Cultural Genitals

    I don't really know where to begin with this post, so I'll start by saying that the reading as a whole made me very unsettled. It made me unsettled to know that ambiguous biological sex affects so many children. It made me unsettled to know that some parents knowingly allow their children's genitals to be mutilated. ("We protest the practices of genital mutilation in other cultures, but tolerate them at home" (79)) It made me unsettled, perhaps most of all, that doctors systematically enforce gender binaries by insisting that no child leave the hospital without a clearly defined sex of male or female.
    I had already been made aware to a certain extent of the amount of intersex children born in my anthropology class, but I had never gotten the kind of in depth look that this reading gave. The detailed descriptions of the processes by which doctors reconfigure the sex of children were appalling and heart wrenching, as I thought of each of those individual children who would then grow up to wonder why their parents went to such extremes to make them "normal". How can any child come to terms with their identity knowing that it was artificially molded to fit a social norm? More importantly, as the reading pointed out, how can any parent know how their child will grow up to wish to express their gender identity? A child could be biologically reassigned to be a male, and grow up with the personal notion that they are female. While the parents are certainly acting to a certain extent out of fear, and think that what they are doing is best for their child, they in reality have no idea how that child will wish to express themselves.
    I'm glad that the reading asked, "What if you had an intersexual child?", because it made me think. I certainly have always believed that I will allow my children to express themselves in whatever way they so choose, and I also concretely believe that if I were to discover that a child of mine was intersexual that I would leave the child's body completely intact and allow them to do with it what they please as they age. For similar, albeit less impactful reasons that I think circumcision is an immoral act, reassigning my child's sexual gender would be to me an act of violence upon their humanity. Such an extreme act as that kind of surgery should be a decision only the child should be able to make.

    Finally, on a less related note, the reading said something about transsexualism that I had never considered. It said that to prescribe to transsexualism was to give in to gender binaries, and to acknowledge that you can make a polar switch from one gender to another. Never before had I thought of transsexualism in this way, and I was glad that the author was so bent on debunking it and moving towards the idea of many genders. At the NY6 conference, I met many individuals who embodied both male and female identities, feeling like neither one nor the other yet both at the same time. As the reading suggested, transsexualism is better represented as transgenderism, in which gender lines are crossed but not necessarily in the polar "one or the other" way that has been traditional.

    As for the name of my post, it comes from this quote: "If cultural genitals counted for more than physical genitals, many of the dilemmas just described could be easily resolved" (113), which I just thought was a great quote!