Gender unspecific

[Kate Thomas]

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Oregon Daily Emerald - University of Oregon

Gender unspecific
Women's and Gender Studies lecture addresses sexual ambiguity and the issues
that intersexed people face

By: Talia Schmidt
Posted: 4/16/07

On a typical dreary Thursday afternoon, Suzanne Kessler began her speech by
talking about nutritionists. She said recently she heard a nutritionist on
the radio recommend that men eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a
day while women should eat seven servings a day.

"When I hear routine uses of the word men and women, I ask myself, 'what do
nutritionists mean by women and men?'" Kessler asked. "Do they mean people
with clitorises and XX chromosomes should only eat seven or nine servings a
day? Or people with Y chromosomes should eat more vegetables a day? Or do
they mean people of a certain body weight; do they mean people with a
certain metabolism of a certain muffin-fat ratio, a certain level of
estrogen and androgen? Do they mean people who more or less like to wear
pink nail polish? I don't know. I don't know what they mean by that."


Nearly 100 various students and faculty members filled up 182 Lillis to hear
Kessler, who is a professor of psychology and Dean of the School of Natural
and Social Sciences at Purchase College State University of New York and
author of "Lessons from the Intersexed," talk on the ethics surrounding the
treatment of those in an intersex condition.



"What Suzanne Kessler did so well in 'Lessons from the Intersexed' was to
uncover social assumptions that guide clinical decision-making in regard to
infants and children born intersex," said Reis. Her book "provided the most
comprehensive approach to the study of intersex that had ever been published
up to that time. And it's still a must-read for anyone interested in the
medical management of these conditions, the importance of the social norms,
or even more broadly the study of how we think about gender and how those
decisions get made about who is a boy and who's a girl."

[ChildOfTheLight]

The thing in this article that caught my eye was the nutrition claim.  I would think that the real meaning of the claim that "men should eat nine servings and women should eat seven" is that women (by whatever reasonable definition you prefer) tend to eat less than men, on average, and therefore need to eat fewer fruits and vegetables to get the right proportion of them in their diet.

Of course, a female distance runner doing 70 miles a week probably needs to eat more than your average couch potato male to stay healthy, therefore, more fruits and vegetables.  Granted, there aren't many such people, but the point is that the amounts and types of food you should eat must be based on the state of your own life, not on an average for your sex.  It just shows, in one more way, what a gross oversimplification saying "women should do this and men should do that" is.  Women aren't all the same as each other, men aren't all the same as each other, and women and men aren't separated by a colossal, dramatic gulf in all of their physiology and psychology.