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anorton's picture

Something I found very

Something I found very useful in the non-literary articles and medical texts was their attention to defining the terms we've been using, or perhaps throwing around uncertainly, in class.  Dr. Dreger (from The Oprah Winfrey Show,) succinctly settles the difference between "sex" and "gender": 

"There's issues of sex, which is biology—that's male and female and intersex....  There's gender, which is boy and girl, and sometimes people switch that.  And then there's sexual orientation, which is something else in addition—that's whether or not we're attracted to males or to females or to both" (8).

What Dr. Dreger puts forth is incongruous with Professor Grobstein's claim that, because there are uncountable ways of putting together the human body with male and female differences, there are uncountable sexes.  Dr. Dreger allows for three: male, female, and intersex.  Is it fair to group everyone who does not fit within standard conceptions of male or female into one group?

I am further unsatisfied with the term "disorders of sex development": why are differences from standard sexual development automatically "disorders," a word that carries definitions from the semi-innocuous "irregularity" and "confusion" to the more-negative "disturbance" and "disease" (from the OED)?  How can society move toward full acceptance of people with disorders (diseases, disturbances) of sex development if the very rhetoric surrounding them carries such connotations?

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