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Last week’s conversation was certainly controversial, but also quite interesting. Though I don’t want to get stuck on the binary vs. spectrum debate that occupied much of our discussion during class and already on these boards, I can’t help myself but add my own thoughts. Overall, I think I ultimately come back to one of the points brought up during one of our first classes (the one on neurodiversity) – every person is an individual. I think Professor Grobstein and many others continue to stress this point throughout the course, and I firmly agree. In treating patients, health professionals must take many variables into consideration and not only base their judgements on simple one-word answers, but rather a more overall understanding of the individual patient. For instance, we talked about pain scales and how they are used for treating patients – it’s not enough to just ask “does it hurt,” but also to determine how much, where, why, and what else the person may be feeling (though understanding others completely obviously has its limitations – beetle analogy). This same approach should be taken when considering things that are more commonly presented in a dichotomous manner, such as male/female and homosexual/heterosexual. Supporting people to not make blanket judgments about large supposed groups of others is a great idea, and I think this should be brought up more often in our everyday lives.

However, as some have already expressed, I too have trouble fully agreeing with some particular ideas from class and on this discussion board. I would suspect a self-reporting scale of male/female to not be very useful. This by no means it should not be attempted, that’s just my hypothesis. As Liz suggested, I don’t think a socially-constructed/affected ideas such as a tomboy would necessarily identify as more male than a valley girl. I think a lot of people’s self-reporting would be based on the words chosen on the scale and the connotations those words hold. For instance, many people (myself included) would most likely rate themselves differently on a scale for “male to female” as compared to a scale for “masculinity to femininity.” So, as Emily suggested, taking into account all the variables and differences between individuals would get so complicated that I’m not sure it would end up being productive.

With that said, at least in the clinical arena, I think the trust goes to our health professionals (just as when we discussed their roles in treating pain). Educating them as to how to best interact with patients and realize individual differences is crucial for them to provide the best care possible. I hope we can at least all agree on that.

Something else I just quickly want to touch on is the idea of homosexuality/heterosexuality as a scale. I too believe in the spectrum idea for sexual identity, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say that society is on the same boat or even that most people are comfortable with this concept. Many people still believe sexual preference to be a strict dichotomy. Whether this is true, I’m not sure. It makes sense to me that it would be a spectrum, but I also know I’ve read papers that studied sexuality and I remember the results markedly supporting two separate trends – homosexuality and heterosexuality, even for people who self-report as bisexual. I can’t recall where I read these papers, and so cannot follow up on them, but I remember these findings as surprising and striking. Maybe it is simply a social construction that leads people to fall into either group. Or maybe it’s more biologically based. Or maybe it’s a spectrum. I obviously don’t have the answers, but this topic certainly has plenty to be discussed.

Thanks for a great presentation!