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Intersexuals and Transgender - Online Essay

Intersexuals and Transgender

A 15-year-old girl is incarcerated in a Chicago mental hospital in 1981 and kept there for three years because she won't wear a dress. A Winn-Dixie truck driver is fired from a job he held for twenty years when his boss learns that he wears women's clothes at home. A small-time hustler in Falls City, Nebraska, is raped and then murdered when he's discovered to be physically female. A woman bleeds to death after a Washington, DC, hit-and-run accident when, after finding male genitals under her clothes, paramedics stand by laughing.

M or F? For most of us that's a simple question, decided while we were in utero. Checking off that box--at the doctor's, on the census, on a driver's ...

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than either/or. The slash between M/F cuts painfully through these lives.

And so they've started to organize. Brought together by the Internet, inspired by the successes of the gay rights movement, and with national sympathy gained from the movie Boys Don't Cry, intersex and transgender activists are starting to get a hearing in organizations ranging from college campuses to city councils, from lesbian and gay rights groups to pediatric conferences. And, like the feminist and gay rights movements before them, the new sex-and-gender activists may force us to rethink, in life and in law, how we define and interpret the basics of sex.

A first clue to how zealously the M/F border is guarded--to how sex is literally constructed--comes at birth. One in 2,000 infants is born with genitalia ambiguous enough to make doctors hem and haw when parents ask that first question: boy or girl? Since the late 1950s/early 1960s, standard medical procedure has been to lie and obfuscate. Rather ...

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Intersexuals and Transgender. (2015, March 5). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Intersexuals-and-Transgender/104651

"Intersexuals and Transgender." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 5 Mar. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Intersexuals-and-Transgender/104651>

"Intersexuals and Transgender." Essayworld.com. March 5, 2015. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Intersexuals-and-Transgender/104651.

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 3/5/2015 05:13:15 PM
Submitted By: xdezuy
Category: Social Issues
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 408
Pages: 2

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