In “What We Knew of the Sexes,” Gavin Francis makes comparisons between ancient Greek views on intersex to the trans genders of today, giving insight into society coming to terms with an acceptance towards gender ambiguity. He uses a logical appeal to show how gender ambiguity and androgyny are not departing from normal standards as instead there representing variance. Despite his weak organizational skills with switching from one idea to the next, Francis still provides strong evidence and reasoning to create a profound understanding of gender variance in today’s society. Francis starts his essay with explaining in medical terms how some babies are born true hermaphrodites containing both male and female cells. To the time of adolescence …show more content…
Francis supplies different doctor produces and methods for surgery to be able to have a more open view on different perspectives: “Gohrbandt’s “vaginoplasty” procedure involved the creation of a tunnel through the pelvic muscles from the perineum up to the abdominal lining” (Francis 63). Throughout the essay Francis was consistent with explaining big medical terms, as well as claiming exactly where he got his facts from or giving credit to philosophers and other physicians. Francis uses Greek stories and myths to help the viewer get an understanding of what he is discussing about in his topic allowing to have a deeper understanding and relate the stories to what he is discussing: “Plato’s Symposium for instance tells of the playwright Aristophanes’s contribution to an earnest discussion about love” (Francis 60). The essay includes, examples of other physician’s case report summaries as stated: “translated and republished in 1997 in the International Journal of Transgenderism” (Francis 63) showing how Francis is providing a range of resources to help express his …show more content…
When Francis is describing his patients stories he uses a tone that makes the reader feel empathy and compassion as “he told me, sobbing” (Francis 61). He is aiming for the reader to be able to connect on an emotional level to the transgender patient, so they can feel their pain and better understand what it is they are experiencing. From hearing Francis tell a patient’s perspective and story gives the reader insight into how the patient sees and perceive things by stating: “Tarik was profoundly dysphoric; every morning he woke with a plunging feeling in his gut, knowing he faced another day of acting as a man. He was depressed, and his sleep was agitated and unrefreshing. His body disgusted him.” (Francis 61). Francis also describes the journey of a baby who was born an intersex and explains the stress it causes on one’s parents not knowing the gender at the time of birth. By giving the reaction of the parents lets the reader also establish a connection that they might feel they one day could be stuck in the same situation and lead them into visualizing a scenario of what they would do if they were put in the same
In How Sex Changed by Joanne Meyerowitz, the author tell us about the medical, social and cultural history of transsexuality in the United States. The author explores different stories about people who had a deep desired to change or transform their body sex. Meyerowitz gives a chronological expiation of the public opinion and how transsexuality grew more accepted. She also explained the relationship between sex, gender, sexuality and the law. In there the author also address the importance of the creation of new identities as well as how medication constrain how we think of our self. The author also explain how technological progress dissolve the idea of gender as well as how the study of genetics and eugenics impacts in the ideas about gender/sexuality and identity. But more importantly how technology has change the idea of biological sex as unchangeable.
The definition of gender has become way more revolutionary and expressive compared to the twentieth century. Gender used to be similar to sex where someone would be identified as a male or female based on their biological genitals however, this day in age it is way more complex. Someone can be born a male but mentally they feel like a male. In “Sisterhood is complicated” Ruth Padawer explains the journey of different transgender males and the obstacles they face while attending Wellesley college. Wellesley is a women’s college that has been around for a very long time and is in the process of the battling the conflict of whether they should admit transgender students. Ariel Levy author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” tackles the stereotypes and
In today’s society, it can be argued that the choice of being male or female is up to others more than you. A child’s appearance, beliefs and emotions are controlled until they have completely understood what they were “born to be.” In the article Learning to Be Gendered, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet speaks out on how we are influenced to differentiate ourselves through gender. It starts with our parents, creating our appearances, names and behaviors and distinguishing them into a male or female thing. Eventually, we grow to continue this action on our own by watching our peers. From personal experience, a child cannot freely choose the gender that suits them best unless our society approves.
Gender by many scholars is deemed to be socially constructed although there is much debate to whether this is actually the case. Simone De Beauvoir (1973: 301) famously claimed that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. In this undisputed text de Beauvoir argues that women are not born a woman. Instead they have to develop feminine behaviours and traits in order to become a woman implying they were not always a woman. It is not the case that nature causes women to be feminine and men to act in a masculine way. Society has constructed it to be this way. Kate Millet also takes a gender socialisation view. Arguing that one’s gender has nothing to do with their biological makeup instead it depends on their culture
“Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls”: few of our cultural mythologies seem as natural as this one. But in this exploration of the gender signals that traditionally tell what a “boy” or “girl” is supposed to look and act like, Aaron Devor shows how these signals are not “natural” at all but instead are cultural constructs. While the classic cues of masculinity—aggressive posture, self-confidence, a tough appearance—and the traditional signs of femininity—gentleness, passivity, strong nurturing instincts—are often considered “normal,” Devor explains that they are by no means biological or psychological necessities. Indeed, he suggests, they can be richly mixed and varied, or to paraphrase the old Kinks song “Lola,” “Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.” Devor is dean of social sciences at the University of Victoria and author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989), from which this selection is excerpted, and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1997).
Gender is such a controversial subject. There are some people who see it as what you are born as whereas other people see it as a choice to be whatever you want. There are people who judge whatever gender you are, no matter the choices you make. Paul Theroux wrote about how restrictive masculinity is in his article “Being a Man.” There are so many more restrictions on being feminine. Theroux’s idea of masculinity being restrictive is being challenged on the account that being feminine is seen as bad, and weak.
First; comes, the notion of nature. West and Zimmerman term this as sex, referring to a person’s biological makeup through genitalia, having a penis or vagina, or simply chromosomal pairing of XY or XX (29). Although there is no escape or control an individual has, if their foetal tissues formed into a penis or vagina, biology does play an underlying role in an individual’s identity and personality formation which is socially constructed. What is the correlation between biology and socially constructed gender then? The case study West and Zimmerman present of “Agnes, a transsexual person who was born (31), ” and raised a boy, but went through sex reassignment surgery, and identifies as a female, shows that although biology may result in a certain genitalia, an individual’s response to that may be one that is conforming or opposing to it. By the terms conforming and opposing I mean to say that Agnes could have either continued to
As a result, the third-personal perspective can't in principle be authoritative with respect to disability and asexuality. The notion of transformatively finkish experiences is therefore a very powerful concept for disability and asexuality studies more generally. We can apply it to very many cases including cases of selective reproduction based on the presence of birth defects, cases like Ashley's, cases of trans-sexuality in children, and so on. Because it follows that the first-personal perspective is authoritative in cases like these (i.e., since these two perspectives are exhaustive), we have reason to believe that there ought to be multiple mappings in socio-conceptual space.
In Doing Gender authors West and Zimmerman argue the concept of gender being an outcome of daily life rather than an outcome from a physician with an ultrasound with only two permanent results. The meaning behind the term gender invokes different connotations of either masculine or feminine qualities that lay the groundwork for societies preexisting roles. Society today views gender as being either of masculine or feminine form however the controversy with this is how this is determined in our society today as well as in the past. Both authors fall upon the idea that sex is a disposition of birth whereas gender is a disposition of your actions after your birth. “It is necessary to move beyond the notion of gender display to consider what
In the book Difference Matters, Brenda J Allen, begins writing about how gender matters in society. One of the main topics that she talks about is how in today’s society the male gender is the more predominate gender. As the reader, she has brought to mind many new ways to view how males earn more money then females, how we classify jobs as masculine or feminine, and also how society excepts males’ vs females to act and preform in the work force.
In this article, Shaw and Lee describe how the action of labels on being “feminine” or “masculine” affect society. Shaw and Lee describe how gender is, “the social organization of sexual difference” (124). In biology gender is what sex a person is and in culture gender is how a person should act and portray themselves. They mention how gender is what we were taught to do in our daily lives from a young age so that it can become natural(Shaw, Lee 126). They speak on the process of gender socialization that teaches us how to act and think in accordance to what sex a person is. Shaw and Lee state that many people identify themselves as being transgendered, which involves a person, “resisting the social construction of gender into two distinct, categories, masculinity and femininity and working to break down these constraining and polarized categories” ( 129). They write about how in mainstream America masculinity and femininity are described with the masculine trait being the more dominant of the two. They define how this contributes to putting a higher value of one gender over the other gender called gender ranking (Shaw, Lee 137). They also speak about how in order for femininity to be viewed that other systems of inequality also need to be looked at first(Shaw,Lee 139).
With this week’s readings, many interesting articles were discussed but the one that struck me the most would be Christine Delphy’s article, “Rethinking sex and gender.” This specific article brought about points and perspectives that I had never experienced before prior to the reading. What was even more shocking, however, was when I discovered that some of the fallacies that Delphy had mentioned in the article were already ingrained in myself. For example, within Delphy’s first examination she points out that there is a hidden assumption that sex precedes gender since it is a biologically derived characteristic and this was an assumption that I found to make myself. Even though I thought that this article would just be another simple read for me, it turned out that it was quite the enlightening experience as it provided insight into how gender roles and classification developed as well as providing a lot of interesting arguments. However, what I connected with most would be the later part of the article that specifically focuses on the topics of hierarchy and division.
Consequently, “The Five Sexes, Revisited” is about how there are more than two sexes (dimorphic) and one of Anne’s points are about how immediate “corrective surgery”
Some of society today has luckily overcome the definitions of men and women, allowing people to form their own identities, but this is not without much conflict. Women experienced a great deal conflict to be seen as equals to men in the workplace. Homosexuals have stepped out of society’s gender expectations, producing their own controversies and disagreements. The traditional gender roles of “Shiloh” and “Boys and Girls” are from the past, and many steps have been made past them, but society still holds on tight to portions of those established ways. Still, conflict will always occur where ideas diverge.
In discussing the subject of male identity, especially as compared to female identity, Farrell is very careful to remain very objective throughout his rhetoric. Part of his balanced approach to proving his argument, is the use of an objective point of view. Farrell’s deliberate objectivity can be seen in aspects of his piece such as his word choice, free of denotative language, his lack of any first hand anecdotes, a removal of any indication of his gender (except his name), and a strict third person style throughout his piece. All of these characteristics combine to make his argument effective to a large demographic of people, unlike many pieces on gender identity, whose audience is usually limited to at most a spe...