ted talk

• This is a talk about intersexuality, and how it is the living proof that the binary is wrong. It's not real. Because it is about more than that. It is about a combination fo everything: genitalia, chromosomes, DNA, hormones..

• Intersexuality is widely considered taboo, with doctors prescribing surgeries under the excuse that “it causes cancer” when it does not.

• There is a strong belief that your sex defines a lot about you and your behaviour, however, all of these things depend on many more things than just your sex. My personal experience: I am Bipolar, Borderline with ADHD. Borderline for example, controls my emotions on the day to day, meaning I am very unstable emotionally if not treated. My emotions don’t go from 0 to 100 they go from -100 to 100 to -100 to 100 all the time, even multiple times in a day. Borderline personality disorder is very common, amongst both men and women, yet because I have a vagina, many people deem that it is not a disorder that it is just because “women are like that”. Borderline personality disorder causes a lot of distress and can be at the origin of suicidal behaviour. There is such a strong stigma around the disorder due to a stigma around gendered behaviour, even leading to biased research about BPD. Finding treatment in these cases is difficult because people just see women as hysterical and not men. Making it difficult for men to get a diagnosis on a mental disorder deemed female, and women finding it difficult to get help because of the belief that “all women are this way anyway”. As of hat I can also say I experience bias because of my sex in a medical context, for something even completely different, due to bias.

• “Imagine a world where we could live in a society that teaches us not to have shame about the things that our bodies do or do not do.”

conclusion | with proper research i could find enough empirical evidence to prove that gender binary is wrong. i like her approach as an intersex because it involved the body more than spiritual gender which fits with the trends i researched. i think it encourages my idea of exploring the becoming alien.

Quinn. E. (November 2018). The way we think about biological sex is wrong [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_quinn_the_way_we_think_about_biological_sex_is_wrong#t-833225