Pink or Blue isn't Black or White....

    A good friend of mine is the mother of two girls and one of them happens to be the same age as my son. Inevitably, when we’re together we compare the ups and downs of being the parents of teenagers and do the boy/girl contrasts and comparisons. Girls are more fun to dress, boys are more mischievous, girls mature faster than boys, parents don’t have to worry about boys as much as they do girls. We assign a masculine or feminine quality to everything they do from the minute they are born. There are boy colors and girl colors, boy toys and girl toys, boy activities and girl activities. As long as our children stay within the guidelines that have been laid out by society, all is well. What do we do, however, with those children that don’t fit so neatly into the essentialist’s vision of male and female?  The attached video is great...it really shows us how difficult we are making it on children who don't really understand what they are going through.

     Feinberg notes “That pink-blue dogma assumes that biology steers our social destiny” (Feinberg, 9). She makes a good point when discussing infants and who exactly has the authority (or right) to determine the appropriate size for male or female genitals. Who sets the standard to begin with? The rationale behind much genital mutilation in infants is that the surgery is far more difficult and holds many more risks if you wait until the child is older. These intersex infants grow up without having had the right to define their own sexuality. Their sex was decided for them at birth, not by nature but by a medical professional so they could “conform to a particular society’s concept of aesthetics and normality” as noted by the group Students for Genital Integrity (SGI, founded at San Francisco State University in 2002).

     As a society we are consumed by the ideology of masculine and feminine. We go so far as to label everything as having a specific gender from boats to tools to weather systems. We do this based on external qualities and neglect to consider the internal attributes. If a person is born biologically a female but chooses to dress and affect “masculine” qualities, is she trying to act like a man or is she trying to act like herself? Does society have the right to make that judgment? We are taught from a young age NOT to judge a book by it’s cover yet we continue to do this every time we force a transgender person to label themselves in one way or another. If sex is determined by biology, as essentialist's believe, how can they demand that a transgender person make a “statement” as to their gender when they are biologically on the fence? 

     I struggle with the concept of linking sexual orientation to genetics. It seems to me that this concept says that if we step outside of the normative ideology, it couldn’t possibly be due to free will or individual choice but rather because of an abnormality in our DNA. As Anne Fausto-Sterling states in The Biological Connection, “In the study of gender (like sexuality and race) it is inherently impossible for any individual to do unbiased research.” (IWS, 42).