I had a few problems with the articles for this week, specifically The Five Sexes, Revisited by Anne Fausto-Starling and X: A Fabulous Child's Story.
Anne Fausto-Starling did a good job talking about intersex people and some of the problems they face; but in the one paragraph she devoted to transgender individuals she made it painfully obvious that she has never talked to many trans* people about the problems they face. The first problem with this paragraph is the use of the word "transgendered" this word is grammatically incorrect. By adding the "ed" to transdender Fausto-Starling is implying that those who are transgender have not always been transgender. This makes it seem like trans* individuals wake up one day feeling completely different in their gender then they had the day before. The paragraphy goes from bad to worse as Fausto-Starling attempts to give an example of a transgender person. Fausto-Starling uses an example of Jane, and doesn't bother to touch on the problems being trans* may have caused her. Instead she uses the example to talk about Jane’s genitals and sex life. Fausto-Starling writes, “Jane takes hormones to feminize herself, but they have not yet interfered with her ability to engage in intercourse as a man”. There are multiple problems with this sentence the first being that Jane is a woman married to another woman, she does not engage in intercourse as a man. She does however engage intercourse as a woman, as that is what she is. The other major problem with Fausto-Starlings statement is the fact that she has no need to go in to Jane’s sex life. She could have talked about Jane’s life experiences or other difficulties trans* individuals face on a day to day biases, but instead she feels the need to tell her readers how Jane has sex with her wife. I for one will never understand why straight people seem to be so obsessed with how queer people have sex. Fausto-Starling has obviously been had a lot of experience with intersex individuals and the problems they face in a binary society, but she seems to have never talked to a trans* person about how being trans* has affected their lives.
The problem I had with X: A Fabulous Child’s Story is very similar to the first problem I had with The Five Sexes. The story uses “it” to refer to a child with no gender, this is not only grammatically incorrect but has very problematic implications. “It” is not a pronoun and cannot be used as one; we use “it” to refer to object and animals, which are not self-aware and not classified as people. By referring to this child as “it” the author is both objectifying and dehumanizing them. This is completely unexcitable to do to a person, especially a child. If you don’t know someone’s gender there are plenty of gender neutral pronouns available to choose from, including but not limited to, them and their, and ze and zim. If the author Lois Gould just used the proper pronouns this would have been a very good article, as it is I found myself cringing through most of it.

-Heather