Because Science told me so...

Last summer, I took a biology course on Women. Which means I took a biology course on reproduction.

This three week class was the one of the final pulls towards declaring a Women's Studies major. (After that class I signed up for Introduction to Women's Studies and the rest is history.) What I learned in that class was more than just science, it was life.

Let me explain. Reproduction is how everyone came to be. Even the test tube babies. That's life.

We're all little miracles! YAY!!!

You know what else is a miracle: being a sex. Do you know how easy it is to have genetics mess up and you get born with testes and ovaries? Or a penis but no scrotum? It's more common then you think.

Some research says that 1 in 100 births belong to the intersex group. I'm serious. I've seen lower stats too. But that is the one that I have read the most often, in several sources.

Intersexuality intrigues people. Part of this is because we do not learn about it until college (hello? I was 19 before I learned about this?). Some intersex people may not find out about their own intersex until they are older. (It's not all on the outside, folks.)

[Photo Reference: Eph-B-CABOT-Variety-1938-01]


I'm taking a class called Sociology of Sexuality this summer. Now sex is my favorite thing to talk about and I am blunt about it. I knew this class was going to interest me and challenge me and educate me and that is why I decided to take it.

A few posts ago I realized I was getting more and more personal with my blog posts. This blog is not about my personal life. Although I have experiences that I feel I need to share, I want to do it to add to a professional conversation. Those posts, always has a professional background. Always.

Some people have told me in more polite ways: to shut up about sexuality and my experiences. That it is not appropriate to talk about this subject or that subject in that environment.

But that is what we need to do! We need to talk about our experiences!!! Why? Because experiencing sexuality is NORMAL. No matter who you are.

Intersex people for decades had corrective surgeries since birth to try and make them one sex or the other. Usually it was the doctor that made those decisions to have the surgery. And for decades, children were lied to and growing up with the idea that they were born a certain sex.

Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote 'The Fives Sexes: why male and female are not enough' to address these issues.

She says that their aren't really only 2 sexes, there are FIVE. Is your mind blown? Mine is. We see our lifes in binary ways, we are taught that since birth. Maybe even before birth. Black can only be black, white can only be white. But we don't just have two colors, we have so many more.

In my American Indian Literature class, I learned about the idea of a Medicine Wheel. The medicine wheel was a circle that tried to include more than just two categories of anything. The medicine wheel encompasses all people, all things. It's not a melting pot either, it is a inclusive symbol that wanted to include cultures, not erase them.

This 5 sex thing is slowly making it's way to becoming that medicine wheel. It's trying to make people understand that there is a 50/50 chance that you become a boy or a girl. There is more in to development than that.

Your sex does not end when you are given a X or Y chromosome from sperm. That's just the beginning of sex. And it doesn't end when you are born. (Do you know that some people don't just have XY or XX. They may have XXY, or XYY or YY...it happens...)

Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are researchers about sexuality. And in one of my readings I did for my Sociology class they stated that even sex is created. Just like gender is.

Yes, it is created to organize and categorize the world.

Last summer I learned that sex is what you were born with and gender is the traits that society gives that sex....and this summer, I learn that even sex is a creation of the society we live in.

So I am as confused as you are right now. But it makes sense.

Why else do we not have language for something that happens in 1 in 100 births? That we only have 2 pronouns for female and male. Even though....intersex happens.

It's because the society a long long long time ago decided that it didn't. Decided that if you were, you had to choose the two options.

So relying on biology, they say that your sex is natural. That you have a sex. They created sex through biology. And since it is science, people believe it.

Well, they forget to mention, or they didn't have the resources we do now or even 50 years ago, to prove that the idea of 2 sexes really isn't right.

So when people tell me that science is always right. I say...."uhhhh no."

Who knows in 50 years people could be telling me that my skin is an organ? Oh wait, they do. Or they could tell me that pluto isn't a planet? Oh wait, they do. Or that the earth is round? Shiz, that's what they do.

So what did I learn today?

Science isn't always right, but it is getting better.

(I wrote on issues like this one before, you can find it here.)