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I was talking to a friend recently about her volunteer work within the GLBT
community and something she said caught my attention: “gender is so over!”.
Now that statement may seem ridiculous, especially when you consider that
everything in our Western society demonstrates and magnifies the divide between
the two sexes.
Boys are given toy trucks, girls? Barbies. Even if the politically correct
parents of today have moved beyond such cliches, I’m willing to bet that they
may have read books like, Men are from Mars, Women from Venus.
There are two sexes: men and women. But is it that clear cut?
Turns out… no.
Science is slowly beginning to come to grips with the question of gender and
the
discoveries are nothing short of astonishing. Whereas we once thought of the
world divided between two halves, the new paradigm is one where there is a
continuum.
Recently I stumbled on this article: We’re all intersex where Gerald N.
Callahan, the author of Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two
Sexes is interviewed about his research:
In between what we call the ideal biological male or ideal biological female,
there’s a whole range of other possibilities that don’t differ from our basic
preconceptions to the extent that we have names for them or call them a
disorder. Just like with every other human trait, there are an infinite number
of possibilities.
Of course this is nothing really new. There are other books, like Gender: An
Ethnomethodological Approach, from 1978 which expound more or less the same
ideas.
We’ve all heard of ‘hermaphrodites’ – persons which have both sexes. By the
way,
recently, intersexuality has replaced the more familiar, hermaphrodite, as the
word of choice within the medical field.
However objective it may seem, even the scientific framework for defining the
"two sexes" is a cultural construction. As Judith Butler has shown, the
dominant
American ideology of the body affirms the existence of two sexes, two genders,
and two basic sexualities that are treated as naturally distinct. But
biological
sex is not ideologically independent of the other terms; our culture defines
our
genetics, object-oriented genital joining, and other gender practices in binary
fashion in order to identify us dualistically as either male/masculine or
female/feminine (where "normal" males and females are heterosexual). Violations
of these norms are deemed unnatural. So doctors have tended to define genetic
sex dualistically, as XX or XY, and to label violations of the genetic dualism
(such as XXY and XO people), including "mismatches" between genetics, hormones,
and appearance, as "diseased." But as Anne Fausto-Sterling describes, there is
a
spectrum of such deviations, naturally occurring bodies with non-dual genital
combinations and diverse physicals expressions. Hidden among the males and
females living in America are so-called "true hermaphrodites," who possess both
ova and testes, "genetically male" (XY) people with Androgen Insensitivity
Syndrome who look like and are usually raised as women, "genotypically female"
(XX) children whose genitalia are virilized at puberty, and "genotypically
male"
(XY) children who are anatomically female or androgynous at birth but at
puberty
develop testes, a fused scrotum, and secondary male sex characteristics.[29]
Though the inclusion of nondual bodies, genders and sexual designations and
other biological florescence, are by definition qualified for inclusion in this
article and such inclusion is rarefied, especially when understood as embodying
a syncretic and wholistic ideal, a "a one-sex/body, multi-gender model that
reflected ancient gender norms" and which is metaphorically apt in many
spiritual nondual traditions as Burrus & Keller (2006: p. 71) state:
...the dominant ideology of the body in the premodern West was a one-sex/body,
multi-gender model that reflected ancient gender norms for the distribution of
power. Only with the rise of Western medicine and genetics has sex been
conceived as dual and ontologically stable--male and female.[30]
>
>
>This is science saying gender is cultural rather than biological. What I've
>read
>of the translations of the Writings, assumes that the readers have a binary
>gender conciousness. Is there room for this new gender paradigm?
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