May 27, 2007

• How important is sex?

  Sexual activity is very important to all humans with normal healthy biochemistry.  The fact that the biological imperative to reproduce is stronger than the instinct for self-preservation is demonstrated every time someone risks life itself to satisfy the mating drive.  Sexual activity is only peripheral to my topic.  The “sex” about which I am asking is that denoted by gender-specific words and those little boxes on various forms marked with an “M” or an “F”.  How important is the distinction, the question of which box one checks?

  …and why don’t those forms offer us other choices, at the very least, “undisclosed,” or, “none of the above?”  Depending on which

  definition of intersexism one uses, at least one in every 1,500 to 2,000 births
  has anomalous sex or gender, and one or two babies out of every thousand births have surgery to “normalize genital appearance” (sex reassignment surgery, SRS). (Source:
   American
  Journal of Human Biology)  That statistic applies to infants, but of course older children and adults also have SRS, and sometimes that is done to “correct” an earlier surgery that assigned the “wrong” sex. 

  Many people believe that one must be one thing or the other, that it is wrong to be both.  It is certainly dangerous, in our culture, to be both, or to be different.  The psychiatric profession in the USA considers the desire to change one’s sex to be a rare mental illness called Gender Identity Disorder, and DSM-IV claims an incidence of about, “1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females [who]
  seek sex-reassignment surgery.”   Each year more than that many people in this country have SRS.  Shrinks have their own reasons for preferring to view it as mental illness, and for presenting it as rarer than it is.  Transsexual and transgender researchers have found, “that the prevalence
  of (MTF: male-to-female) SRS is at least on the order of 1:2500, and may be twice that
  value.”

  This question of the importance of sex occurs to me at this time because the issue pops into my mind every
  time the profile pic of one of my Xanga friends is displayed in my Friends Module.  I have a transsexual friend.  As far as I know, that
  fact has been kept secret from readers of my friend’s blog, including
  myself.   So, how, you may ask, do I know this?  Well… I am
  psychic, after all.  I’m also observant, intuitive, intelligent, empathic
  and in touch.  It’s a secret, sure… but it’s an open secret.

  Even though I prefer openness in all things, I
  certainly can’t fault my friend for not coming out here on Xanga.  I
  can imagine some of the reactions.  It could take a few generations for our culture to begin to accept all the anomalous individuals among us.  With some religions declaring intersex babies to be abominations, hospitals and surgeons routinely assuming that one sex or the other must be assigned to any baby with anomalous genitalia, and psychiatrists preferring to see the anomaly of transsexuality as the problem while they ignore the psychological effects of demonization, marginalization, rejection, harassment, and persecution, it takes a great deal of courage to come out.

  In trying to think of ways I might help further the process of acceptance, I have concluded that I will occasionally bring up the issue for discussion, and will seek out ways and places to lobby for inclusion of other options than just the usual M and F on forms.  If they’re going to be nosy enough to ask, they might as well be ready to accept an honest answer.

  I have written previously about the complications our culture creates in the lives of transgender and intersexual people, in male or female or not.  For another view, read “There are more of us than you think,” by Joanne Herman.  Intersex Society of North America is an information and advocacy organization.

  By the way, as far as I know (not having had any gene-testing) I am female, except for some of my attitudes and personality attributes.
  

  • 5:43 pm
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