Intersex Day of Remembrance

Transcription

So for Transgender Day of Remembrance this year my friend Hannah and I decided to give the school a "Gender Presentation" that explains "gender" and "transgender." Unfortunately, Hannah isn't here with me and she is definitely very knowledgeable, but hopefully I'll be able to fill in the missing parts and put it on YouTube! So, here it is: our Gender Presentation. Hope you like it! So the first thing we talked about was gender: what is it, what is it about? and we talked about gender as a 'basic identifier.' So, if I were walking down the street and I saw a girl who I thought was pretty, I would say, "Wow, that's a really pretty girl," and the first thing I would think to identify her as is a girl. That isn't a bad thing, but it's something that is very intrinsic to the way we view ourselves and others; Something that's built in and we don't think about before we do. We just do it: We identify people by gender. If gender is so basic to identifying people in our society, We might as well know its definition. (And something that I do in every power point, whenever ever possible, is to consult Merriam-Webster) Merriam Webster defines gender as (definition above) At this point we asked our audience, "Associated with ONE sex? Well, how many sexes are there?" When people called out, they mostly said "2" Some said "3" or "4" or "6" These are all valid guesses. Normally, sex is thought of as binary: there are only two choices. Therefore, assuming sex is binary, if gender is based on sex, there should only be two choices: Male or Female. Right? Well, as it turns out, sex is not binary. There's male, there's female, and there's something else called intersex! People who are intersex are the people who we used to call "hermaphrodites". Nowadays, we no longer use the term "hermaphrodite". Not only is it offensive, but it is incorrect because there is no such thing as hermaphroditism in humans. Intersex people are born with ambiguous genitalia meaning that the doctor who delivered them could not determine the sex. It's more common than you might think: one in every two thousand births are intersex. Quite a significant population! There are many types of intersex that I will not go over because I am not an expert in the area. One problem that faces intersex people is that many intersex people, three or four months after birth, are given a surgery by choice of their parents. The surgery is meant to give the child a more ordinary life and, usually, the child is made female. Because of this, a lot of intersex people end of falling in the category of "transgender" because they find out later in life that they are intersex and don't know how to identify their gender. Maybe they've felt a lot of gender-confusion in their life and finally understand why, but still don't fit solidly into one gender because they don't fit solidly into one sex under the male-female system. Now that we've explored sex a little bit and discovered that sex isn't something that's binary, why would we expect gender to be something that's binary? And actually, it tends not to be! But that leads us to the question: "What is the difference between sex and gender." The difference can be explained pretty simply. Sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears. What that means is that sex is your anatomy, what the doctor identified you as at birth. Gender has to do with how you think of yourself in respect to our binary system, and how you choose to express your gender identity. and how you choose to express your gender identity.