summarize this text: and reproduced. Butler rejected the liberal presumption that we have or possess sex/gender identities, and theorized instend that cuch of us does or performs sex/gender in our actions-how we dress, speak, and otherwise behave.
The verb "perform" connotes the role of repetition in generating and sustaining social norms that create such momentum in our day-to-day lives that we often mistake them for something a priori to human expe-rience, something
"natural" or "God-given" that exists outside of history
and beyand our personal control. The fact that sex/gender norms are subject to historical and cultural change reveals the constructed nature of our sex/gender performances. At the same time, the repetitive and compulsive nature of our sex/gender performances means that sex/gen-der norms are deeply ingrained and highly regulated social customs that we experience as if they were unchangeable. Postmodern gender theory has shed important light on the fact that when we speak of sex we implicitly speak of gender norms, and vice versa.
The problem with collapsing the terms "sex" and "gender" however, is that doing so robs us of a language with which to differentiate between the sexism of sex-based disadvantage and the sexism of sex-identity discrimination triggered by sex-classification policies. Most of our social practice has not absorbed Fausto-Stering's or Butler's claims. Indeed, even many of us who teach and write about these interventions do not consistently use them to alter our self-conceptions and perceptions of others. This is evident in a great deal of feminist research and teaching, where transgender and intersex experience is still often explained as ex-ceptional, instead of being used to fundamentally challenge the idea that the terms "man" and "woman" imply particular body parts.'* Sex discrimination jurisprudence has exacerbated this problem by using the terms "sex" and "gender" interchangeably as synonyms without acknowledging the constructed nature of our sexed bodies, and our basic right to say who we are in relation to the categories of male and female." Just because we perform sex/gender simultaneously, and both are socially constructed, does not eviscerate the conceptual distinctionbetween sex and gender. Gender sebased disadva the heart of tradi ten sexism, which focuses on sex base disevantage, or artical contains on a persons opportunites because of sex Sex tenty sexism envelops traditional sexism, but goes further to assess who is permitted to be in the categories of male and female.
Birth Certificates
The first sex-marked identity document that we acquire is a birth cer-tificate. All people who are born in the United States are issued birth certificates by the state or territory in which they are born, and every state and territory requires that the birth certificates they issue include a "male" or "female" sex designation. When prenatal development is monitored via ultrasound, a medical technician determines the baby's sex identity prior to birth. At twenty weeks into a pregnancy, a penis or vagina is typically visible on the ultrasound monitor. Parents are given the option of learning this information, or waiting to hear "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" at the moment of birth. The delivering physician makes that announcement based upon a quick visual inspection of the baby's genitalia.
When a baby is born in a hospital, a sex marker of male or female is entered into a birth certificate application form, which is then passed along to the "mother" to complete. "She" is asked to fill in additional information about herself and the baby's "father" I use quotation marks here because not all delivering parents self-identify as "mothers," and not all second parents self-identify as "fathers." Some transgender men with ovaries and uteruses can and do become pregnant, and some transgender women whose bodies produce sperm can sire children. In order to be more institutionally efficient, hospitals might consider using the terms "delivering parent" and "second parent" to more accurately retrieve the information they are seeking: who the child's legal parents are, not what their sex identities are.
There is precedent for this degendering of parents in the US State Department's 2010 decision to replace the terms "mother" and "father"with "Parents" and "Parent 2" on its passport application forms. In making this administrative change, the State Department sought to "recog-nize different types of families."! Cisgender (a term used to refer to non-transgender people parents are not harmed by this more inclusive
as "parents."
and institutionally efficient format because they retain their identities When a baby is born outside of a hospital, parents are legally required to register the child's birth with the state, usually within ten days. In such cases, parents are responsible for indicating the sex of their child on an out-of-hospital state-issued birth worksheet.'
This seems like a simple declaration for a physician, midwife, or parent to make, However, medical experts report that one child in somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand births has "noticeably atypical" genitalia.
And many more people are born with subtler sex anatomy varia-tions, some of which become noticeable only later in their lifetimes.?
People who are born with chromosomal, physiological, and/or endocri-nal features that do not neatly correspond to our culturally determined definitions of dyadic sex are described as "intersex." Some intersex con-ditions, such as aphallia, whereby a "genetic" male with XY chromosomes is born without a penis, are apparent at birth. Other conditions may not be apparent or "diagnosed" until puberty or even later, such as androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), whereby a person is born with XY chromosomes but the person's cells cannot absorb "male hormones" or androgens. People with AIS appear to be and mostly self-identify as female, but do not menstruate, lack a cervix, and have sparse underarm and pubic hair.
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Since the mid-twentieth century, the medical protocol has been to perform surgeries on infants diagnosed with intersex conditions in order to "fix" their atypical bodies. The protocol focuses on surgical intervention during the first eighteen months of a child's life based upon the belief that "gender identity" is malleable during that period.In her canonical gender theory essay, "How to Build a Man" Fausto-