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my mother taught me to crochet when i was young. she was left handed, so she taught me how in the bathroom mirror so her hands would be in the right position.
she learned to crochet from her grandmother, who was right handed. her grandma was the one that originally used the bathroom mirror to teach her granddaughter properly.
i find something poetic about that. here in this bathroom mirror, through generations, we adapt to our young who have a different way of learning and interacting with the world
Amazing TED talk on the way the strict gender binary harms us, by XY intersex woman Emily Quinn
Here’s an extract of her talk:
“I have a vagina. Just thought you should know. Just thought you should know. I look like a woman. I’m dressed like one, I guess. The thing is, I also have balls….I’m not male or female. I’m intersex.
“Most people assume that you’re biologically either a man or a woman, but it’s actually a lot more complex than that. There are so many ways somebody could be intersex.
In my case, it means I was born with XY chromosomes, which you probably know as male chromosomes. And I was born with a vagina and balls inside my body. I don’t respond to testosterone, so during puberty, I grew breasts… I don’t actually have a uterus – I was born without one, so I don’t menstruate, I can’t have biological children…
“We put people in boxes based on their genitalia. Before a baby’s even born, we ask whether it’s a boy or a girl, as if it actually matters; as if you’re going to be less excited about having a baby if it doesn’t have the genitals you wanted; as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person.
Are they kind, generous, funny? Smart? Who do they want to be when they grow up? Genitals don’t actually tell you anything. Yet, we define ourselves by them. In this society, we love putting people into boxes and labeling each other…
“But there’s one really big problem: biological sex is not black or white. It’s on a spectrum. Besides your genitalia, you also have your chromosomes, your gonads, like ovaries or testicles. You have your internal sex organs, your hormone production, your hormone response and your secondary sex characteristics, like breast development, body hair, etc.
Those seven areas of biological sex all have so much variation, yet we only get two options: male or female. Which is kind of absurd to me, because I can’t think of a single other human trait that there’s only two options for: skin color, hair, height, eyes…”
Listen to whole talk here. Believe me, it is worth your time!
Saying sex isn’t binary because some people are born intersex is like saying humans have tails or extra fingers because some people are born like that…
The definition of a binary is that only two options exist. Therefore, the existence of intersex people means sex cannot be a binary by definition. It can have a bimodal distribution- and indeed, it does- but it cannot be truly binary.
Humans can indeed have tails and extra fingers, in the same way that humans can be intersex. If you said ‘humans always only have five fingers on each hand’, you’d be wrong. If you said ‘humans can only be 100% ‘male’ or 100% ‘female’’- i.e. that sex is binary- you’d be equally wrong.
I’d like to also take this opportunity to remind people that there are more people with intersex conditions in the world than there are natural redheads or people with natural ambidexterity, and yet we always talk about how intersex people are statistically unimportant, a fluke, a mutation, because they’re such a small percentage while redheads are included in surveys and accepted as a possibility in almost all aspects, and ambidexterity is recognized as an existing middle state in what could very easily be reduced to a (mistaken) binary as well. Hmmmmm.
This has become one of my most popular blog posts ever, with more than 47,000 likes and reblogs. The main reason is likely because Emily Quinn gives this kind of diversity an unavoidable human face.
I would like to add one more thing: What those who are committed to the strict binary forget is that the variation found in intersex people continue into the world of non-intersex people.
Take genitals: Some intersex people have what people call “ambiguous” genitals. But the genitals of non-intersex people also vary a lot in shape and sizes.
Some scientists argue that there are as many as nine different types of vulvas. The average penis size is between 13cm and 18cm (5in to 7in). But a large number of men have penises that are not of average size, from less than 4cm to more than 26cm long. Some have identified as many as seven different penis types.
You cannot draw a clear line between the normal and the abnormal, when it comes to human genitalia.
Averages are precisely that: averages. Nature is ruled by diversity, not averages.
[Image Description: photograph of a smiling Emily Quinn, who has pale skin, shoulder-length dark hair, and blue eyes. End I.D.]
This legitimately needs to be in future literature textbooks to capture the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Here's all the pride worms so far!!
wizardshark