(no subject)
On the intersex debate.
In my reflex opinion there are two problems inherent to trying to lobby in the intersex debate. Firstly the people who are intersex often don’t make very good advocates; it undermines the very thing they’re striving to achieve - the recognition that we’re all just people and not determined by the markers of our gender - so to come out and say, ‘I’m an intersex’ will have people thinking, gosh, I wonder what they look like without any clothes on, and before you’ve even argued a point you’ve become the individual as exhibit. Besides, just because you’re intersex doesn’t inherently make you political, in fact it probably makes you a stronger supporter of the privacy movement; the politicising of gender happens as a choice and a public choice at that. And, flowing from that idea, if you were intersex wouldn’t you consider it discursively worse to have your face blacked out and have your voice distorted on A Current Affair than to appear as a curio because effectively that says, ‘I’m ashamed, don’t look at me’. But if you’re not intersex, and you’re an advocate in the intersex movement aren’t you immediately considered a sham? Aren’t you reduced to having to talk about ‘my intersex friends, Charlie, Alex and Toni’? And what does that say about you - don’t people think ah, a cause-junkie or ah, sexual abuse as a child or ah, a bi-sexual relationship in their teens. Subsequently, who can talk for the intersex movement? Is it just the word, the text on paper? I think Winterson and Eugenides would say yes. Or maybe it’s the beautiful androgen-insensitive people would can talk for the intersex movement, porcelain and tall; because that glamorises the intersex movement - that turns the intersex from abject to object.
Secondly, and these are just ideas, how do you go about asserting gender as a slippery concept able to shift outside the realms of biological essentialism and not offend the feminist movement? Because if gender is slippery and Foucault was right then the feminists construct the feminine as disadvantaged in order to give the movement a raison-de-tre, that being the liberation of the female. And how does that work with the glass-ceiling, the sticky-feet syndrome that still happens? The point being of course, that the intersex movement happens in the same sphere of gender politics of feminism and if they fight each other no one will hear either voice over the cacophony.
If you are unfairly dismissed because you are an intersex you can’t appeal it because the law says gender discrimination happens only against a woman or a man. That at least needs to be changed.
You are dangerous if you are an intersex. You are powerless and powerful at the same time. It must be frightening at first.