Sexual kind

See also: Kind

The kind is a recent concept in Social sciences and Médecine which one can simply apprehend the direction through the two following quotations:

• the sex, it is what one sees, the kind, it is what one feels. Dr. Harry Benjamin
• the kind, it is what one could call the “social sex”. Christine Delphy

The concept of kind ( gender ) was created in the English language because the word sex has there a Semantic field much more reduced than the word “Sexe” in French - making difficult the presentation of the place of the Homme S and the Femme S in the company - and under the influence of the feminist , which differentiated the anatomical sex from the kind in order to call into question the constraints imposed by this last.

Thus, the sex is used to refer to the physical differences distinguishing the men and the women, the kind with the nonanatomical differences (psychological, mental, social, economic, demographic, Politique S…).

Social kind

The “social kind” is the identity built by the social environment of the individuals, i.e. the “Virilité” or the “Féminité”, which one can not regard as “natural” data, but like the result of extremely strong Mécanisme S of construction and social reproduction, through the education. It milked with the behaviors, practices, roles allotted to the people according to their sex, to one time and in a given culture.

According to Simone de Beauvoir: “ One is not born woman, one becomes to it ” under the influence of patriarchal education . Some, such Pierre Bourdieu, estimate that is also true for the men: “ One is not born man, one becomes to it ”, and it is through a whole education, made up of ritual of integration of the male Norme, that the male identity is worked, and that the man provides in the company a function of reproduction of the domination.

This education is not only constructive but also punitive: the deviation of the roles of kind (i.e., a dissension between the presentation of kind of a person and presentation of kind required of a person of its sex) is not always tolerated and unquestionable attitude are still repressed by the company. A simple example is the " tenue" social: a joke on the sex will be seen like relatively acceptable on behalf of a man, but will bring funny looks if it comes from the mouth of a woman. There are in the history of the documented cases people who were burned alives to have refused these constraints. At the time when medicine took the step on the religion they were stigmatized, “pathologized”, psychiatrized with force. In spite of a long fight, this use of medicine to build a normative system is not finished. The problem particularly arises for the people born intersexuées (with an unspecified sex the day of the birth). In a company which assigns certain prerogatives to one or the other of the biological sexes, these people have evil to build an identity. The first information which one has being on an individual his sex, to have an ambiguous presentation is a serious social handicap. The problem is sometimes " résolu" in a hasty way by parents, who make operate their baby in order to appoint a sex to him as of the youth. the consequences can be serious if the choice of the parents does not agree with the identity that the child builds itself while growing.

One can also mention the Sexual orientation according to the kind: the majority of the companies define a rule of the demanding kind that the men wish the women and vice versa.

In addition to this education with the kind (by which each individual passes), social sciences also showed the character learned from these behaviors through the categorization of the company and the stereotypes which it develops sometimes unconsciously. A recent example of study on the books for children showed that the roles according to the sex of the characters are very partitioned: a doctor is practically always a man, a nurse a woman. A mother with the hearth is uin traditional, whereas one never finds of house-husband. Some wanted to extend this report to the absence of representation of homosexual couples in these books. It would be not of a refusal to represent them, but about a choice made by the editors (who in addition do not hesitate to speak about subject low registers): to let the children grow and form an opinion by themselves about a fact of company which he will face one day, and thus avoid any militancy in a direction or the other.

Internal kind, transgenre, and transsexuality

The term Transgenre sometimes also called 3rd sex, would have been borrowed from the community lesbian, gay, Bi and trans, Anglo-Saxon in the years 1990 via the Canadian community where it designates any individual asserting the right to nonconformity to the traditional standards or the transition between the kinds, not with the liking of a physical or administrative third person but only of their own will, sometimes with a political or philosophical aim to fight against the sexism and discriminations which are dependant for him, to propose an alternative to the bipolar or hétéronormée company, or quite simply to live his life while trying to escape the stereotyped models. This term however often is misused, because based on a confusion between the people born with an unspecified sex and that which, having a proven identity sexual, refuse it and aspire to belong to the other kind. The people born with an ambiguous sex reject this denomination for the " transsexuals sociaux" , because they estimate that they are two problems well distints (one of physiological nature, the other psychological one).

Autodésignent themselves sometimes like transgenre, the militants, Androgyne S, Hermaphrodite S, Travesti S, Transsexuel S, Drag king, Drag queen, Transformiste S, XX Servant boys, Boyz, New half or Shemale S.

Another interpretation indicates the “internal kind” is a major Sentiment of identification with a sex in particular. The majority of the people are identified with the kind which the company allots to them according to their genitals: a person born with male genitals is not only identified, but also will be identified often, with a man; a person born with female genitals, with a woman. It is what the english-speaking define under the term of “ gender identity ” and which is translated into French under the term of “sexual identity”.

One describes as Transgenre the state in which the internal kind is in dissension with the characteristics that the company allots to a person while being based on her genitals with the birth; for example, when an identified person as a man by her male genitals refuses to be identified like such, but without to be identified like a woman . In fact, a great number of people transgenres are identified at the same time like men and women, of share a company which erases more and more the bulk-heading between the roles allotted to each kind.

It is one of the great differences which there are between the people transgenres and the people transsexuals. The Transsexualisme nominates a person who either was born with a female body but which asserts a lifestyle of man (FtM), or a person born with a male body but who wants to be a woman (MtF). In both cases, it not congruence between their appearance and their aspiration is so strong and so painful that one considers a surgical operations to adapt the appearance of their body to their psychology. This operation however has a very limited impact: certain parameter of the body, specific to one or the other of the sexes (the shape of the body you of the face, cuts hands and feet, smoothness of the features, etc) are not modifiable, or very with difficulty, in spite of the promises that certain not very scrupulous doctors make the candidates with the operation.

Of another problems occur then: the word " sexe" referring above all with the biological distinction, apart from any social implication, the question arises: can one call " femme" an human being whose appearance remains ambiguous, and whose genetic inheritance is exclusively male? (the same question arises for the opposite operation). Current research on possible a " sex of the cerveau" still comes to add with this blur, because they would tend to confimer that each biological sex has characteristics. For the administration also, it is a difficult case: the civil statue can exceptionally change the mention of the sex of a person, but that presents legal problems, in particular for the marriage and the adoption, which are accessible only to the couples " naturellement" heterosexuals. The question also arises in fields where the membership of one or the other of the sexes has an obvious importance. The sport is an example: the pulmonary capacity of a man operated being higher than that of a woman born woman, this one has an advantage that some compare to doping, because that creates an inequality in fact between the competitors.

The majority of French believing to employ the punished language, speak about " transsexual not opéré" to indicate the transgenres, whereas the latter, do not wish of anything to be identified like such. It acts then for them of a simple rejection of this categorization of the kind, which does not have any influence on their sexual identity. A transgenre can adopt an attitude and a behavior androgyne, while keeping an exclusive attraction for the women, for example.

The term “sexual identity”

The term “identity sexual” is that which was adopted in French to translate the English term " gender identity". If English refers to the behaviors (the kind), French refers to the body (the sex). In English, the " term; gender identity" was adopted, because the other expression (" sexual identity") was already used to describe the sexual orientation.

For some, this use can carry to confusion between the identity connected to the “sex” in the direction man/woman (what one understands by the word kind in the use describes in this article) and the identity connected to the Sexualité and sexual life. One about his sexual identity (for example, “am I could thus question myself bisexual? ” “which kinds of sexual relationships preferred I? ”) without to question its kind (“am I a man or a woman? ”)

The expression sexual identity is also problematic in the sense that it returns implicitly to a Métaphysique of the sexes distinguishing strictly from sexualities like different gasolines within the human being. In this case, or these identities define truly a kind, and it should be admitted that humanity is divided into several species whose reports/ratios are difficult to determine; or the sexual identity is inessential, i.e. fixes quotas for, and does not look at the essential determinations of an living being as anybody human.

For other, it is on the contrary very judicious. the expression " identity sexuelle" refers to the " question; who am I as being corporé and sexué? " And it is well with this question that the people transsexuals are confronted, transgenres and intersexuées. It is the answer to this question which leads the people transsexuals to modify their body by surgical way definitively. This question brings the intersexuées people who were assigned arbitrarily with their birth with having to correct this arbitrary assignment. To feel which one east constitutes another question to know how one assumes oneself and one expresses oneself as a man, that woman, that man and woman, that not man, that not woman, etc

The kind and the sex in the language

The grammatical kind (male/female) should not be confused with the sex (male/female). Male words can designate women, just as female words can designate men (for example in the sentence “Pierre a person sympathetic nerve is ”). In French, to indicate groups as well including/understanding men as women, one uses the male kind. It is about a grammatical rule applied (in France) in the near total of the printed publications (press, edition, etc).

This rule nevertheless is disputed by many people: being based on the partial correspondence which exists between the kind and the sex, they estimate that the generic use of the male kind reveals the character “sexist” of French grammar. The majority of the linguists and the professional grammairiens consider nevertheless that this appreciation is stripped of base.

It is increasingly frequent to use female words rigorously to designate women, especially in professional environment (a author, a auteure ), and to build turnings duplicated to include the women explicitly ( gay and lesbians , all and all ), which, altogether, is a manner of generalizing the complimentary closes by avoiding exclusions (" Frenchwomen, français" , " Mesdames; messieurs"). detailed article: grammatical Kind