Reflection Three: Undoing Gender (Doing Justice) Judith Butler
Undoing Gender (Doing Justice)
Butler, J
After reading a new article in this class, I become more and more appalled at the behavior and rationalizing some people and medical professionals use to put labels on human beings. In Butlers reading, the story of David/Brenda was certainly something I found hard to read. Reading about David’s choices being taking away by figures who insisted they knew best was ridiculous! Immediately from the start where we read about the doctor who “accidentally” permanently altered the life and body of a young child, I felt a strong outrage that someone who should be expertly medically trained to perform an operation was trusted to do something that he couldn’t. Due to a doctor’s carelessness, David/Brenda grew up in a life that was under a microscope for countless nameless faces to examine and scrutinize. Something that upset me while reading this was David’s own insistence that he didn’t want to partake in the things they made him do but having no one hear his voice. He fought against what other people wanted him to be and only until he was much older did someone finally begin to realize that David can make his own choices. His choice was taken away when he was only 8 months old because someone said he would have an easier life and he would grow up “normal” if he looked like what a normal person should be. I thought the parents of David were much too willing to have their child be “normal” rather than stop for a second and consider that David was a human being with emotions and thoughts of his own that he could formulate himself. David didn’t need “professionals” telling him that he’s something that he’s not. The world which David grew up in were much too concerned with him being having a normal childhood that they didn’t see that he was living anything but. I felt helpless for David when I read the part about him refusing to partake in an operation to officially gain a “real vagina”, the fact that his simple no wasn’t taken for an acceptable answer and he had to go screaming just shows that these people weren’t listening to what he wanted! The use of his own twin brother to perform mock coital exercises was disgusting! How anyone thought that that was okay, I will never understand. The fact that the public reports didn’t include his real accounts was a big indication that these researchers were more willing to release reports which showcased the supposed success of David’s case rather than share what he felt and spread the truth about the faults of sex reassignment.
