This week’s reading was one that I found very thought-provoking and made me self-reflect on what I thought of as true and what values are in relation to others and the world. While I did not self-reflecting a part of the reading that I had trouble understanding is at the bottom of page 20 to the top of page 2. When looking at truths and what can be claimed as a personal truth or as Mitchell says “my truth” he brings up an example of what can’t be true and the limits truth has. In one of these examples, he states that one can not choose to be a gender that they were not born as, and even after transitioning it is still not true that they are the gender that they identify as because at a genetic level he claims that there is no such thing as transgender. I found myself questioning this extensively because I do know transgender people and to say that they do not exist I find a very problematic and frankly transphobic comment. I understand that Mitchell is looking at this on a genetic level but gender and sex are two different things, and this might be a very new concept that has not caught on completely, but gender is a social construct and it is fluid and a spectrum. Sex is what is assigned as birth and it is a binary unless someone is intersex. I also found it interesting that he paired that comment with the idea of being transracial. I understand why he might try to compare the two to prove a point but they are drastically different. Gender is an internal sense of self, race is not. One can not inherit gender, unlike race. Race is also not just physical differences but it holds very strong social connotations like a culture where gender has no culture.
Categories
One reply on “Week 11”
I think it is important to realize what Mitchell is aiming to reveal here. He is simply stating there was a change in mindset after a certain point in history, in which identity politics began to take hold in society. People now refer to themselves with the language of “I identify as…”. He writes that there is an “inevitable truth” that one must confront and seek to change in order to change their gender. Only a few years ago those words “sex” and “gender” were interchangeable and no one batted an eye. However, now we have entered an age in which those truths that one is born with are easily fixable to express what the brain believes. This goes back to a comment I made on a someone else’s post. This idea of ingrained truths that are undeniable to one person, that person who believes it is their truth. These “truths” that people believe are true for them are undeniably true for them. One could try to tell them they are wrong until they are blue in the face but it would do no good. People that undergo sex changes truly believe that they are the wrong sex and need to change in order to fit their mental state at the time. In my opinion, it is an immoral phenomenon that is taking place within our society. We discussed the cannibal example in class in which the one man who willingly agreed to be cannibalized by the other man and the German government needed to intervene on the basis of “moral incongruity” and the man who cannibalized the other was put in prison. Why then are the same standards not held for gender reassignment surgeries? How is that somehow held to a different standard?