Short Post 2/14

I couldn’t help but to relate the reading for today to the book I read in high school called Middlesex.  Middlesex tells the story of a girl named Callie growing up and realizing she is an intersex.  When she is young she has no idea that she could possibly be an intersex.  However, through adolescence puberty she realizes something is wrong with the way she feels inside and out.  She starts to have a crush on the “Obscure Object”, a girl she is friends with.  Callie realizes she has more than an understandable “girl crush” and that is a feeling of sexual desire.  When Callie first has sex as a teenage girl she is shocked by the sharp pain she feels inside of her.  At that point, she realizes something is wrong with her female genitalia.  In the end, Callie meets with numerous doctors and decides she feels most comfortable identifying as a male.  At that point, Callie decides to change her name to Cal and take on the role of being a male in society.  Throughout Middlesex, you see Cal grow up as a girl and really feel connected to Cal and the issues he has gone through in his life.  The author also presents other problems that are more “normal” that many of the readers can relate to.

While reading Sexing the Body, historian John Boswell discusses how homosexuality existed centuries ago within ancient Greek history.  I think the concept of the Kinsey scale is extremely interesting in that many people can be identified as heterosexual, homosexual and everything in between.  Boswell makes the argument that if an ancient Greek was cloned and brought to present day he would be homosexual in the present if he was in the past.  Boswell makes an extremely controversial argument because some people believe nurture creates homosexuality.  Cleary science does not tell us which is true and to be honest I do not see why it matters.  It should not matter if a man or woman is gay or an intersex.  For example, Maria Patino’s situation with being banned from the Olympics because she had a Y chromosome is ridiculous.  She identifies as a woman and is a woman.  During Link training, we went through safe zone training.  Safe zone training was designed to teach Links how to understand and act appropriately when dealing with homosexuality and gender identification.  I learned the appropriate terms for identifying men, women and people who do not identify with a gender.  We are suppose to identify people with no gender as ze.  The whole training raised my awareness and taught me how many sexes and genders really exist.  I am excited to continue reading Sexing the Body and see what else Fausto-Sterling discusses about sex and gender.