I found the Fausto-Sterling essay, "The Five Sexes Revisited," to be quite interesting and it provoked many emotional reactions. In one of my previous classes, I studied the Joan/John case of sexual reassignment at birth so I have some familiarity with the discussion Fausto-Sterling is putting forth in this essay, yet I still find the stories quite compelling and gripping. A big issue with sexual reassignment that is brought up is the actually surgical reassignment- Faust-Sterling says here of the process of assigning gender that "physicians should minimize... irreversible assignments." This is important, I believe, as gender is transient and subject to change. Gender and Sex are not the same thing and they should not be treated as such.
That said, Judith Lorber in "The Social Construction of Gender" says that gender is "so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes." Because of how the gender dichotomy domineers our lives, it is hard for many to separate sex and gender. Genitalia does not determine one's gender, only their sex/where they fall in the intersex spectrum. Gender is also not just "male or female;" there are those who identify as agender (i.e., without gender), genderqueer (the definition is subject to change depending on the person but it usually involves the gender spectrum), some prefer the term nonbinary although this is also used to refer to all who are not part of the gender binary, bigender, demigender, genderfluid, intergender, third gender, and a host of other terms.
It is also important to know that sexuality is also separate from sex and gender. The cisgender, heterosexual people would like you to believe that it is all connected but I am here to tell you that it is not. As I love to say when I tell people about my sexuality, "It's not about parts, it's about hearts."
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