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rmI was going to chuck this into sundries, but then some of you might miss it, and it needs to be talked about.
Over at Cornell we have a case of gender and body policing, unnecessary surgery, and stimulating 6-year-old girls with vibrators in the name of dodgy science.
Really helps to confirm my suspicion that the only good girl is one who knows how to disappear, doesn't it? And if she can't figure out the skill of it, don't worry, someone will hold her down and do it for her.
I won't ask you what this fear of big clits is, since we can all figure it out, but did you know that women with larger clitorises are also more likely to identify as gay?
Yup, that's right, one of the many HORRIFYING implications here is all about trying to erase queerness, erase the existence of people like me (and let's note the particularities of this particular act of hate, since there is also a correlation between larger penises and men being gay, but no one is cutting into these suspect little boys).
Things that will never make any queer woman less queer: hair removal, makeup, self-hatred, dresses, boyfriends, surgery, "therapy." My mother used to buy me electric razors, over and over.
All of this speaks with terrible eloquence to the suspicion I often harbour that the most inherently queer thing about me is my unwillingness to disappear.
If you don't get how all of this connects, you should probably go read Valerie's Letter again and again and again until you do.
An inch.
One inch.
Get it?
Over at Cornell we have a case of gender and body policing, unnecessary surgery, and stimulating 6-year-old girls with vibrators in the name of dodgy science.
Really helps to confirm my suspicion that the only good girl is one who knows how to disappear, doesn't it? And if she can't figure out the skill of it, don't worry, someone will hold her down and do it for her.
I won't ask you what this fear of big clits is, since we can all figure it out, but did you know that women with larger clitorises are also more likely to identify as gay?
Yup, that's right, one of the many HORRIFYING implications here is all about trying to erase queerness, erase the existence of people like me (and let's note the particularities of this particular act of hate, since there is also a correlation between larger penises and men being gay, but no one is cutting into these suspect little boys).
Things that will never make any queer woman less queer: hair removal, makeup, self-hatred, dresses, boyfriends, surgery, "therapy." My mother used to buy me electric razors, over and over.
All of this speaks with terrible eloquence to the suspicion I often harbour that the most inherently queer thing about me is my unwillingness to disappear.
If you don't get how all of this connects, you should probably go read Valerie's Letter again and again and again until you do.
An inch.
One inch.
Get it?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 10:33 am (UTC)Children with ambiguous genitalia are routinely operated on, and as other commenters have said, parents are under tremendous pressure to "normalize" their infants' genitals, with the implication that if they don't, they're bad parents and the child will suffer. Surgical intervention remains the standard of care, unfortunately.
I have a dear friend who was born intersex and also surgically "corrected" to be raised as a boy. She grew up always feeling like a girl, now lives as a woman, but still has pain and medical problems due to the doctors' "help", not to mention a substantial amount of trauma from being repeatedly subjected to exams and surgeries as a child without anyone explaining what had happened to her body until adulthood.
This, among many other reasons, is why we have to move beyond our current concepts of gender.