Laying someone’s gender up for evaluation has prompted infant girls to be circumcised and infant boys to be abruptly reassigned. The attitude toward a large clitoris or small penis sends the western society into a panic. It leans too heavily on established walls of what is conditioned as “male”, and what we agree is ‘female”. With defacing accuracy, children were carved in the name of gender, and it took blinding arrogance to not believe these same children wouldn’t grow up and notice the difference between themselves and their minds. Elsewhere, in other societies and communities, who may not be as able as the western world, are much more forgiving in what life provides them. Reassignment with intersexuals is not so soon as a surgical procedure as it is a length of time called Puberty where clusters of children in places like the Dominican Republic come to the same mind-altering status as any other, typical children: hormones. Rather than taunt or mutilate, these children are accept. Instead of finding a cure or denial, these children are accepted. But we cannot all be like this example of approval, we cannot all admit to centuries of recognition and stories of approval. This exploited affair lives in India where the third sex is an empowered victim. Of today’s knowledge, there’s the option and burden of surgery to make ourselves feel better. To make ourselves fit into those shapely boxes we call Gender, yet ignoring the hate that enforces and the taboo we make of it. Forcing our outsides the match the inner character is not the attribute to obtain. It’s the understanding of the horrific battles between culture, genetics, genitals, and thought.
How western medicine has treated the transgendered is rooted in fear. To rule out a third gender is to keep the options simple, keep the possibilities narrow. The idea is to keep and protect “male” and “female” as a control group and the only categories possible for efficient research.
When the categories are binary, there are less test results to deal with and organize. In the preferred perfect world this equals fewer accidents to contemplate, not as much of decisions to beset, and a reduction of conscious evaluations for society to stifle. If there were a treatment for a third sex or the third sex, that reality annihilates the binary relationship. So what does Western medicine do?—it literally nips in the bud. It deconstructs, mutilates, and injects false intentions if not cloaking them altogether with knives and chemicals to solve a problem that wasn’t naturally diagnosed by the prescribed victim. Medicine is meant to cure, but with these forced victims, biology manages to outgrow science as boys are shaved down to being girls but mature in women who love women. Once again, science doesn’t solve a problem it intended: making whole, traditional women out of men.
As for what else can be done in choosing a gender, it is a competition between biology and culture. I would believe both influences are needed to educate a person. I believe both should be acknowledged as a cause to current results that are functioning. Then, whether they are conscious of it or not, human beings can be what is allowed of her- or hisself. But if to pick an answer: biologically programmed. I believe it is all about hormones, regardless of what you look like, it’s the hormones that determine how you act and it is hormones that determine how you think. If you’re a physical appearance is male but you have high levels of estrogen, that’s certainly going to reflect on your mannerisms. And if you’re lucky, you won’t care what others think, you’ll simply do what comes natural.
David Berreby, Biology will Defeat the Defense of Marriage Act, SLATE, Internet, 10 September 1996.
Tuller, David, (1997) Intersexuals begins to Speak Out on Infant Genital Operations, San Francisco Chronicle, A-15. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1997/06/21/MN22579.DTL
