I was Born that Way?: Food for Thought

Garfinkel’s Agnes was a report on a project about socialized gender and what would allow Agnes to pass as a “normal” women.  This particular story will bend your mind around the idea of gender biologically, socially and personally.  Article:

 

garfinkels-story-of-agnes.doc

 

 

 

 

 

What does Garfinkel’s Agnes teach us about gender?

 

Gender seems to be based on social acceptances and biological correlation.  The irony is that biological can be changed and adjusted for the behavioral and social acceptances of ones gender that is outwardly expressed.  Agnes story was presented in such away that the reader is to believe that Agnes is in fact a feminine women and has always been such, despite “her” male biology at birth.  The article could cause people that might normally consider Agnes a man with physiological sexual identity problems to be really a woman with unique biological abnormality.  Gender seems to be more a construction of society, cultural norms and individual identity more than true biology, which can be changed.

 

“That is just the way God made you” statement just does not seems to justifiable answer today’s individualism crisis of gender identity.