ZF
December 1st, 2020
The Social, The Biological, and Everything Inbetween
Awareness of gender identity and what this means towards the long-accepted idea of a gender binary is becoming more commonplace. However, the legitimacy of people’s feelings of gender dysphoria are being dismissed in the name of “science.” In his essay regarding gender dysphoria in children, Felipe Vizcarrondo states “Gender is not a biological term, it is not found within the person’s being … there is no rigorous scientific evidence for this.” I will argue that his ignorance in asserting that there is no scientific evidence that gender is not found within a person’s being is hypocritical, given that he directs us towards multiple implications of scientific evidence. I will focus on three points that Vizcarrondo recognizes—that doctors, psychologists, and even lawmakers are recognizing that gender is within a person’s being, that he uses sex and gender as if they are interchangable words, and the more complex reasons why many transgender individuals have such high suicide rate.
Within the first paragraph of his essay, Vizcarrondo gives his stance that gender identity has become American’s government-sponsored religion. He says “In the last 5 years, gender ideology has overtaken every major public institution in our society from mass and social media, to public and private education from preschool forward, to professional medicine and psychiatry, and increasingly, law.” He is correct that awareness of gender identity is becoming greater, but he is incorrect when using this in his essay to somehow say that gender identity is not within a person’s being. If medical professionals who study the biological aspects of sex and psychiatrists who assess the ins and outs of how gender relates to a person’s sense of being and their behavior are recognizing and studying gender identity enough for it to be increasingly recognized by the law, there is obvious scientific work being done to explain it.
The fact that Vizcarrondo uses the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangably delegitimizes his argument. Sex is biological, and gender is sociological. No matter how his argument that gender identity is not part of our being is viewed, it is wrong because biology and sociology both comprise who we are; Our being. Vizcarrondo writes that “People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.” His original argument was that gender has nothing to do with our being and that there is no scientific evidence supporting that it does. However, he took his argument about gender, sociology, and made it about sex, biology. He even includes the definition for the medical diagnosis for many gender non-conforming individuals, gender dysphoria, of which numerous scientific studies have been done by very reputable specialists.
Vizcarrondo mentioned studies that stated transgender individuals were more suicidal after transitioning, but ignored the discrimination that pushes them to that point and instead chose to focus on hormone therapy as the cause. The 2001 study that he linked in his essay says in its discussion “According to qualitative research, many male-to-female transgender persons turn to sex work because they face severe employment disctimination.” The article goes into depth about things like social discrimination, unemployment, sex work, and contraction of HIV as a result of sex work, which are all more to blame for the suicide rates than sex changes. These people are committing suicide because they are being treated horrible over who they are, which again, circles back to gender being a part of our being.
Vizcarrondo assumes that gender identity is not part of our being, but ignores the medical evidence that it a real part of us, the differences between sex and gender, and the horrible discrimination that transgender people face in order to try making his incorrect point. We should care about this because there are too many people who invalidate the realness of gender identity as a part of our overall identity as people. Everyone has a gender identity, whether it is within the binary or not. The continuing cycle of dismissal, mockery and hatred towards individuals who do not conform to the gender binary never has been and never will be acceptable. To see changes, we need to be able to pick apart the arguments of the people who think those things are okay to subject gender nonconforming people to.
Word Count: 716
Sources
Clements-Nolle, K., Marx, R., Guzman, R., & Katz, M. (2001). HIV Prevalence, Risk Behaviors, Health Care Use, and Mental Health Status of Transgender Persons: Implications for Public Health Intervention. American Journal of Public Health, 91(6), 915-920.
Vizcarrondo, F. (2020, May 28). Gender Ideology: The Latests Assault on Our Children. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.hli.org/resources/gender-ideology-latest-assault-children/
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