Several weeks ago I went to McDonald’s with my two sisters and ordered at the drive through. My older sister ordered a Happy Meal and the female drive through attendant asked: “Boy or girl?” The question of the attendant led me to wonder what would happen if I were to ask her I could get a toy for my androgynous child. “Why toys to you have for tyrannies?” I admit, this might cause an intellectual dilemma at a fast-food restaurant, but it does raise bigger questions. Scientifically, there is more than one differentiation among the sexes: male, male intersexed, female, female intersexed, and completely intersexed. But we as a society, others as well, only like to think that are just two sexes and that anything different is wrong and unnatural. I doubt that there will ever be a day when five toy options are available at McDonald’s but one day people will at least hopefully that’s just a little more to most people.
I think this 'small apocalypse' can easily relate back to the article we read by Joan Riviere on gender and womanliness as well as The Parable of the Sower (when Lauren starts to dress and act masculine). It is interesting to think about how our society would function if we had a broader spectrum of sex classifications. Would we still have separate bathrooms? What about all-boy and all-girl schools? And Joseph, you mention that there's five broader categories, yet I'm sure that there are people who find themselves in between those categories. I don't really have a solution to society's problem of generalizing that all people must fit either male, female, or the grey area in the middle. Our society may never be able to let go of the automatic "male or female" label; if it ever did, it might cause some small apocalypses in the mindsets of people who concretely identify themselves as either %100 male or female.
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