Chaos Queen

I’m sorry I can’t focus well, I’m sorry I get all scrambled when I talk, I’m sorry I get sad easily or for no reason, I’m sorry I can’t keep my room clean. I’m sorry if I embarrass you by crying in public, or if I annoy you when I talk about things that I’ve told you about twenty times already.

Valerie Hegarty

8 selfies 2k14

The idea of x and y chromosomes equaling male and female is as much a social construct as a scientific one. Science needed a way to categorize animals that could mate with one another and produce offspring, noticed a trend that most sperm producing animals had an xy and most egg producing animals had an xx, and thus these label.  However, their is a saying I learned in my first college bio class and that is, sex is biological, gender is social. We had that hammered into us class after class. Why? Because prescribing western/America/human understandings of gender to the sex of animals is not good science. These labels are not always applicable, especially since many animals posses multiple sex organs, can change their sex organs, or even reproduce asexually. Like many rules in science, the x/y binary is not absolute and the male/female binary is not all that applicable once you get outside of mammals.

Like most social animals we have our own ways of interacting with each other, like lions, hyenas, or bison, etc. That’s where gender comes in. Babies are assigned male or female at birth based on the look of their genitalia, not genetic testing. In essence, children are assigned their gender before they are old enough to understand it. Not every human being fits comfortably into this equation. Scientist believe that about 1 in every 500 people born is intersex. You are also under the assumption that “females” cannot/do not grow body or facial hair which actual has little basis in scientific fact, it is a social concept, and one that is constantly evolving.

Equating x and y chromosomes to female and male genders is also very eurocentric. Many cultures all over the world have multiple gender categories that do not fit the xy model. That does not make these genders any less valid because the very concept of gender is a social one and it changes across cultures as well as across time periods. There is also significant psychological proof that imposing binary gender roles on young children is damaging for children who do not fit comfortably into these. And this is all without even taking chromosomes into the equation. Why? Because It is  impossible to look at another human being and instantly know what their dna says about them. It also completely ignores the psychological, sociological, and historical context of gender and equates it to a simple principle we used to understand how animals breed.

the candle gives a devil looking shadow 

Salmon and Asparagus in Foil