To Draw, or Not to Draw, A Line
Really nice article today in the Washington Post
"Which Side Are You On?"
On where is the gender boundary? Or is the boundary just in our heads?
Alice Dreger, a professor at Northwestern University,
"To me, it’s no different than deciding where the foul line is," Dreger said. "The line is not drawn by nature, it’s a line we draw on nature."
Granted, most folks fall into one of the two broad categories, a bimodal distribution, as they say. But the space in between the two groups is not at all empty, and there are lots of us in the in-between.
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I think Nature does draw pretty clear lines by species. In our case, one produces a male or female gamete, which is a pretty accurate compass.
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that 1% that’s changes their sex, thatÂ’s crazy to think of it. iÂ’m out here in the sticks, 200 kids in the whole school district, so by those facts 2 kids here will change their sex.
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take care,
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Montana Wildhack. There’s seven human genders. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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ryn: People like to think there is a spectrum, but medically, it’s quite binary.
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Years ago I had a patient “George” referred to the practice with a diagnosis ovarian cancer. Obviously born a female, George had bargain sex-change surgery in Thailand several years earlier, and the doctor had left the ovaries intact. George became unique as the only “male” in the hospital EMR with the diagnosis of ovarian cancer, but from a treatment perspective (or genetic testing protocol), all the cosmetic surgery and hormone therapy in the world didn’t change the fact that George was a woman.
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This reminds me of the book I just finished reading about Pakistan and Afghanistan – the boundary lines were drawn arbitrarily by the English… The tribal groups can be anywhere.
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http://www.beaumontsociety.org.uk/wobs/challenge.html
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Does it really matter? I mean I supposedly think like a male according to all the tests, but I was born female, and raised mostly so, at least after my brother was born. I happen to hate being female, but it has more to do with the way females are treated in society than anything else. Well, except maybe the crazy hormone changes every month. My husband, although male, thinks much more like a…
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female, or rather did before he started losing his mind. It works out. Physical gender is fairly straightforward. Gender identity and gender roles are incredibly more complex, and our society does not currently allow for the flexibility necessary for the myriad possibilities in thought and behavior, hence the need for the option to change physical gender. People are people and should be…
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respected and accepted for their abilities, talents, thoughts, etc. regardless of gender, regardless of however many genders there are. Until people can see each other as people, not just male or female and apply harmful stereotypes to these roles, any discussion of other gender issues just seems ridiculous. My opinion only, as a bisexual married to a pansexual.
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