Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈's Post

SEX AND INTERSEX (AND GENDER)

"If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery and hormones to carry out the decision. Choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines."

(Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, "Sexing the Body")

The recent US govt statement on "sex" talks about "sex at conception". At conception EVERYONE IS INITIALLY FEMALE as possible male characteristics cannot even develop for several weeks. That is part of a process which may, in some people, not develop in a binary way or in a predictable way. In addition, not everyone is either XX (usually female) or XY (usually male) in terms of chromosomes. In fact, the notion of a strict, hard binary is entirely false. This is NOT a matter of numbers for even the possibility of one single deviation proves the binary is not true to reality. The fact is a binary, which is the same as a deliberately created gender division, is artificial and a political project. As Fausto-Sterling says in the same book:

"But why should we care if a 'woman'
(defined as having breasts, a vagina, uterus, ovaries, and menstruation) has a 'clitoris' large enough to penetrate the vagina of another woman? Why should we care if there are individuals whose 'natural biological equipment' enables them to have sex 'naturally' with both men and women? Why must we amputate or surgically hide that 'offending shaft' found on an especially large clitoris? The answer: to maintain gender divisions, we must control those bodies that are so unruly as to blur the borders. Since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes, they weaken claims about sexual difference."

Neither sex nor gender nor sexuality, a number of leading biologists say today, are a simple matter of "what's there". Increasingly, social factors are also seen to matter. For govts, it becomes a matter of politics (and political dogma) too. In one fell swoop, the US govt has attempted to wipe out intersex people and trans and non-binary people. This is based on ignorance and flawed thinking as part of a political agenda for an entirely political purpose.

They can never be allowed to succeed. For biology does what it can not what orange fools tell it to.

#trans #intersex #nonbinary #queer #lgbtq #lgbtqia #politics #usa