Mtv True Life: I'm Changing My Sex

[Guest Soph]

Just for some clarification:

A person's sex is arbitrarily determined by a combination of chromosomes and reproductive organs, as well as overall phenotype. These are, of course, not definitive and there is a lot of room for variation. Additionally, there is no sexual dichotomy that is so widely assumed by people, exactly for those reasons. The paramount article detailing this was "The Five Sexes" by Anne Fausto-Sterling. She looks at the variation in reproductive organs and has those determine sex.

Gender is the social expectations arbitrarily attached to a person based on how another perceives their sex to be. While sex may be at least somewhat objective, gender is entirely variable and wholly culturally determined.

Gender IDENTITY, however, is sort of a misnomer. In reality, I think it ought to be sexual identity (since we identify as the opposite sex over the gender-- that is, we are attracted to living in the opposite gender because we are attracted to living as the opposite sex. It is simply a concern over the order of causality), but that term is given to the gays. That is the internal sense of how one feels, both about their role in life concerning their gender and their relationship with the features that determine their sex. This is determined by the brain, or so I think. There are trans people who are all about personal expression and don't necessarily believe there to be a biological origin for gender identity, and there are those that do, and I clearly fall into the latter.

So what those people are trying to say is that you can't change your sex. They're still wrong, of course, since what defines sex is not at all set in stone. To say that you cannot change gender is to show that you have no idea what the definition of gender is, as you can change your role in society very well. In this sense, trans people do change their gender, as do they change their sex (most, at least). However, nobody can change their gender identity--that is both the most intangible and the most immutable property of sex/gender there is.

I don't know how much of this was addressed in this topic, I'm sort of tired and don't want to read through it

[Guest AshleyRF]

Real scientist don't care what shape the reproductive organs are in 90% of the time.

[Guest AshleyRF]

male and female are far from a social construct though its an evolutionarly construct with the sole purpose of spreading your genes to the next generation. mannerisims, speech, ways of acting when in the presence of the opposite sex or same sex. heck even your scent are signals of health or fertility in the hunt for a compatable mate i could delve deeper into it but i will leave that up to the discovery channel lol

Sakura

Male and female are sex not gender. And all the mannerisms, speech, and ways of acting are signals of ones gender, but those things all change from culture to culture and are part of a gender (social) construct. American women don't have the same mannerisms, speech, or ways of acting that African women have. Those are all socially learned constructs.

[Sakura]

if you look at it from a cultrual stand point then they may seem very diffrent at first glance, the only thing that really separates them are laws and religion. which are social constructs that dictate men and women of a diffrent cultures actions. i mean you can,t compare say women in afiganistan to women in the usa when afgany women are mandated by there laws and religion. to be covered hair to to toe at all times in public. as to were most USA women dont have those same laws and religion and are given far more liberty to act and dress the way they want

there was a show on the discovery channel i forget what it was called it dug down into the deffrence between genders

they took a test group of 50 men and 50 women of diffrent enthnicites and put them on a tread mill. and told them to just walk. in the first test there was little to no diffrence in stride and over all demenor between them, then in a separate test they told the same 50 men and women that they were being judged on thier attractivness to the opposite sex, and put them back on the treadmill men instantly flaired thier shoulders out, puffed up their chest and over exagrated their shoulder movement in attempt to make them selves look larger and stronger.

women stood up straight, shoulders back with longer with longer strides in both legs and arms. they also greatly exagurated the movement in thier hips and butt drawing attention to their butt hips and chest the 3 main areas that are a good single of health a fertility.

also they took 10 women to a night club, 5 were estimated to be at their most fertil in their cycle, they were all of about the same genral apperance all wearing almost the same exact thing. as to not give iether woman an edge over the other. they found that out of those 10 the women that were at the hieght of their fertility were approched 5 times as often by men attempting to date them or have a one night stand.

the thing that causes this is they took these women before hand and studied thier voices all threw a month and found that all 10 of them. when they were their mostfertial their voices went 2 octaves higher than they did all threw the month and men are by evolution designed to pic up on this small change.

i could go on and on it was a 3 hour show and filled to the brim with very insight full things about the diffrences. i mean the real diffrences that most are not even aware of between men and women

we are creatures of evolution our cultures or religions may constrain or direct how we act but if you cast those aside and look at how men and women act on a basic instinct level the diffrence is miles apart

Sakura

[Guest Joanna Phipps]

The main stream confusion about sex and gender is the fault of the mass media; for decades they have used sex and gender interchangeably when in fact they do not describe the same thing. Remember sex is between your legs and gender between your ears; gender is how the brain sees us relative to constructs of its own. It seems like some may be backed up by biology given some of the brain studies and other studies that have been done.