Amaan Syed Week 5

Gender Assignment Week 5

Raine Dozier’s “Beards, Breasts, and Bodies” talks about Transgender people and how the body attributes of a person help someone decide the person’s Sex or Gender. The article talks about how Gender and Sex both are social construct along with sexuality. Dozier also gives us the results of the research he conducted. The results were surprising as to how facial hair affect someone’s Gender and identity. A woman who was 9 months pregnant was just thought to be a “fat man” just because she had facial hair. Another woman with facial hair who had a very feminine high pitched was just considered to be a “high voiced man”. Sex is often considered to be the guiding points of a person’s gender. In “Decolonizing Transgender in India Some Reflections” by Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy, it talks about Transgender communities in East India and how the communities are addressed as Hijra/Gandu and many other terms. The article also talks about how so many gender identities come under the common definition of Transgender. These identities are also different on the basis of their class and caste they belong from. This causes many problems for self-identification, where people generalise the meaning of transgender to different gender identity. The division of class and caste also causes a rift between people within the spectrum. The authors stress that decolonizing is a project to include external forms as well as existing structures of LGBTIQ communities both in “east” and “west”.