchangeably, even though they are different. Sex is what a person is biologically born with, whereas Gender is how a person is seen in society, their roles, and their accepted behavior. Gender identity is a person’s inner sense of being male or female and a display of that. Jayme Poisson writes an article, “Parents Keep Child’s Gender Secret,” on two parents that decided to raise their newborn child genderless. The couple also allows their other children to display whichever gender they choose, not conforming with “how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex,” (Poisson 366). Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the idea of being able to respect the traditions of others without having to agree with or understand them in “Making Conversation”. Women and men are, not surprisingly, treated very differently in society. In “Human Dignity” Francis Fukuyama writes about equality and the essence that humans possess. Society creates a stigma for men who act feminine and women who act masculine, creating a negative impact on ones gender identity, specifically on the description of gender roles, and how certain products are marketed.

Another part of society that is part of human nature is the need to categorize others to make sense of and interpret others. When a person is born the doctor interprets their sex as either boy or girl depending on which genital organs they possess. The problem with this sex assignment at birth is that it leaves no room for ambiguity which is sometimes needed in cases of intersex and transgender individuals. Without knowing the true gender of a child we put them into a category before we even know if they fit. For example, David Reimer who was born male was reassigned as a female after an accident during circumcision occurred (Colombo, p. 554). Doctors believed that reassignment would be best because many believe gender identity is taught.

One in every 2,000 babies born every year are neither male nor female, they are what is known as hermaphrodites. These children and their families are forced into a life of hardship and encounter many conflicts, which need to be addressed. Should the parents choose the assignment of the sex to a newborn child and subject them to a life of surgery and doctor visits? There are 100 to 200 pediatric surgical reassignments every year. Many of these children are subjected to doctor visits for the rest of their childhood. Worst of all, many of these children find themselves resembling or identifying with the gender opposite of that which their parents chose for them.

Gender identity is an aspect of the self that is constantly evolving. It is how you feel internally and how you choose to express your desired gender through the way you dress, the way you behave, and the way you appear to others. A majority of the population feels as if they are either a male or they are a female. Others feel like they are neither. There are a various amount of labels that can define a person who feels like they are neither male nor female such as genderqueer, gender variant, or gender fluid. One who defines as cisgender presents themselves as the gender that they were assigned at birth. How one chooses to express their gender identity is completely up to them (Sexual Orientation and Gender). At the beginning of adolescence, both boys and girls deal with “pressure to conform to culturally sanctioned gender roles” (Priess, Lindberg, Hyde, 2009). Some very important aspects of gender identity include interpersonal, family, and friend interactions, the attachment theory and self theory, cultural contexts, and gender stratification.

Biological and psychosocial cultural identifies the meaning in gender identity. It is said that the sex of a child is biological (the genetic makeup) and the gender is psycho socio cultural (male/female defined by social status). Specifically, when addressing the gender it is defined as one's role and personality that they assume, for example in the American culture females are nurturing and the males are to be aggressive. Through social interaction, biology and the media gender identity is developed. This gender identity is misrepresented through social media which leads to a huge misunderstanding of this concept in society. These factors, unfortunately, set limits and define the standards of what is masculine and feminine, which lead to a harmful impact on society members, causing serious problems to an individual in particular and society in general.

The roles of genes clearly play an important part in defining sex as every one of us. However, with genes comes at birth male or female in whom will generally by categorized into gender roles from the very beginning. As soon as a baby is born its already a topic of what clothes she’s going to wear, professions and everything about her will most likely be thought as either male or female ways of life. Even with our cultural changes (gay rights, transgender) you still have to relay on the fact that you always born either male or female; hormones are the key factor in determining what sex thus influencing your gender identity in our society. In this paper I wanted to answer the title question providing insights on both subjects, how genders roles are not important in our society and how they are important.