Thursday, March 25, 2010

Gender Is Inborn

In the past, I have written about (Making A Man Of Me) how we all have an inner sense of gender that is a part of our very being and that gender is inborn in all of us. In Maine, a family in the late sixties and early seventies tried to raise their daughter gender neutral (There is also a current family in Sweden that is trying the same thing and I wrote about it here) and the daughter wrote about her experience in a Newsweek article.
My Name Is Jesse
But I am not a boy. Inside my parents' failed experiment with gender neutrality.

By Jesse Ellison | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Mar 23, 2010

When I was 2 years old, my father started building a big house behind our tiny starter house. For days leading up to the arrival of the giant trucks and backhoes coming to dig out the foundation, my mother tried to get me excited. "Don't you want to watch the big trucks?!" she'd tease. When they finally arrived, the neighborhood boys parked themselves on our property, transfixed. I glanced out the window and immediately turned back to my toys, ignoring the commotion. As my mother recalls, "It was really a wake-up for me."

In 1978, the year I was born, feminists like my mother were embracing the notion that gender roles were entirely rooted in the way that you were raised. In the 1970s, the feminist fringe was giving up bras, shaving, and diets; they were lighting their own cigarettes and opening their own doors. It was the "new feminism," and where the first movement was concerned with legal equality, like the right to vote, these women were focused on de facto equality: asserting that it was nurture, not nature, that made women and men different. To bust out of gender oppression also meant to assert that there was absolutely nothing different about our biological makeup.

We all thought that the differences had to do with how you were brought up in a sexist culture, and if you gave children the same chances, it would equalize," my mom says. "It took a while to think, 'Maybe men and women really are different from each other, and they're both equally valuable.' "
As we learn more and more about gender identity I think that we learn the there is something deep within us that tells us our gender. When children are born intersex and the doctors try to “correct” the child’s gender, we are finding that the children are letting us know their true gender is not what the doctors assigned them at birth. We find that the outward clues of our gender are wrong some of the time and that maybe instead of assigning gender at birth, that maybe we should wait until the child tells us their gender. What a radical idea!

3 comments:

  1. The problem with that is that Intersex kids and children don't have a choice in being born intersex. Where as trans have a choice.

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  2. The problem with that is Intersex people don't have a choice being born intersex. Intersex people are born with their DNA that was given to them and they don't have a choice in what genes and DNA to have. See the problem with the choice and no choice is that Intersex people don't have a choice and trans people do have a choice.

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  3. Gender is not a social construct but is inborn in all of us; we do not choose our gender. No one wakes up day and says, “Gee, I think I’ll be a girl.” This has been proven in scientific research over and over again by such doctors as Drs. Docter, Diamond, Ecker, and Reiner.

    The case of John/Jane Doe where after a circumcision accident, the doctors made John into a girl. He always knew he was a boy, no matter what his parents or the doctors told him. Gender identity is inborn in use.

    Dr Reiner write in a research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled, “Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth” that “Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male.” He also writes in an interview in the New York Times that “As part of a research study, I've personally seen and assessed 400 children with major anomalies of the genitals. Of those, approximately 100 might be called "intersex." Our findings have been many and complex. The most important is that about 60 percent of the genetic male children raised as female have retransitioned into males.” Gender identity is inborn in use.

    We do not choose our gender, but instead we are born with our gender identity. The notion that gender is a social construct was disproved when Dr. Money was exposed.

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