When we talk about gender, yes we talk about it as something that we do that was given to us, but we also talk about it in a way that implies malleability. To us, societally, gender is a fluid concept on a sliding scale that can be different from the way we were born, different from the way we were told, just fluid.
Sex, on the other hand, is spoken about in rock-soild, definite, unchanging terms. The sex you were born as and that is on your birth certificate is one of two extremes. What if that wasn’t the way the world was structured? Well there is a “third sex” so to speak, encompassing everything between the extremes. Intersex.
The article “Giving Sex” describes the way that our medical system, as we know it, decides what sex is and how it has enforced this hard boundary line in sex that endures even beyond the hard boundaries in gender beginning to fall. Both trans and intersex people run into this wall where if we ever question our assigned sex, it is medically inconceivable that someone may exist in the grey area between. This is a product of the medical gaze, where doctors feel that they need to fit a patient’s background or story into the neatly defined biomedical paradigm that has been described and upheld for a long time.
Intersex people are required to undergo medical treatment to affirm a sex that was assigned by doctors based on a clitoral size gauge in most cases, in some completely based on what kind of surgery the surgeon thinks is easier. Trans people, on the other hand, are not allowed to have access to these treatments because they, for some reason, know what sex they feel correct as to a less complete extent than a doctor assessing a baby that has been born literally 3 minutes ago.
Davis, Georgiann, Jodie M. Dewey, Erin L. Murphy. 2016. “Giving Sex: Deconstructing Intersex and Trans Medicalization Practices.” Gender and Society 30:3:490-514