For most of the six-billion people who occupy this planet few things in our ever evolving lives are completely static, completely unchanging and rigid. Hardly ever do we give second thought to the things we believe are static and cannot change, but are we correct in assuming that anything in our life is permanent? The relation of gender (our mental constructions of being male or female [or perhaps even neither[or both bi-gender]) to sex (the anatomy of our bodies) can be such a thing. Although throughout our life the world around us, that which is immediate and that which is distant, ebbs like tides, ever-changing, we know so well that some things – such as our bodies – will always remain familiar. We may move between jobs, between cities or nations, even friends come and go, but we do not fear ever waking to find ourselves in a new body, with a new sex, or even with a new sense of gender. This though is only what we think is true.
There are some people though, unmentioned, often unseen or forgotten, perceived as alien: like strangers in a strange world 'normal' people who feel incapable of relating to the intersex, the transsexual, drag queens and drag kings, even cross dressers deconstruct that which we may feel can never be questioned: how our perception of sex and gender seem to be linked; if I feel male then I am male and if I am male then I must feel male. Yet the truth is that our physical sex, and the more personal gender, are capable of becoming disjointed with one another. It is through the individuals previously mentioned though where we may find that which we felt so sure of before, our bodies, may in fact be no more immalleable than our dress styles. For it is from these people and out of their stories that we should recognize the often unseen truth behind sex and gender: that both are neither static, but are rather dynamic identities that are not only capable of change but capable of remodeling over-and-over throughout all of our lives.
You get home at the end of a long day at work. You come inside, scoff down some food, and decide its time to hit the hay. You head to the bathroom and as you brush those pearly whites, you stare into the mirror and see somebody staring right back at you., sometimes that person is an exact replica of you; a backwards version of that good lookin’ self you remember. Other times though, you see some stranger staring right back. This person doesn’t look like you at all. This person looks too thick, too thin, you see a pudgy stomach where you once imagined washboard abs, you see blemishes, the wrong hair color, the wrong eye color, the wrong image, the wrong person. Now imagine that every single time you looked into that mirror the wrong person was staring back. You just could not find a way to relate to that reflection. For individuals who were born with an intersexed condition, this is exactly how we as transsexuals can feel every single day.
Our Society is based on two binaries. First is the sex binary that inevitably leads to a gender binary. It leads us to believe that there are two sexes, male and female which relate to the body and these sexes must adhere to their assumed genders, man or woman. Men act masculine and women act feminine. Almost every aspect of our culture has been separated to fit into either category. Things are either masculine or feminine and the system usually discourages people from mixing gender roles. For the majority of the population, we except this system and believe that bodies can only come in two forms and these forms follow their norms. What that majority doesn’t realize is that there is the possibility to be neither male nor female or both male and female or somewhere in between. One of these categories of people that do not fall into the categories of the sex binary those who are born intersexed.
Immediately after birth, we are categorized as either male or female. But there is a large percentage (1 in 2000) whose biological sex cannot be classified. These individuals are known as intersexed (Wilchins, 72). Chromosomal and hormonal irregularities can cause a new born to have atypical, and usually ambiguous, genitalia and gonads. For many years, surgical procedures have been performed soon after birth in order to build a less ambiguous looking genitalia allowing for easier classification. The doctors would usually assign a sex as quickly as possible. More often than not, the child was assigned to be a female because it is an easier procedure (Beck). Once the aesthetics of the genitalia have been normalized, the parents would then raise their child as a female. The problem with this is that often the child will have a hormonal imbalance and genitalia that does not function fully causing for much confusion as the child reaches puberty and onward. Intersexed individuals are one of the many groups that suffer through our social construct of a sex and gender binary because they are forced into living a life as a sex and gender other than their own. They are forced to live a life identifying as either male or female because a third or forth or even fifth option is not available.
