Quote:
Originally Posted by Demimonde
However, Jhally does discuss the trans community in order to exhibit that despite societal pressures and policing on gender roles, they as outliers show that something else is going on and that gender CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be applied from the outside, even though those pressures exist.
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Huh?
It seems to me that he cites to them as evidence that gender identity does not exist in and of itself, and that you will learn whatever gender role you are assigned, or perhaps choose.
Again:
There are some interesting cases where individuals born as one sex have been assigned to the “wrong” gender category. That is, someone born with male physical characteristics but assigned to the female gender, and they then grow up as that gender, despite the physical sexual origin.
This seems to strongly indicate that gender is an assigned thing, and that it is "interesting" when people are assigned an unexpected gender. I would not call "more than half of these people end up dead prematurely" so much "interesting" as "devastating". This paragraph carries the connotation that such experiments are successful, not disasterous.
Later:
It is starting to break down a little as transsexual and transgender people have challenged this binary distinction and insisted upon having a legitimate place in the culture – not on the margins but at the center of the society. And their example shows us that the two sex/two gender distinction is a socially created one – not natural.
While some trans people clearly fall outside the obvious two cases, the bulk of them identify very strongly as one specific gender, because "male" and "female" are real categories for gender, just as they are for sex.
The existence of intersex people does not mean that there is no such thing as male or female sex, and the existence of intergender people does not mean that there is no such thing as male or female gender.