Sexing The Body By Anne Fausto-Sterling

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Any society, American, Mexican, Indian, no matter which, its inhabitants have a familiar set of opinions and standards, and a firm belief that those are good, sensible, and irrefutable. We want to believe that we are right, and we want to make sure we are right. This determination has led humanity into periods of discrimination, misunderstanding, and pain. Yet we do not learn as easily as many think we do. The abundance of mistakes in history are too many and some too great to be unnoticed. Despite these lessons, we do not yet know it all, even if we think we do because 'we live in the 21st century'. New controversies arrive, new ideas, perceptions and discrimination arise and one example is on intersex and homosexuality. The except Of Gender …show more content…

Sterling analyzes and criticizes the way society handles the meaning of different when it comes to sexuality and gender. The medicalization and misjudgment of intersex and other sexual ambiguities is heavily derived from our long standing belief in two genders and the appropriate roles they are assigned in playing 'house'. Consequently, a cycle of discrimination against the 'abnormal' rose and seeks to use medicine and higher knowledge to change the unknown based not based on medicine, but our own biases. Our civilization believes gender to be composed by only males and females. We think of it as an irrefutable fact and that nature has always had those intentions. According to past generations, nature intended for Earth to be composed of males and females and that they would be attracted to the opposite sex in order to reproduce and populate the earth. This is the gospel truth …show more content…

For example, in the treatise on The Intersexual Disorders, Drewhurst and Gordon adopt a very tragic tone on the birth of intersexual children, assuming that parents must feel bad and that the child is facing a dreadful deformity, "One can only attempt to imagine the anguish of the parents. That a newborn child should have a deformity...(affecting) so fundamental an issue...which immediately conjures visions of a hopeless..." (Sterling, 47). But what constitutes an actual deformity? A deformity is usually interpreted as a physical difference that leaves the person unable to perform day to day tasks to care for themselves. However, Dewhurst and Gordon adopt a very dark tone when they describe the settings surrounding the birth of an intersexual child. They use words such as 'freak', 'misfit', 'deformity', and 'tragic'. They dramatize the fact that the child happened to be born as an ambiguous sex without considering the fact that the child may not be in any sort of danger or need for

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