Baby X In Most Modern Societies Education

¶ … 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 wrote a short story with the title X: A Fabulous Child's Story where she explores this topic. 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 style (especially in the grooming area) that was typically associated with females. Although the term is almost extinct, the concept stuck and it helped change deeply ingrained ideas about sex stereotypes. The process complex, slow and far from reaching an end in the near future, but the apparition of the concept it was an indicator's of the majority's will to accept the possibility that appearance alone is insufficient to designate gender.

In most of the world, adults will still react typically to an infant and address it differently based on what they assume the child's sex was. Parents will also still feel typically uncomfortable if a stranger will be mistaken about their infant's sex. Adults will tend to evaluate infant girls' degree of cuteness and delicate features, while they will address whatever signs of maleness they think they noticed in an infant boy. It is rather amusing when considering that most adults have a hard time distinguishing between a boy and a girl infant when they have no clues indicating the respective child's sex.

In a few years, when the respective infant grows into a boy, he will be pressured from all sides to conform to his gender category. Provided the parents failed to teach their son to behave properly and manifest "manly," most grandparents will be very careful to amend their lack of steering their boy onto the "right" path. Boys will be expected to play hard, fight, run, display technical abilities and play with boys. Their own peers will amend them from an early stage of their development if they failed to do so. Girls are more likely to play with both girls and boys and have "girlish" as well as "boyish" occupations, than are boys. Boys are still under a great amount of pressure to affirm their sexual identity "correctly" everywhere they go. On the other side, a general leveling of the way children are viewed and expected to behave, according to biological traits may be harmful. Some researchers suggest that, academically speaking, boys and girls are different and they need to be treated different in order for them to achieve the maximum results according to their abilities.