What's In A Name?
By Jordan Osserman '11, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Wednesday, April 02, 2008
http://thedartmouth.com/2008/04/02/opinion/osserman/Last term, the Gay-Straight Alliance officially changed its name to Gender Sexuality XYZ — GSX for short. While I think the new acronym sounds more like a Ferrari model or extreme sports tournament than a group of students fighting heteronormativity, the concept behind the name change is an important one.
At Dartmouth and within educated American society at large there seems to be a general level of acceptance — at least theoretically — towards gay people. Typically, the argument goes that most people will be born straight, but some will be born gay. Gay people are exactly the same as straight people in all respects but their sexual preference, and therefore deserve all the same rights and protections that straight people enjoy.
However, modern queer theory — that which led to the GSA name change — radically challenges this binary. Queer theorists assert that people often identify in ways more complex than gay or straight, male or female. Some men are comfortable with their genitalia but prefer to cross-dress. Some women are sexually attracted to men but emotionally attracted to women. And some individuals, born intersexual, embrace their ambiguous gender without choosing to identify as male or female.
