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tweakabelle -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/13/2011 12:08:26 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BanthaSamantha
From a philosphical perspective, I feel uncomfortable with the weird confusion between sex and gender. The begining of the article encapsulates my discomfort.
quote:
Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.
Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.
Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess
They're describing gender here and how Jonas identifies with masculine activities and toys while Wyatt identifies with the feminine instead. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. If a boy wants to wear a dress or a girl wants to play with tools, I'm fine with it. There is nothing wrong with a man dressing like a woman, emulating a woman, or living as a woman, nothing at all.
A man actually calling oneself a woman is another thing entirely.
What unnerves me is the suggestion that Wyatt, despite completely unambiguous genetics and biology, actually is a girl. Such a notion trivializes sex, and minimizes what makes a man or a woman. It reduces the essence of womanhood to wearing dresses, putting on makeup, playing with dolls, etc. I find such a crass reduction offensive. Little Wyatt may be a feminine boy, but he is a boy none the less; it will be his experiences as a particularly feminine boy that will be valuable to philosophers of the future.
Firstly I share your concern at the kind of negative stereotyping of women that reports of cases like this often exhibit. It is the popular media and it is being written for a broad audience. Without excusing the stereotyping, it is difficult to report cases like this accurately and accessibly in mass media, and almost impossible to do it with academic rigour. And is the stereotyping any worse than one finds every day in other sections of the same media (eg the fashion pages, sex in advertising)?
Thank you for drawing attention to the sex/gender distinction. This is an important distinction. Commonly, sex here refers to the physical classification of bodies as male or female, using biological criteria such as ovaries/testes, genitalia, chromosomes, body shape etc. Gender, (femininity and masculinity) refers to the social and psychological aspects of this classification, and is further divided into Gender Identity (our sense of ourselves as male or female or otherwise) and Gender Role (the way we perform our genders and the social expectations placed upon us associated with sex/gender).
In the orthodox two-sex model, gender is seen as overlaid upon the 'natural biological bedrock' of physical sex. I do agree that the evidence in the OP presents a certain challenge to "what makes a man or a woman", to the orthodox two-sex model(s). That's precisely why I chose to highlight it. It seemed to me to be a good starting point from which to open the discussion about all these issues. I'm fascinated by these issues and the profound questions they pose. So I'm glad that your perspective is represented here and look forward to you developing your views if you choose to do so.
While the individual genetics and biology in the OP are as you say, completely unambiguous, this is most certainly not the case on a broader scale. There are at least 16 thus-far identified intersex states eg XYY chromosomes, multiple chromosomal mosaics - XX/XY, XX/XYY and so on - even a 'syndrome' where there is no 46th chromosome (XO or Turner's Syndrome'). There is the evidence in the link offered above where the infants' biology and genetics is anything but unambiguous. Just to mention one or two examples ....... Hopefully this thread can explore evidence like this, the OP and related matters and discuss its implications for all of us as both gendered individuals and embodied sexual subjects.
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