vanessa guzman

    Reading the 2 articles makes it clear how gender stereotypes affect so many more things than we think, and women typically always get the short end of the stick. When reading Rachel’s story it was upsetting to see how many medical professionals easily dismissed her symptoms and downright ignored her. When they told her to wait her turn and said “Women cry- what can you do?” you can tell that this is the way they probably treat all women; the nurses and doctors get so many patients that after a certain point they just stop caring about the patients and their symptoms. The fact that women have always been painted as emotional and hysterical also plays a big part in this because if a man acted the way Rachel did he would’ve gotten treatment so much faster. Most men may be unaware or unbothered by the serious medical problems women can face, but male medical professionals have the obligation to be more aware and in tune with their patients and their health so its upsetting how the doctor didn’t even bother to actually examen Rachel. Also, I would expect a little more from female medical professionals because I’m sure they are aware of the way society tends to look at women as overdramatic even when they’re not, I would hope that female medical professionals didn’t also paint their female patients as over dramatic and emotional. Rachel was really lucky that she was with someone who knew she really needed help and kept pestering the doctor to look at her results. In the end the worst things come down to the fact that Rachel was ignored even though she clearly showed she was in a lot of pain, it’s sad how Rachel gets nightmares and that one of the things she least wanted was to be overdramatic, but that the people meant to help her when she was sick made her feel as though she was being dramatic.           

    Looking back at the history of African American women and birth control  makes it clear that access to forms of birth control and abortion have never been about women, but about what the men around them wanted. An African American woman’s access to birth control has mainly been determined by the power structure at the time, whether that be men wanting to maintain the power structure at the time or men wanting to change the power structure at the time. In the past, slave owners did not want African American women to know about birth control because they wanted them to have more children so that the slave owners could have more slaves and money. Later on, black men also did not want them to have abortions or use birth control so that they could have more children and increase the black population, and white men wanted to have them sterilized so that there would be less “undesirables”. Its upsetting that a woman’s right over her body is never about her, but about maintaining or changing a power structure around her. Men try to limit what a woman has access to so that they can keep control, they also seem to only view women as someone who can have children and ignore everything else.

     Men never pay much attention to a women’s access to birth control until they think it’s going affect them. As if what man wants is always to be prioritized over what a woman knows is best for her. In past history men have wanted women to have children for their own personal reasons and then just ignore the well being of the child and leave women alone to handle everything.

    Every now and then we are told, and expected to believe, that men and women are different based on biology and the inherent traits they possess. Psychology had for a long time justified differences between men and women as something that just was, something natural that made women inferior to men physically as well as mentally. Weisstein points out several instances in which psychologists, clinical psychologists, and biologists used the smallest and most basic pieces of evidence as the explanation to a women’s inferiority. One of the worst things being how they would only look towards evidence that supported their theories, but never at all the evidence that opposed it. She mentions how how psychologists only focused on what they believe was innate and never on other factors, like a person’s environment, which are just as (if not more) important. Weisstein goes on to mention how people will act how they think they should act, that is, how others expected them to act and how a situation requires they act. This also makes me think of stereotype threat, in which a person may perform worse in a situation in which their group is considered to be “inferior”; like how women will perform worse on a math test if they believe women are worse at math than men. They are related in the sense that we are never as free as we believe ourselves to be, there are underlying things within society that can make us act a certain way, without use even noticing.

    I am currently also taking a personality course, of course we haven’t gone in too deep, but their have been slight mentions of the differences between men and women, for example traits that seem stronger in women. There was one experiment mentioned was by Debbie Moskowitz (1993) related to women being friendlier than men, the experiment showed that women were only friendlier when interacting with other women, but when interacting with people of the opposite sex they were just as friendly as men (Larsen and Buss). It shows how differences in traits are not as straightforward and drastically different between the sexes as we believe. We have only grazed certain traits that seem stronger in one gender as opposed to the other gender, but not why that might be. For example when people mention that girls are more mature than boys, but fail to realize that it may be due to the fact that girls are expected to be quiet and “proper” and help out around the house since a younger age, as opposed to boys. We have also learned that traits seem to be more important only when the situation is ambiguous/ weak, because in many cases situation determines behavior. That fact does make me feel as though we have improved some in personality psychology.

    The fact that Weisstein has pointed out how some people will do the bare minimum to “prove” stereotypes (such as looking towards some primate behavior to explain human behavior) and how outcomes can be greatly influenced by what a researcher believes (ex. the rats performing better in the maze when the researchers believed they would perform better) both show how important it is that we don’t just simply accept all explanations that come from “evidence”. Data is data, but it can be manipulated to prove what a researcher wants it to prove. It is important that we don’t simply accept all explanations that only use “biological” evidence to explain men and women, but instead also look towards other possible explanations such as society and situations.

    David’s story was one of people making decisions for you without fully taking you into account. Sure most of the adults seemed to really want to help him, but in most cases they ended up making matters worse. I think the worst thing was that David’s life was made so horrible just because everyone wanted him to “fit it”. And even though John Money and Milton Diamond did try to help David/Brenda, it seemed like a guise because they both had some selfish, underlying reasons.

    Firstly, I don’t think it was fair for David’s parents to decide to raise him as a girl after his penis was burned and severed during the surgery. I understand that they felt it would be best if they found some way for him to fit in, but changing your child’s gender at a young age without their approval seems wrong. Maybe they felt that if they waited until David was old enough to make his own decisions it would be too late, but completely changing your child’s gender so that they can “fit” one gender didn’t seem right because I don't think David having a severed penis meant that he could no longer be a boy. Yes, if David had continued to live as a boy with a severed penis he might have felt different from everyone and gotten bullied, but they ended up creating a phallus for him when he went to see Milton Diamond, so why didn’t anyone suggest they just do that in the first place?

    Also Dr. Money made everything much more invasive than it had to be, with everything from showing Brenda sexually graphic pictures of vaginas to making her and her brother do mock coital exercises. On top of that, Dr. Money allowing others who were simply interested in or following the case to examine Brenda’s genitals must have also been extremely uncomfortable for her. Dr. Money allowing others to examine Brenda’s genitals, to me, is an example of how he was using her. He allowed others to examine her so that they could see it as proof that what he was doing was working, and that his theory that you can socialize anyone to be any gender was correct, even though he omitted things that disproved it, like Brenda not enjoying typical girl things. More than help Brenda, Dr. Money seemed to pressure her to fit his idea, like when he had people who were transexual try and convince that being a girl was better.

    Milton Diamond was more help for David because he helped David go back to being a boy. He did help by giving him the phallus and male hormone shots, but he did also continue to constantly observe David. Milton also used David to prove his theory that gender is all about nature and the chromosomes. I understand that situations like David’s can give more insight to sex and gender and its nature, but I think we often forget how invasive it is for the person being observed. New information is important, but so is that person’s comfort and privacy.

    This all also relates to  babies born intersex, and how adults chose for them to undergo surgery to make them normal, even though it can cause them to lack certain sexual functions and pleasure. Along with the fact that surgery leaves physical scars that are also not “normal”. We have becomed so obsessed with normalcy we cause more harm than good. Instead of looking for other solutions, both John Money and Milton Diamond suggest an intersex child must be raised either a boy or a girl. Money believes that without a phallus they must be raised a girl, while Diamond believes that they must be raised a boy if they have the Y chromosome. We always feel as though everyone must fit into the categories of being either a boy or a girl because that is what normal is.

    Everyone went along with the surgery and socialization to change David into Brenda so that he could fit in and be normal, but did they ever stop to think that making Brenda regularly go see Dr. Money and constantly have her life under observation was everything but normal for any child/teenager?