Women Studies Gender Difference

When a baby is born, people try to define that baby by a specific gender, whether it is a boy or a girl. When a person tries to apply for his or her identification card, there are only two options for genders, male or female. In many Western societies, people tend to have an expectation about individual's biological sex to be determined with a fixed gendered behavior, either male or female. At this point, however, we deeply have to think that how we can determine gender and sex. Until now, we only defined gender and sex only depends on biological factor. But, there are more than male and female, such as intersexes. According to Fausto-Sterling, "We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender- not science- can define our sex. Furthermore, our belief about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place" (Fausto-Sterling, 7).

Then, some might ask what gender is and what sex is. Many definitions can be found from various prospective; however, according to Women Studies' lectures, Sex is "socially constructed categories based on culturally accepted biological criteria" (Ferber et. al. 2009: 557). Gender is "socially constructed categories dividing people into groups, such as women and men" (Ferber et. al. 2009:555). Therefore, it is obvious to say that gender is different from sex differences because sex differences only "attributable to biological difference between males and females" while gender is based on social construction. People often think sex and gender identically. Some stereotypes about men and women can testify this fact, such as men are physically stronger than women and that women are better at multi-tasking than men. Those stereotypes were falsified scientifically. In the lecture, we have learned that are stronger than women because "male bodies have more muscle mass, but male bodies are bigger on average than female bodies" (Keys, Jan.4,2011). Moreover, women seemed to be good at multi-tasking because in 1906, "R Bean identified the Corpus Collosum is bigger and stronger in women. [However, there was another theory showing that] in young, healthy adults, there is no difference in Corpus Collosum, and only appears to be [there is] a correlation between its size" (Keys, Jan.6,2011). People define whether one person is male or female by looking at his or her socially-constructed outlooks by stereotypes that were described above.

On the other hand, some people got hurt and disadvantaged because of these stereotypes. They are the people who are intersexual. From the lecture, intersex people are children who were born with ambiguous genitalia, sexual organs, or sex chromosomes." Unlike what we have known typically, from the film we saw in the lecture, all embryos begin with same basic factor, which means we start out the same way. As they get developed in their mothers' womb, there are some possibilities of female babies who have masculine hormones, who would become male-like babies, and male babies who had not developed-penis, who would become female-like babies. Since we start out with all same basic factors, it is not rare to have intersex babies in our societies. However, we still expect According to Sharon Preves' article, Intersex Narrative, she said, "Bodies that are considered normal are not inherently that way. They are, rather, classified as aberrant or customary by social agreement."(33). As we have seen in the film, Is it a boy or a girl, there were some people who were born as intersexual. They told us that they had to go through the surgery when they were still babies to remove whatever does not fit into their chromosomes - either small penis or big clitoris. Doctors told their parents that they needed surgery and highly recommended to be done when they cannot recognize their differences. When decision was made by parents and doctors, intersex babies did not have any choice to make decision even though it was their lives that they had to live on. In Preves' article, it

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