Dualisms: Male vs Females

Anne Fausto-Sterling discusses the dueling dualisms between makes and females. She starts with Patino failing the sex test for the Spanish Olympic team because she had an Y chromosome so they considered her not a women. She eventually fought the ruling because her body never developed the male characteristics. If it were up to Pierre de Coubertin she wouldn't compete at all because "women's sports are all against the law of nature" (2-3). Obviously that is a very sexist comment because we have many equal sporting teams for women and men today. Examiners said testing still must be done, but they wanted women to parade around naked to see the physical evidence that they were "actually women". Women found this degrading just to prove their femininity. The line that "boys perform better then girls because of their gender" is outdated and incorrect and as proof, three women beat a man in an Olympic event of the high jump.

In the 1970s women achieved "full economic and social equality once gender inequality was addressed in the social sphere has faded in the face of a seemingly recalcitrant inequality" (4). I don't think equality was ever achieved in these aspects. President Bush changed then title 9 rule so that it made it easier for colleges to avoid the equal scholarship rule and this was in 2005. Some questions that Sterling was asking can be answered in a couple different ways. She asks: why we surgically remove one sex organ if a person is born with two? She gives the answer of maintaining gender divisions. I believe that, that is one answer but what about the emotional aspect? Deciding what gender you want to be, because of societal reasons of being different. An example, would be in Grey's Anatomy where a 15 year old girl found out she had testies inside her, so she could potentially be a male if she wanted. She always felt out of place and different so she wanted to try to be a boy. How does that effect her friendships with other, or her family? It can be emotionally tasking when your different. So when doctors catch it early enough, I can't see it being all bad that they remove one or the other in the sake of the emotional reasoning.

Sterling also talks about the rating scale and the complexity of the variables that deal with sexuality. One person might not be fully heterosexual or full homosexual, there are different in between stages and degrees. This is not uncommon, even back in the Greek and Middle Ages there were always different forms of sexuality, just sometimes society of the different periods deal with them differently. Sterling talks about the two general patterns of essentialism and constructionism and the historical record of each. To "declare oneself "gay" in the United States is to adopt an identity and join a social and sometimes political movement" (18). I don't know if this is necessarily true because people hide that their gay so they wouldn't be in the political movement if people didn't know about it. The real dualism comes along when you are comparing sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed. There is also the theory of mind over body which many people use in sports. Your not tired, it doesn't hurt, you can play through the pain. Usually you can't but there are times when you can. If you tell your body something doesn't and get yourself to truly believe that, then it won't. In most "public and scientific discussions, sex and nature are thought to be real, while gender and culture are seen as constructed" (27).