Is the life of a gender ambiguous person less worth living?
According to Phong, if we admit that we want to opt out of having intersex children when we could, then we are
prejudiced against intersex people. I
agree with Phong. We do, in our culture, consider the life of an intersex child
less worth living.
Dr. J’s argument against this is that we don’t consider a
person’s life less worth living than other people’s when that person could
live just like everybody else with the help of modern medical technology. This
analogy does not work because first, there is minimal psychological harm done when a person takes insulin pumps. There is little social prejudice against having diabetes (at least in comparison to being intersex); second, by
choosing to take insulin, isn’t a diabetic patient already affirming that she
considers a life with normal insulin level better than a life without? A
gender ambiguous person who does not have genital conditions that harms his/her
health sometimes would not really mind having sexual ambiguity. Medically,
being intersex (without harm to health) does not make life less worth living; however
socially, it definitely does. This is why most students would opt for Phong’s pill
that “cures” intersex. The same goes for a beauty pill. If everyone could take
a pill to be beautiful, I doubt many people would refuse to take that pill. Being ugly is not medically harmful, but it is
socially harmful in our culture. In the same way, being intersex is not
medically bad, but it is socially bad. Who should we blame? Ourselves! We are
the constructing pieces of our culture and it is our responsibility to make the
culture friendly to all kinds of genital conditions (isn’t it ridiculous that
we have this obsession with the ethics of the shape of genitals? Why is that even
a thing?)
Whose problem is it that our life is less worth living?
I had trouble explaining to a friend about Fausto-Sterling’s
suggestion to change the gender binary bias in our social system rather than to
change the people to conform to gender binary. My friend insisted that “if
people are not comfortable in their bodies, it’s their problem”. I wanted to
say that the discomfort in our bodies is socially forced upon us; however the
transgender issue makes this point hard to make. If gender binary is socially
constructed, why is that there are people with female bodies claiming that they
need the other body? This is because the socially constructed selves are more
important than our biological selves in defining who we are. Our gender-binary culture
exaggerates the role of biological differences in determining gender
differences so much that a person with one social self feels uncomfortable in
his/her biological self and would like to change it to match his social self.
If I were to imagine myself to be a boy and pretendthat I have a penis despite being biologically female. It would be especially hard and
I would considered sex reassignment surgery seriously. However, I would not want to be
physically altered because of the expense and complications that come with the
surgeries. I wouldn't think that the biological sex of my body matter so much in defining who I am. Appearance of a male or female serves other people in
determining who I am, and it’s not my responsibility to appear one way or the
other. We know that as social animals, our socially constructed self is much
more important than our biological self in determining who we are. Therefore I
have made it a part of my mission to not make assumptions on other people’s selfhood
based on their apparent biology and gender-presentation. I hope my friends would start doing this as
well.
Briana, your analysis to the diabetes comparison was extremely thought-provoking and represented an angle I had not thought about. While I find myself agreeing with most of what you say, there is a part of me that questions the nature of norms and how those norms came to be, and if they came to be naturally throughout the human race, are they more purposeful than we credit them? This lead me to my second thought. If you are not considered the "norm" or what is socially acceptable i.e. attractive, definably male or female ect. then how do we break boundaries to say that the abnormal is normal? Because what really defines normal?
ReplyDeleteBriana,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this insight. During the class discussion that you reference in your post, I was reminded of how similar Phong's point about being prejudice against intersex individuals was to ableist arguments about "curing disabilities." At Rhodes, I have taken several classes with professors who focus their research on the sociology of disabilities. With modern technological advancements, doctors can now determine whether babies will have certain physical or mental "handicaps" and often times recommend that a pregnant woman abort the fetus rather than carrying it to term. While I firmly believe in a woman's right to choose, I agree with you that these arguments imply that life with a physical or mental disability (or life with ambiguous genitalia, in this case) is inherently less worth living than life that strictly adheres to what society considers "normal." If you think about it, the only reason that physical differences like the need of a wheelchair are considered "disabilities" or 'impediments" is because our society operates in such a way as to only cater to people with one mode of mobility. If we expanded our definition of "mobile," and made every building or structure wheelchair accessible, then this would not longer be considered a "handicap." With regard to intersex or people with ambigious genetalia, if we simply deconstructed the gender binary and expanded our normative understanding of gender, we wouldn't ask people to opt out of the possibility of ambiguous genitalia. By choosing this option in Phong's universe, we ARE suggesting that these lives are less worth living instead of radically critiquing and overturning our conceptions of "normal."