HFS 388: Human Sexuality. Gender Inequality and the Prejudices Against Sexuality

Gender Inequality and the Prejudices Against Sexuality
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Gender Inequality and the Prejudices Against Sexuality
Life changes challenge a person to adapt to his environment. These changes do not only pertain to physical evolvement, but these also involve changes in norms, culture, and bodily perception: these changes an individual’s personality and development, especially one’s sexuality. Sexuality is a variable entity that continues to evolve. A person may have a different perception of his or her sexuality in childhood because of biological characteristics.
Moreover, a person can change his or her perception by changing the gender after learning about society. People have different gender roles throughout history. Moreover, it is up to the individual to choose which role best suits his or her personality and how to handle the prejudices that come with his or her choices.
Sexuality has a broad and indefinite definition. The World Health Organization defines it as the principal feature of humanity that encompasses gender and gender roles, sex, sexual orientation, erotic behaviors, bodily desires, intimacy, and reproduction. It can be qualified by experiences and justified by the interaction among all the other aspects of humanity—biological, psychosocial, social-political, cultural, legal, religious, and historical influences. This differs from sex, which is biologically determined, and gender, which is socially-determined CITATION Wornd1 \l 1033 (World Health Organization, n.d.).
The beginning of sexual development can be explained by biology. Sex denotes the biological features that are not mutually exclusive. Some people have both, while others only possess a single characteristic. These allow the society to differentiate a person on whether he is a man or she is a woman CITATION Wornd1 \l 1033 (World Health Organization, n.d.).
The mechanisms by which science identifies sex genetically are significantly variable. Human sex chromosomes play a vital role in sex determination. There are two sex chromosomes, namely, the X and the Y chromosome. In placental mammals, like humans, the existence of the Y chromosome decides the sex. The female cells consist of two X chromosomes, while the male cells have both the X and the Y chromosomes. However, later research revealed that there are rare people who have reversed chromosomes (Abbott, Nordén, & Hansson, 2017). Some of these people can be classified as sex-reversed XX men who has the characteristics of a male but has the genetic composition of a female. This has only been discovered by the medical physicist, Albert de la Chapelle, in 1964 CITATION Tri06 \l 1033 (Trivedi, 2006).
de la Chapelle’s discovery in 1964 can be considered as a late innovation since the world has known humans since prehistoric times. Nevertheless, humans only judged a person’s sex and sexuality using two categories—male or female. Given this fact, we can consider that there may have been other sexes that are forcefully being removed in the history of human beings because of cultural disparities.
Fausto-Sterling (1993) reveals that there are more than five sexes. How...