''female'' and "male" as a categories need to stop being used in a medical context.
we do not need to correct or expand how ''female sex'' and "male sex" is defined. we need to decouple all physical traits from their sexgender categorization.
when people are faced with the artificiality of "sex," many people fail to actually deconstruct it and instead covertly maintain their belief in a binary by invoking a spectrum model instead.
"sex isn't binary, it's a spectrum" is not accurate, and it does not constitute deconstruction of sex. this conceptual model envisions sex as a sliding scale between two "real" sexes at either end, where one can either move "towards" male or female.
as eckert explains in intersexualization: the clinic and the colony, this bi-directional spectrum model is foundational to the creation of intersex subjectivity. "intersex" is envisioned as a "mixture" of sexes, which inherently constructs male and female as "pure" and anything outside of them as "impure." the intersex body is envisioned as inherently more complicated or complex than the "pure female" and "pure male" body. and reliance on the fixed points of "male" and "female" on either end of this "spectrum" does the work of naturalizing these categories and, by doing so, necessarily also enshrines the sexgender hierarchy they exist to define.
"Therefore, I do see problems with using it because the references it combines reaffirm the two entities, which are supposedly more âpureâ and then merge into the hybrid. The notion of the hybrid in itself implies that there is such a thing as purity, whether it is in relation to identity, gender, body, nationality, ethnicity, or origin in general. Moreover, whenever there is a third (no matter if it is an identity, a body, or a space) the first two are implicit and are thought of and listed according to a specific hierarchy. This hierarchy makes one of the two entities the more dominant, hegemonically more justified, debatably more important part and the second one less influential, less important, and more likely to be disregarded. The Third is always based on a first and a second and these are not free from their hierarchical reference system" (pg 193-194).
to deconstruct "sex" we have to actually do the work of challenging the grouping of traits together within gendered categorization. there is no "male" or "female" or "intersex" body outside of these medical labels being forced upon us.
our bodies have a whole bunch of various characteristics, and we can influence these characteristics through learning how they develop and age over time and what factors influence that development in what ways. some are influenced by overlapping factors and some are not.
some of our characteristics are captured under "sex" (determined to constitute sex, or to be part of this collection of traits associated through sex categorization, or to be imbued with gendered meaning) and others are not.
every new trait that becomes "sexed" leads to less bodily autonomy. "sex" is an expanding naturalization project that captures more and more of our bodies for restriction under sexgender enforcement.
we need to abolish sex, not expand it.
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