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Sex is actually fun, part deux
Third in a series
Because our culture is so obsessed with sexual relations — “sex” for short — we need to discuss a number of aspects beyond the zoological. Like the difference between sex and gender and the link to sex(ual relations). When you and I were born, the midwife or doctor took a look at our genitals and noted whether we were boy or girl. Very occasionally, they couldn’t tell. If so, physicians probably tried to “remedy” such “hermaphrodites” by surgical means or at least advising the parents to choose to raise the child as a boy or girl.[1]
The reason I raise the question of intersex people (the term they prefer) is because of the fact that they exist (and the majority do not get diagnosed until after puberty). In other words, all of us are our bodies to begin with. And for a long time, it was thought that such people need to conform to being either a boy or a girl. This is not a medical issue, but a cultural one: it is the culture you grow up in that determines what male and female mean. All human beings are born incarnate, that is, with a body. We have no choice about that, of course. Many of us, I suppose, would have rather had a different model, but we have to play the hand we are dealt.
