Questions I never knew needed answers

While reading Sexing the Body I recalled two classes I had taken before, Women’s Biology and Women’s Health. In both of these classes we learned and talked heavily about the difference between sex and gender. While I understood it on a textbook definition level, I never really understood what it could be mean to have that difference. Reading the first chapter of Sexing the Body and the situation with the Olympian shed a new light on the matter for me.

                It is issues like this that lead me to believe that Fausto-Sterling is hosting some sort of intervention in her book.  Both the sub sections of “Male or Female” and “Sex and Gender” touch heavily on this issue. The way that the material is presented is in a non-argumentative way, but she simply presents her facts and research. Fausto-Sterling doesn’t even come right out and make a claim to either way or what she believes in, she simply states situations and lets you draw your own conclusions.

                I think that her presentation in the first chapter is what makes her book successful as an intervention. It addresses issues that most people would not even think about on a regular basis. As a heterosexual female, the issue of sex versus gender was not a prevalent issue that I considered while growing up. The older I have gotten it has been something that I have had to struggle, in the sense of figuring out where I stand, with. I have a friend who is a male about my age who believes that he was supposed to have been born a woman and wishes to go through surgeries to become a female.  When he chose to share this with me it opened up a long series of deep conversations with myself about what feeling like you are the wrong gender or sex means.

                I look forward to reading Sexing the Body to further learn what in fact the arguments are on this issue. So many times I have found myself ignorant on how to answer a question simply because I never even realized it was a question. I think that the book will be thought provoking enough to help me think through these issues and draw my own conclusions.