A common statement I hear from those critical of medicalizing children’s bodies to conform to some elusive gender identity, creating life-long medical patients, is that they don’t care what adults choose to do with their bodies. The exception is for children.
We better start caring.
To choose to appropriate the body parts of the opposite sex is sexual objectification. It exploits human wholeness, rooted in sex, and renders it into pieces to be reassembled into not only a costume but a commodity for use by another. For as bad as other avenues of sexual objectification and exploitation are - and they are terrible - we at least understand they’re not positive, let alone a human right. Even prostitution, which has been euphemistically rebranded to “sex work” by some, is at least not being sold to us, via corporations, as a positive lifestyle expression. Goldman Sachs, so far, has no coming out ceremonies at their banks for prostitutes and workshops for allies of prostitutes, as they do for men who appropriate women’s body parts. We do not yet have a “prostitute’s day of visibility,” nor do we have feminists, even those supporting prostitution as a working model, calling for a celebration of prostitutes’ visibility.
This terrible blind spot of many feminists protecting men who appropriate the sexed body parts of women is a facet of our conditioning to femininity: to defer to men, to emotionally defend and take care of them at a cost to ourselves, especially if they present themselves as vulnerable.
