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meathiel and dissonant_dream for the blue dragons!... They're cute.;)
Winter is making its final (hopefully...) stand this weekend, and after trudging through frozen snow for most of the day running errands my legs feel weak and achy. Luckily I don't have to go anywhere tomorrow...
No other personal news to share... but there is something I've been thinking about a lot for the past few days. See, I discovered this blog on intersexuality. Also known as hermaphroditism - but the latter term is seen by some people it refers to as controversial. Anyway... the essence of the matter is that our (Western) culture tells us everyone is born either male or female, except for some extremely rare "birth defect" cases that require immediate corrective surgery. According to this blog, 1 in 200 people is born with some kind of "intermediate" sexual configuration (purely biologically speaking, of course - the concept of gender identification doesn't even enter the picture at this point, since of course a newborn cannot "identify" with anything). One in two hundred. That's not so extremely rare at all. That's 0.5% of the population. Except it isn't public knowledge, because the medical establishment seems extremely concerned with enforcing the belief that only two sexes/genders exist in nature, and that whenever someone is born looking like neither, "nature" made a mistake and they - the doctors - need to fix it. It's not particularly difficult to see the motive behind such enforcement; the more clearly we define and separate the two sexes, the easier it becomes to establish the "superiority" of one over the other. But, like it or not, this isn't how nature works. Nature is fluid and capricious, and doesn't care for neatly labelled boxes that people create to more easily "manage" our reality. And, in nature, sex - like gender - is a spectrum. Quite literally so. There are various forms of hermaphroditism in existence, but they do not include - contrary to popular myth - individuals possessing BOTH a penis and a vagina. They include a number of combinations of internal and external reproductive organs that are either typically female, typically male, or somewhere in between (with varying degrees of "in between"). In fact, in fetal form everybody's genitals are "somewhere in between"; or, in other words, their basic form has the capability to develop into either male or female - and sometimes the different components do not go in the same direction. It is all very clearly and accessibly explained in the following post - with the help of hand-drawn diagrams (no photos of random people's genitalia - just in case you're wondering, LOL):
http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
The post also talks about how doctors make arbitrary decisions concerning the sex of babies born with atypical genitalia, and often perform surgery that is painful, traumatizing and can lead to lifelong complications; and how all that happens long before the child in question has a chance to grow up and decide what gender they identify with (if any). This happens because we, as a culture, believe that everyone needs to conform to a set of clear-cut definititions that are sometimes quite far removed from the messy reality of LIFE. Often the people supporting the validity of those definitions say: "Imagine how tough life is going to be for this kid if we let them grow up neither male nor female." True. But who makes life tough for them? We do. We, the society. So how about we change our thinking instead of putting infants through traumatizing surgery without even knowing if we're trying to transform them into the "correct" gender? (an example from the blog: a baby born with a uterus AND a penis is usually considered by doctors to be female, so they remove the penis; however, should the baby then grow up to identify as a boy, the whole thing turns into a pointless tragedy)
And this is merely the tip of the iceberg, as far as issues related to the topic are concerned. Biological sex is one thing; gender is another. Also a spectrum, and not necessarily paralell to the sex spectrum. And then we have sexual orientation. How do we even talk about it in relation to intersex people?... When someone is neither male nor female, then terms like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" lose all meaning. Only "asexual" and "pansexual" would still be valid, I suppose.
Anyway... I find all this absolutely fascinating, as well as important, and so I couldn't stop myself from sharing.:) There are so many taboo topics, not discussed in "polite society" (polite society being, by definition, sexist, bigoted and otherwise oppressive, imo). But, thanks to whatever deity up there that gives a damn, we have the internet.:D
And to put my own private spin on it: the blog clarified one orientation-related thing for me. I've been getting used to calling myself a bi-romantic demisexual; as in, romantically attracted to both genders (and sexually only to people I have romantic feelings for, regardless of gender). However, if I take into account the fact that there are more than two genders, and that my romantic feelings, in general, have absolutely nothing to do with people's genitals - then I have to call myself pan-romantic. Seriously - if I loved someone, I couldn't care less if their junk looked like a "special case" from a medical journal; I would still want them, and they would be beautiful to me. And if I didn't love them, I wouldn't want to have sex with them anyway - even if they looked like a Playboy/Playgirl centerpiece, LOL. So, pan-romantic demisexual it is. *nods* ;)
meathiel and dissonant_dream for the blue dragons!... They're cute.;)Winter is making its final (hopefully...) stand this weekend, and after trudging through frozen snow for most of the day running errands my legs feel weak and achy. Luckily I don't have to go anywhere tomorrow...
No other personal news to share... but there is something I've been thinking about a lot for the past few days. See, I discovered this blog on intersexuality. Also known as hermaphroditism - but the latter term is seen by some people it refers to as controversial. Anyway... the essence of the matter is that our (Western) culture tells us everyone is born either male or female, except for some extremely rare "birth defect" cases that require immediate corrective surgery. According to this blog, 1 in 200 people is born with some kind of "intermediate" sexual configuration (purely biologically speaking, of course - the concept of gender identification doesn't even enter the picture at this point, since of course a newborn cannot "identify" with anything). One in two hundred. That's not so extremely rare at all. That's 0.5% of the population. Except it isn't public knowledge, because the medical establishment seems extremely concerned with enforcing the belief that only two sexes/genders exist in nature, and that whenever someone is born looking like neither, "nature" made a mistake and they - the doctors - need to fix it. It's not particularly difficult to see the motive behind such enforcement; the more clearly we define and separate the two sexes, the easier it becomes to establish the "superiority" of one over the other. But, like it or not, this isn't how nature works. Nature is fluid and capricious, and doesn't care for neatly labelled boxes that people create to more easily "manage" our reality. And, in nature, sex - like gender - is a spectrum. Quite literally so. There are various forms of hermaphroditism in existence, but they do not include - contrary to popular myth - individuals possessing BOTH a penis and a vagina. They include a number of combinations of internal and external reproductive organs that are either typically female, typically male, or somewhere in between (with varying degrees of "in between"). In fact, in fetal form everybody's genitals are "somewhere in between"; or, in other words, their basic form has the capability to develop into either male or female - and sometimes the different components do not go in the same direction. It is all very clearly and accessibly explained in the following post - with the help of hand-drawn diagrams (no photos of random people's genitalia - just in case you're wondering, LOL):
http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
The post also talks about how doctors make arbitrary decisions concerning the sex of babies born with atypical genitalia, and often perform surgery that is painful, traumatizing and can lead to lifelong complications; and how all that happens long before the child in question has a chance to grow up and decide what gender they identify with (if any). This happens because we, as a culture, believe that everyone needs to conform to a set of clear-cut definititions that are sometimes quite far removed from the messy reality of LIFE. Often the people supporting the validity of those definitions say: "Imagine how tough life is going to be for this kid if we let them grow up neither male nor female." True. But who makes life tough for them? We do. We, the society. So how about we change our thinking instead of putting infants through traumatizing surgery without even knowing if we're trying to transform them into the "correct" gender? (an example from the blog: a baby born with a uterus AND a penis is usually considered by doctors to be female, so they remove the penis; however, should the baby then grow up to identify as a boy, the whole thing turns into a pointless tragedy)
And this is merely the tip of the iceberg, as far as issues related to the topic are concerned. Biological sex is one thing; gender is another. Also a spectrum, and not necessarily paralell to the sex spectrum. And then we have sexual orientation. How do we even talk about it in relation to intersex people?... When someone is neither male nor female, then terms like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" lose all meaning. Only "asexual" and "pansexual" would still be valid, I suppose.
Anyway... I find all this absolutely fascinating, as well as important, and so I couldn't stop myself from sharing.:) There are so many taboo topics, not discussed in "polite society" (polite society being, by definition, sexist, bigoted and otherwise oppressive, imo). But, thanks to whatever deity up there that gives a damn, we have the internet.:D
And to put my own private spin on it: the blog clarified one orientation-related thing for me. I've been getting used to calling myself a bi-romantic demisexual; as in, romantically attracted to both genders (and sexually only to people I have romantic feelings for, regardless of gender). However, if I take into account the fact that there are more than two genders, and that my romantic feelings, in general, have absolutely nothing to do with people's genitals - then I have to call myself pan-romantic. Seriously - if I loved someone, I couldn't care less if their junk looked like a "special case" from a medical journal; I would still want them, and they would be beautiful to me. And if I didn't love them, I wouldn't want to have sex with them anyway - even if they looked like a Playboy/Playgirl centerpiece, LOL. So, pan-romantic demisexual it is. *nods* ;)
