Bugs, Sex, and Gender.

I really do think as humans it is our instinct to categorize things. Scientists long for this methodology. They find a new bug in the forest, get all excited, put it in a kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, species. Hooray. Science minds seek order. As a child you are taught (and observe) how everything is classified-race, religion, gender...bugs! But it is not until you grow older that you begin to look not at what is classified, but how it is and what that Actually means. There exists such a large societal impact by how we view things. Just look at gender. Anne Fausto-Sterling (from now referred to as AFS). She sought to literally "pick apart" what we as children thought to be a universal truth--that there are only boys or girls. For her this distinction just doesnt cut it. "Sex" sometimes cannot be defined so easily (like Patino) and gender is in itself so complex that one could write volumes on their own.

So then, how does decartes inhabit her? As she describes, gender has been defined as "social forces that mold behavior." At first, I was like what? But then if you consider that societal structures are in fact what makes one think, act like and accept who they are (man/woman, something else) you see that this may full well be true. And, she posits that there are more than the two sexes. Again, these are her opinions--but where does it stop? Someone not too interested in the subjuct might say that there are only men and woman and those that fall in between are simply not normal or 'diseased.' Or you could just go crazy and say that there exists as many as sex/gender categories as there are people in the world. Yay, now everybody is special. I'm an advocate for equality, but lets face it--people are different. We look at men and women differently and therefore have to treat them differently. Is this unfair in some instances? Probably. But I often fail to see how this could be approached differently. Adding more categories will simply set up a sort of gradient of unfairness as opposed to the simple "unfair for women" or "unfair for men system" we have now. You want to be unbamboozled? Too bad. I don't mean to be negative. But any societal construct has the inate ability to discriminate and isolate. I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate our current nomenclature system for sex/gender and how it impacts those 'constrained' by it, we definitely should. But any action we may want to take must take place within the system we currently have.