Me: *really likes a character* Tumblr: OMG this character is my PERFECT BABY and LITERAL CHILD and i will PROTECT THIS PERFECT CINNAMON BUN until the DAY THAT i DIE and they are MY character and my HEADCANONS for THIS CHARACTER are LITERALLY CANON and if YOU don’t agree with that then YOU ARE SHIT Me: *slowly starts hating character*
Lorber, Judith. 1993. Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology. Gender and Society 7(4), 568-581. (which is citing the following source) Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Until the eighteenth century, Western philosophers and scientists thought that there was one sex and that women’s internal genitalia were the inverse of men’s external genitalia: the womb and vagina were the penis and scrotum turned inside out (Laqueur 1990). Current Western thinking sees women and men as so different physically as to sometimes seem two species. The bodies, which have been mapped inside and out for hundreds of years, have not changed. What has changed are the justifications for gender inequality.
When the social position of all human beings was believed to be set by natural law or was considered God-given, biology was irrelevant; women and men of different classes all had their assigned places. When scientists began to question the divine basis of social order and replaced faith with empirical knowledge, what they saw was that women were very different from men in that they had wombs and menstruated. Such anatomical differences destined them for an entirely different social life from men.
In actuality, the basic bodily material is the same for females and males, and except for procreative hormones and organs, female and male human beings have similar bodies (Naftolin and Butz 1981). Furthermore, as has been known since the middle of the nineteenth century, male and female genitalia develop from the same fetal tissue, and so infants can be born with ambiguous genitalia (Money and Ehrhardt 1972). When they are, biology is used quite arbitrarily in sex assignment.Suzanne Kessler (1990) interviewed six medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality and found that whether an infant with XY chromosomes and anomalous genitalia was categorized as a boy or a girl depended on the size of the penis-if a penis was very small, the child was categorized as a girl, and sex-change surgery was used to make an artificial vagina. In the late nineteenth century, the presence or absence of ovaries was the determining criterion of gender assignment for hermaphrodites because a woman who could not procreate was not a complete woman (Kessler 1990, 20).
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