Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24100805-20160201152915/@comment-27089028-20181203002724

You might be thinking cheese is a random answer that doesn’t make any sense. I did in fact arbitrarily choose the word to answer what my gender is. It seems difficult to accept the answer cheese as a legitimate answer but isn’t it just as random as believing “real men don’t cry”? If we really want to get technical, real male beings do cry because it is a biological function one is born with. So how is it so easy to tell someone what they can or cannot do on the basis of invisible evidence? The story of Semenya was a very interesting case that I had personally never thought about before. We do not usually think about these kind of things because all around us gender norms become accepted as true. Let’s take a look at the two previous methods of determining sex mentioned in the article: -Until 1915, the sex was determined by locating testicles or ovaries -Before 1968, the International Olympic Committee verified the sex of female athletes by looking between their legs Both were honestly too simplistic and became quite problematic. Even when we looked to some of the most advanced science for an answer, it was never as simple as black and white. Biological processes can be derailed or interfered with by dormant factors that can completely break the idea of there only being ‘male/man’ and ‘female/woman’ and that even complicate the notion of what a ‘hermaphrodite’ is. This is actually quite mind blowing to me. You can be born a ‘man’ and later turn out to be a ‘woman’. So for half of your life you were expected to act as a ‘man’ but would it be possible for society to start to expect you to act as a ‘woman’? Or would it be too weird to acknowledge you as a woman by nature when all your life you were mistaken to be a ‘man’? Gender is not a binary thing and when people try to force it to be everyone gets confused.

P.S. I legit just said cheese because 'randomness' but apparently there's an actual article on the subject.