Re: sex, not gender 2 (fwd)

At 9:24 AM +0800 19/3/00, md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu wrote:
>geezz!! richard, you still don't get it. the existence of sexual organs
>does not guarantee that you will develop a full correspendence
>of your biological identity. there are many "men" around who
>are biological males, but who develop a different sexual identity. are
>they still unambigiously male? or what? it is the same with women too.
>think about lesbians.

ahh. better hope that the doctor knows better than to try to do a pap
smear on the one and knows enough to do it on the other. one
certainly hopes that if a  male comes in with a distended abdomen and
pronounces himself pregnant, that the doctor will not do an
ultra-sound to search high and low for the fetus and mistake the
growth in the stomach for the same...

i thought one of the important gains of the women's movement was to
begin to get medical science to look at male and female differently,
and to recognise the prevailing male bias that had led to a blindness
about conditions that affect females but not males. and to some
breaking-out of the specificities of the female from the ghetto of
obstetrics/gynecology across all of medical science.

and, by the way, it is well-known that poorer people have shorter
life-expectancies than richer people; yet, given all that gender
oppression, human females live longer than human males. might not
genetics have something to do with it? or is it that the oppression
is a social "construction" (running for the bomb shelter :))?


>Men and Women are social categories that receive
>their meanings from society,not from reproductive organs.
>Sexuality is part of the gender system through which sex roles "are
>created,organized, expresssed, and directed, creating the social
>beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society".
>Futhermore, time has changed. we are not geared towards
>reproduction as seriously as we were in huntung gathering societies.
>so why should sex be reduced to reproduction only? are we living in
>the stone ages?

jeez, talk about prejudice: "stone ages" indeed. in at least some
contemporary hunting-gathering societies, sex is hardly geared
towards "serious" reproduction, although reproduction may well be the
by-product of such playful sex, and they accept that children are
born of females. just because some sociologist or anthropologist goes
around talking about the economic value of children, and the
"strategy" of having as many children as possible to ensure the
survival of at least some, ignoring the extent of playful sex, is the
sociologist/anthropologist's problem and strategy for career
advancement, not of "stone age" hunter-gatherers.

is it so difficult to accept that we are biological creatures? sure
in talking about how we are biological creatures we engage in, what's
that term, "performative" acts, select what a culture/science thinks
significant, hence, in that sense, "construct" it. but not all
"constructions" are created equal, although all "constructions" that
survive are, in some sense, adequate to being able to act
instrumentally in the world.

hey, but we agree, gender and gendering are social constructions.
still, it would be foolish to ignore the grounds of possibility of
some components of those constructions in biology. granting this does
not necessitate concluding that such components of those
constructions are natural. that would be an illegitimate move,
predicated on an implicit and illicit assumption that what is natural
is good and shouldn't be tampered with. hunter-gatherers may accept
much that is seen as natural: those are just the facts of life -- one
has to live with nature, and one can't do just any damn thing that
one wishes (although that doesn't prevent many from wishing they
could); but they do _not_ then take it that what is natural is
necessarily good/desirable/benign.

did someone say "a thorough-going materialism"?

Khoo KJ