¶ … Baby X
In most modern societies education relies heavily on the distinction between sexes. Therefore, transgressions were severely punished until late in the twentieth century even in societies that like to present themselves as the most civilized and advanced in the world. Scientists such as: biologists, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, are continuously asking questions about the origins of sex differences and sexual reproduction. These are topics that are still raising contradictions in the scientific world today. Furthermore, psychology and sociology dedicate today a large body of research to the differences between sex and gender. Linguistically speaking, sex defines two forms of life biologically, physically and genetically different, known under the names: male and female. Gender, on the other hand, marks a distinction in areas of study, it is related to human behavior and is mostly used to categorize human beings from a sociological point-of-view: masculine or feminine. A study of the significance of the differences between sex and gender will naturally make a new question occur: where would human societies be without gender stereotypes? Scientists are still divided today between those who think the Darwinian evolutionary theory is the basis for the existence of sex differences and sexual reproduction and those who believe that evolution cannot explain the complexity of sexual reproduction. On the other hand, are increasingly willing to agree that there are fundamental differences between sex and gender.
The writer Lois Gould, appears to be one of those who ask themselves where would humans today be if children's sex would be irrelevant to society. She...
The fact that ethical consideration make the experiment the writer imagines in her short story impossible to reproduce give the reader the opportunity to let the imagination run wild. The story is far from being a children's story. It is the result of profound thought and intense consideration of the children's world and the way adults' behavior affect it. Because a genderless children's world is unthinkable, the writer makes the problem seem complex only because of a characteristic of our human nature: stubbornness. The most interesting thing in the whole story is that she does not attempt to suggest that the experiment is right or wrong. She is just raising numerous questions in the minds of those who read it.
While newborn and young children are often impossible to distinguish as male or female, parents or care givers often decide to mark their sex in a distinctive unequivocal way. Regardless if it happens in a society that boasts about belonging to western civilization or in a society from a different part of the world, infants are often wearing visible signs of their sex. Parents are particularly interested in marking their children's sex accurately. Those who fail do so or even act on the contrary and present their children to the rest of the world in ways characteristic to the opposite sex will be amended in most cases. During the last decade of the millennium, many societies were quick to adopt the term metrosexual. The term was originally destined to distinguish between heterosexuals with homosexual appearances and a new kind of heterosexual who retained his manliness, but adopted a life…
