Follow Up: Responding to Julia

In her discussion on baby blankets, Julia highlighted an aspect of our society that poses such immense problems for the acknowledgment and acceptance of inter-sex individuals. The exercise with the dangling ring in Middlesex not only speaks to the categorization of the baby as either male or female, but also society’s obsession with simply knowing. When people discover a woman is pregnant, one of the most predictable comments is, “Do you know the sex?!?!” Putting our gender associations, like pink and blue, aside, the obsession with defining something that is not even born is where the ugly and perpetuating cycle of the 2-sex system begins. Can you imagine a world where the question was not, “Is it a boy or a girl?” but rather, “Is it a boy, girl, or inter-sex?” While this scenario seems a million years away, look at the example of sexual orientation. While it is still often assumed that everyone is straight until they declare otherwise, the overall acceptance of gays and lesbians has increased dramatically from the days when homosexuality was deemed a psychological disorder.

Our struggle to change these engrained notions of sex and gender made me think about this week’s Brown Bag Lecture with Q. While she was discussing communities very different from the inter-sex one, her shock content was enormous. While I had some idea of the BDSM, kinky, and leather communities, I really found myself struggling to understand where she was coming from and why she does what she does. This, however, was only more proof that the things which we do not know of, we do not understand. Q’s talk illuminated my whole perspective on sexuality and made me realize how easy it is to categorize her community as “disgusting” or “strange” simply because I do not understand it. Applying this the inter-sex community, it seems to me that the only real way to change our belief system is to educate, educate, educate! As I said, I consider myself to be educated and forward thinking, yet Q’s world is something I was entirely ignorant of until I simply learned about it.