« Screen time | Main | Fears divided, not conquered »
Check the box
October 28, 2004
I spent this afternoon at a college health fair as a representative of the AIDS service org I volunteer for. It was your pretty basic scenario, with young men strutting up and taking the large condoms, while the young women picked up the regular size.
I got a really interesting question from a woman who identified herself as a counselor with the school’s mental health services. She said that they were working on an intake form for students who want to see a mental health professional, and were wondering how to pose the question of the student’s gender. She said that the current form has check boxes: “Gender: Male _Female” but that they’ve been criticized for not being inclusive enough, so they were thinking of adding a third checkbox: __transgender.
We started off by talking about the choice of using the word “gender” and making it binary as opposed to using the word “sex” for binary bits. And yes, I know that this binary is questionable, but frequently when an intersex baby is born, someone (not the baby) chooses for the baby to be one or the other.
What I ended up suggesting is the follows: Sex: Male _Female Gender identity: __
I’m sure there are problems with this, but my thinking is that people who think in binary terms will be content to ignore the open-ended gender identity question, and people who are genderqueer will be delighted to fill in gender identity and take or leave sex. And then everyone will live happily ever after.
Posted by Dacia at October 28, 2004 10:39 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wakingvixen.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/179
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Check the box:
» hardcore hentai from Jane
pregnant pussy Public Upskirt pregnant girls free hard... [Read More]
Tracked on April 21, 2006 04:53 AM
» Porn Stars from Jane
hustler mowers free voyeur free hardcore [Read More]
Tracked on April 25, 2006 04:49 PM
