Rebecca Jordan-Young's Sexual Brains And Body Politics

When a baby is born, its body determines its gender. Doctors assign each infant to a category based on genitalia, and when a child does not cleanly fit into one of two boxes—male or female—confusion ensues. What color do I paint the nursery? Should I buy my child trucks or dolls? These questions may be the silly ones, but until quite recently, gender and sex have been nearly inseparable in the minds of the majority. Theories about specific “markers” in the physical attributes of a certain gender are an essential part of why this belief has been so strongly championed. Rebecca Jordan-Young’s excerpt titled “Sexual Brains and Body Politics,” as well as Joan W. Scott’s essay Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, argue that though anatomy and biology are factors that can be related to gender identity, the use of physical attributes to assign gender is an arbitrary process that excludes the experiences and identities of many people. “The idea that men and women ‘naturally’ think and act differently because they have specifically male or female brains is not new,” Jordan-Young begins her argument (7). According to her, the prevailing concept in science is that the sex hormones that a child is exposed to at a young age cause physical changes in its brain (5). The hormones restructure the brain, causing changes that are directly linked to the child’s sex. From infant to adolescent to octogenarian, this theory posits that men and women have tangibly different brains, and Jordan-Young takes it upon herself to investigate it further. If the theory of brain organization is true, what does it mean? Tangible differences in the brains of men and women would mean that gender could be determined physically. If gender is determined physically, not psychologically, then gender as a category is fixed, not fluid. This is not only harmful to the subjective experience and relationship a person has with their identity, but also to the identities of all those who do not fit cleanly into the boxes marked “male” or “female”: those who are intersex or …show more content…
She continues her argument, “[The categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’] have no ultimate, transcendent meaning” (1074). There is no greater importance to the terms we use to categorize people than simply the efficiency with which they allow us to understand our society and its functions. As such, people are essentially placed into these categories arbitrarily. Because physical differences are all we have access to when a child is born, gender assignment is based on anatomy or hormone production and not on psychological or emotional …show more content…
When talking about how intersex individuals fit into the theory’s model, she concludes, “[…] gender causes us to perceive the natural world (the body) in a particular way, and thereby to impose upon it the dichotomous category ‘sex.’ Sex, then, is no longer the raw material from which culture produces gender. Instead, sex is in some important sense an effect of gender” (17). When thinking about transgender individuals, then, this would mean that from their gender identities comes their sex. There is still a tension here, however, because physical attributes like genitalia and hormone production are evident before conscious thought. How could one’s gender identity develop before their sex organs do? Even if that were the case, how could we tell what a child’s gender identity was before we begin to enculturate them based on their physical