Double-edged words

This article in The Economist looks at how the connotation of words influence our understanding of gender:

WOMEN and men face double-standards. That this should show up in the language is no surprise:

• Men who put themselves forward at work are “assertive”, women who do the same are more often “pushy” or “bossy”; 
  
• men are “persistent” whereas women are “nagging”; 
  
• men are “frustrated”, women “upset”. 
  
• A man has a lot to say; a woman is “chatty”. 
  
• A man discusses the doings of his colleagues and rivals; a woman “gossips”.
  

The point is that even when we describe the same abilities or personality traits, we use negative words for women and positive ones for men. 

Men are studs, women are sluts, simply because sexual aggressiveness is seen as admirable in men a, while people would like to police the sexuality of women.

We trust children to know what gender they are – until they go against the norm

Diane Ehrensaft, Director of Mental Health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center , University of California, makes some really acute observations about children and gender in this article. 

She writes:

The main issue that brings children to our clinic is a child in the family who says: “Hey, you’ve got it wrong, I’m not the gender you think I am” or “I do not want to conform to the rules I see around me about how boys are supposed to be boys and girls are supposed to be girls.”

Some of these children are very upset about their gender conundrums; others skip happily outside the gender boxes that were outlined and filled in for them by the culture around them. Yet they all share something in common – feelings about their gender – and depending on how these feelings are negotiated by the adults who care for them, they will either rejoice is their “gender creativity” or suffer from the ill-fit between the gender everyone expects them to be and the gender they know themselves to be.

Ehrensaft sees that when acceptance and allowance of the child to live in their authentic gender replace negation or suppression, the child will have room to find and develop its own identity. And it is much happier for it.

Illustration by hello_meni

Biological sex is not binary | Feminist Times

Interesting write-up on biology, sex, gender and gender identity by Malin Ah-King.

Malin writes:

Psychologist John Money, who became very influential for the treatment of intersex children from the 1950s and onward, considered gender identity to be only dependent on the social circumstances and that there was no innate basis for it. Successful treatment would lead the child to psychologically developing into an unambiguous gender, and as part of this it was essential that both the parents and the child believed that the child had a true sex that only needed medical intervention to get it right.

The assumption of the all over-shadowing social influence, however, has not been without critics. This is especially true following Money’s showcase example of John/Joan, a boy who accidentally lost his penis and was brought up as a girl, who turned out to reject his assigned sex, transition to male and later take his own life. 

In 1965, Milton Diamond suggested a competing hypothesis, namely that the influence of hormones provides a predisposition for gender identity and behavior that sets limits to the social influences. 

Later, evidence accumulated of intersex individuals rejecting their medical sex assignment and, as more and more intersex individuals give their stories and interpretations, the still controversial debate has become more nuanced. Yet intersex children are still regularly treated to conform to current binary gender norms, despite there being no medical reason to do so in most cases.

Read the whole article here!