Anatomy And Gender Essay

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In Germany, if a child is born, the first words it will probably hear, are: “It’s a boy!”, or “It’s a girl!” After this, its life will be determined by the expectations the society have of its gender. Our anatomy determines how we act socially, which profession we will probably take, on which institutions we could use, which people we should marry. We are raised with the thought, that a certain anatomy comes along with a particular identity. But should our anatomy determine our fate? In western culture we are familiar with the idea of being either male or female — two gender identities at opposite ends of a binary concept. Anthropology could give us an interesting insight in other cultures and a different conceptualization of gender. There …show more content…

Regarding to gender theorist Judith Butler (1990), humans are far too complex and diverse to enable all seven billion of us to be evenly split into one of two camps.
If anatomy would dictate us, who we are, if biology would determine our gender, then the comprehension of gender should be equal all around the world (Ortner,1974). There should be just male and female and nothing in between. But when we look at other cultures, it’s not like that. There are cultures who have a different understanding of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality.
Sharyn Graham Davies (2007) examined the gender concept of the Bugis and shows that they are one of those cultures. The Bugis recognize five genders. As in most other cultures the majority belong to one of the main genders: either people who are biologically female and identify themselves as women (makkunrai), or people who’s gender identity is male and they were born with the male sex (oroane). But additional they have three more gender categories: calalai, born as female, but live and work more as men and calabai, who are born male but act more like females. The fifth gender is called bissu. Bissu are a class of traditional priest experts in pre-Islamic Bugis belief systems and rituals. Some bissu are born intersexed, although that’s not always the case, most bissu have a gender ambiguous

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