#ted_doodle

My notes for Susannah's Ted Talk on intersex!! It doesn't make much sense, but this is how my sketches always go loll. I was very happy having the opportunity to sketch while listening, as it is something that I LOVE. There were multiple similarities between this Ted Talk and Malatino's, but what I found they both had a focus on was the complete erasure of intersex as an identity. For colonialism to really work, there has to be a distinct different between the quote-unquote two sexes, and this leads to this erasure, as a hold of power. This reminded me of what Temko said about the change of natural sex organs in infancy, to create the more quote-unquote (my quotation mark key is not working) normal looking genitilia we want, and then defining the chilld as one or the other gender. 

In her TEDTalk, Suzannah Temko mentions colonialism and how it has affected the Intersex community. Malatinto also talks about how Eurocentric ideas have largely (and negatively) impacted the way we view gender, sex, and genatalia. Specifically, that “sexual dimorphism” (the condition where the two sexes of the same species exhibit different characteristics beyond differences in their sexual organs, according to Wikipedia) was used to further colonialist ideals and actions. Cisnormativity has been harming trans and intersex people for centuries.

When watching Susannah Temko's TED talk I recorded these doodles. When listening to Temko I felt their emotions come out as they spoke which told me to begin with how passionately they feel and needed to tell me of their experience being Intersex. I feel I've learned that being Intersex for some or most people can mean that they are abused medically or not, on a physical, mental/emotional level. An important question Temko raised that stuck with me was how I would feel having been born Intersex and my parents had given me surgery to put me in one of the binary boxes as they've stated. I would feel hurt mostly among other emotions. I think it's important we read literature like Malentino's Intersexuality and Coloniality to understand how these all fall into place of sex being a binary system and perhaps what we can do to change it to better fit and understand everyone's identity.

I really admired Susannah Temko’s TED Talk because it gave all of us an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of an intersex person. Furthermore, Malatino’s essay was very insightful, too, because it gave us a really complex history of how the idea of a gender binary was really shoved down everyone’s throats as well as the custom to reject anyone who didn’t conform to this way of thinking. Just thinking about the people who were rejected because they were “different” is so heartbreaking because, unfortunately, we still continue to see this in our current culture.

I found Susannah Temko’s TED talk to be very interesting. I am familiar with intersex, but never knew it involved more than sexual organs, that it includes other factors of sexual characteristics like hormones and chromosomes. I think Temko’s talk and Malatino’s essay both clearly show why the binary system that exists is a farce. What if intersex is the “true” sex? The world’s entire binary system would need to come crashing down.