The Middle Sexes Anthony Thomas

The documentary that I watched this week is called Intersexion. This documentary talks about different people who are intersexual. Intersex can be define as a abnormal condition of being intermediate between male and female. The individuals share their stories about growing up being intersex. Mostly all of their stories are the same. The individual is born and doctors do not know what they are because the individual as both male and female sexual anatomy. It depends if the individual grows up looking either like a male or female that they decide to do surgery. Many of these individuals were not aware of having this condition until later in life. A doctor called John Money had a theory that gender was the product of “nurture not nature”. In

In her article "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough," Anne Fausto-Sterling describes why male and female gender identities are not sufficient in identifying the sexes of every individual. While “Western culture is [still] deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes" (20), Fausto-Sterling challenges this viewpoint by determining that there are more than just two sexes, but “at least five sexes– and perhaps even more” (21). According to Fausto-Sterling, these five (or more) sexes lie on a much wider sexual spectrum, where male and female are not the only biological sexes. It so happens that there is a small number of people who are born intersex: having both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics

In Octavia Butler’s Dawn the idea of gender is deconstructed and reformed from the typical human’s definition. Often people do not consider the role of gender in society today. Usually the first thing one notices when meeting someone new is their gender or their presumed gender. However, there becomes a problem when the person whose gender we perceived identifies as a different gender. Butler forces the reader to examine how they judge and perceive gender. While the ooloi are actually “its” their personalities seem to imply a certain gender. The transgender community often brings up this issue because these assumptions of gender based on our judgments of what defines a male and what defines a female can skew how a transgender person is treated and addressed. In Chapter One of Gender Through the Prism of Difference by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the idea of expanding the number of genders based on one’s biological differences is examined through the five sexes theory. By now the concept of gender being defined solely by one’s biology has mostly been left in the past but the question remains of how do we truly define gender? How does being outside of the social norms that Michael Warner talks about cause us to feel shame when discussing our gender and our perceptions of gender? In this essay, I will argue that preconceived notions of gender create shame when a person’s own perception of their gender does not fit the social norms. This stigma around the limited and strict definitions

To a certain degree, seeing how these matters have progressed since the 1960s gives a good vantage to predicting where they will go in the future. In conclusion, I will look at the future of change on these matters, by examining what seems to be the "avant garde" regarding matters of sex and gender, the phenomenon of transsexualism. I hope an examination of transsexualism will point out some of the contradictions that still continue to exist in American ideas about matters of sex.

“Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She” is a documentary that shows a brief explanation on human sexuality. It shows how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people fit in society in various places such as U.S, India, and Thailand. Most transgender people have been struggling to define differences. Most of all, it is not a choice they made to be a transgender, rather it comes naturally. Transgender people face severe discrimination in every day aspects of their life. Based on the documentary, I would like to focus on the discriminations that is happening on transgender people. I would like to see transgender people in at work place, at schools, and at the public.

He had achieved the shock value not only with myself as the reader, but ultimately who he was addressing. Jamison had been an educator of trans people, speaking out to audiences of college students of all ages. His goal of educating the public stemmed from his own experiences with choosing to change genders as well as a broad overview of the ideas that surrounded transsexualism as a whole. He communicates well that his experiences do not encompass all transgendered people’s experiences and that transformation from male to female (MTF) is quite different from female to male (FTM) transformation. The societal complications from FTM are well examined from Jamison’s view. Many people believed that females that wanted to become males could

Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) argues that rather than sex determining gender-gender determines sex. Sex is shaped by gender discourses which give us scripts to perform according to whether we are biologically classed as male or female. The continual performance of these scripts on a daily basis is what makes us male or female. The classic example of this is the third sex, yes, the third sex and that is the transgender( born male in a female’s body or

Serano recalls her own experiences of being sexualized to shed light on how trans identities are sexualized. The story points out how a person’s transition from one gender to another, or being trans itself can be viewed as sexual solicitation, rather than a result of their own identity (Serano 257). The sexualization of trans people is based on a societal viewpoint that centers itself around male heterosexuality, as Serano expounds:

According to Jonathan Alexander’s chapter “ Transgender Rhetorics: Sex and Gender” he notes that “acknowledging the presence of the transgendered is useful not only for understanding those who are differently gendered or whose presentation … falls outside our ‘norms,’ but also for helping us interrogate the constructs of gender that we often take for granted as ‘natural’” (Alexander, 2008, pg. 130). Ways that the cisgendered public attempts to normalize gender roles is through literature where “male authors… depict a young woman as frightened and helpless, and the female authors… poke fun of the muscle-bound idiocy of a “macho” man”( Alexander, p. 137). The idea as the female being weak and terrified and the man as muscular moron help to reaffirm the cycle of “gender tied narrations” that are tied to society’s dominant public. This is important because society’s cisnormative narrative teaches that gender expressions have strict guidelines that are “innate” in us at birth. These instincts dictate a lot about an individual; however, the recognition of transgender individuals cause the cisgendered to think that “gender is not necessarily an essential and natural given, but rather a sociocultural construct whose repeated performances—as masculinity and femininity” (p. 131). The transgendered attempt to create a discourse to disrupt these social categories and show that there is more to one’s identity than what is socially constructed and self

My Biological sex is female, my gender identity is female, but is my gender expression what I am starting to question. It was after I read Janet Mock’s book and I listened to an interview with Joy Ladin that I became aware of the similarities transgender women undertake in their process to come out, and my own process of redefining the expression of the woman that I am. I feel that the coming out of transgender people is encouraging us, especially women, to deeply question our woman expression. Trans-women like Joy Ladin and Janet Mock are raising a new conversation about gender identity and gender expression…..

Cheryl Chase article “Affronting Reason” and “Beards, Breast, and Bodies Doing Sex in a Gendered World” by Raine Dozier both illustrates the struggles of intersex and transgender face in society. Cheryl article focus on a child who is born intersex and now is dealing with her parents' decision of having a clitorectomy surgery. In Breads, Breast, and Bodies we see how transgender female to male dealt with society at a new point of view. Both stories reflect on the negativities each individual faced and also rise above the norm to embrace their new identity. Betray can cause trusting issue amongst one another, especially when that person is a family member.

Between the Sexes is a compelling narrative. Through several anecdotes, it illustrates the devastating psychological implications of early surgical intervention on intersexuals. According to the article, the surgery robs individuals of their sexual gratification, their gender identity, and their innocence. It's argument is noble, yet flawed. Authors Christine Gorman and Wendy Cole spin several sad yarns of intersexed people who are upset with handling of their gender assignment. They tell horror stories of people kept in the dark about their intersex, about a child forced to stop acting like a boy and become a girl, a teen who was raised to be a girl, but developed into a male. Gorman and Cole stumble into the fallacy of hasty

Through examining the ways intersex individuals are treated in a medical setting, one can see how science only allows binary bodies to be created. Crawley et al. (2007) discusses intersex individuals and the standard treatment of intersex children, being to alter their ‘abnormal’ genitalia to resemble one of the two genders. This has become the normal treatment as if this is necessary, but the only threat the child is in danger of is not fitting perfectly into the heteronormative standard of correct genitalia. Because surgical intervention proves we alter and change one’s sex, it becomes difficult to claim that sex and gender are solely biological, when clearly one’s gender and sex becomes largely altered the moment they are born into society. Anne Fausto Sterling, outlines her concept of the five sexes, explaining that intersex is a term used to describe any individual that doesn’t fit into the narrow categories of male and female. She explains that the same process that was in play in the Middle Ages is

There are several sources that tell a person how to be a man or woman. Science tells us by recognizing the X or Y chromosomes. The media shows us through the physically ideal celebrities that grace the covers of magazines and flaunt their bodies in commercials. Sports, wrestling, cars, and blue for the boys. Dresses, make-up, painted nails, and pink for the girls. All of these sources, as well as others, have evolved into an expectation that has become institutionalized within society. This expectation, is placement and belonging into the binary system of person: the man or the woman. In Anne Fausot-Sterling's acrticles “The Five Sexes” and the “The Five Sexes, Revisited”, the

Gender: a word society uses far too often without realizing its true complicated meaning. Children are born every day and the golden question becomes “Is it a boy or a girl?” What would a person do if they heard their child was neither or both? According to the National Institutes of Health, “One out of every 2,000 kids is born with genitals that cannot be clearly identified as male or female.” These types of children are called “Intersex”, and they break the boundary of gender identification. Intersex is a broad category for many situations where an individual’s genital or reproductive anatomy, or chromosomal pattern, lies between the normal standards of both male and female. The prefix “inter” stands for between; therefore, the simple definition of intersex is “between the sexes.” Intersex conditions usually result from a genetic