Blog Eight
The Kessler text was a very interesting way of looking at gender and really begins to go hand in hand with the medical idea of nurture over nature. The piece simply illustrated our society’s stress on a binary gendered system. When children are born with ambiguous genitalia, medical doctors immediately put pressure on the parents to choose a gender for the infant because it is for the best interests for the child. This decision needs to be made quickly so immediately the parents can begin to raise the child as the specific gender. I suppose it is believed widely be the medical world that one can MAKE a child be whatever gender they want them to be. It is an interesting hypothesis however; I do not think it works well for the child in all cases. But it is the fact that parents are pressured into making that decision for the best interests of the child where I would have to disagree. This so called “best interest� has to do with whether or not the child will fit in to our society and be ‘normal’. However, many probably would not know if the child was not normal until they looked at the genitalia. And it is the genitalia of a typical male, genitalia that is capable of having heterosexual sex that becomes the rubric of whether or not the intersexed infant is a male or female child. And sometimes that forced decision that harms the child more than help them. No one encourages the child to be who they are, an intersexed person, but that is because we live in a society that does not encourage that, or accepts in at all. So these intersexed children are forced to either be squeezed into a category they are not, or be oppressed by society. This is because we define a “normal� body by genitalia capable of heterosexual sex, nothing else is acceptable.