Sex, Gender, and Bodies

O. G.

I think many people aren’t aware of all the different sexual developments of all the people in our society. The first time I heard about a lot of disorders and different outcomes of fetal developments was the first time I have ever taken a psychology class. We all learn about the fetal developments, the hormones, and the body organs in health class and biology class in high school. Yet we never learn anything more than that, making us think that everyone in the world is designed in the same way, and that the world is divided into males and females. As an outcome, nobody really knows about the 1.7% of babies that vary in biological form from the two distinct divisions we learned about. We grow up and walk the world unaware of intersexuality, of Klinefelter’s syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome, Turner’s syndrome, hermaphrodites, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, partial androgen insensitivity, and many others. Our unawareness makes us unable to understand the lives some people lead, and make us very close-minded, which in turn ostracizes the small, but ever-present percentage of people with variations.
Our ignorance about variations of sexual development makes us uninformed about the problematic gender identity. It’s hard for many to grasp that people who have some differences with the combinations of genes, hormones, and anatomy, may have some differences with their gender identity. Many do not understand transsexualism, sex-changes, or gender-identity disorder, and feel that these are problems for which the parents are to blame. In this case, ignorance is really the opposite of bliss. Our reactions to people with such disorders and lifestyles are that of shock. We segregate those people and make their lives absolutely miserable.
In this chapter I even learned that many think that sex is a social construction and vary from our personal and cultural beliefs and assumptions about sex and gender. This opened up a whole new way of looking at things for me, as I wish it could for others. If only we spread awareness about the sexual minorities, we could improve society and make it a better place for the sexual minorities and even for ourselves. If we transform our thinking and work on our acceptance of biological, sexual, and gender diversity, we could be one step closer to gender equality.