Spring Break
To your own sexual identity, be true
Issue date: 10/18/07
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Midterms are upon us, and we are sick of using our brains. We hate our brains, in fact. We hope they would just go away.
In this brief moment of mindlessness, it is worth remembering that there is at least one use of our brain which always cheers us up and makes the whole damn organ worthwhile: Thinking about sex.
But as critical as this intellectual exercise is to our lives, there is a related topic which gets nearly no air time in our brainwaves - thinking about our sexual identity. Many of us will live out our brief spell on earth without ever questioning the sex-related aspects of our identity.
Science tells us that this is worth inquiring into; sexuality is not easy to observe and that gender identity is not completely correlated with primary sex characteristics. The possession of a penis, for example, does not necessarily mean that we love the poonani or that we are roguish and stoic - these are things that, while mostly biologically determined, are best left for us to find out.
Strangely enough, most of us do not take up the task of determining our sexual orientation and gender identity, but instead leave this kind of question to the people we wouldn't entrust with determining the other aspects of our identity - our parents.
At birth, when everyone shouts (for example) "It's a boy!", a commitment is made, on our behalf, that our sexuality and identity will have a certain shape - we shall not fantasize about shagging other dudes, we shall not wear pretty pink dresses. We shall let the hair on our legs grow long and own fewer than 10 pairs of shoes, none of which puts us in extraordinary pain.
What a travesty. We would not have anyone tell us whom to shag or how to dress. Yet we are by and large not bothered by the uninformed and hastily drawn conclusion that we are heterosexual men or women on the mere basis of our body parts.
Thus we arrive at this week's topic, which is questioning, discovering and expressing your sexual and gender identity - in other words, coming out.
In this brief moment of mindlessness, it is worth remembering that there is at least one use of our brain which always cheers us up and makes the whole damn organ worthwhile: Thinking about sex.
But as critical as this intellectual exercise is to our lives, there is a related topic which gets nearly no air time in our brainwaves - thinking about our sexual identity. Many of us will live out our brief spell on earth without ever questioning the sex-related aspects of our identity.
Science tells us that this is worth inquiring into; sexuality is not easy to observe and that gender identity is not completely correlated with primary sex characteristics. The possession of a penis, for example, does not necessarily mean that we love the poonani or that we are roguish and stoic - these are things that, while mostly biologically determined, are best left for us to find out.
Strangely enough, most of us do not take up the task of determining our sexual orientation and gender identity, but instead leave this kind of question to the people we wouldn't entrust with determining the other aspects of our identity - our parents.
At birth, when everyone shouts (for example) "It's a boy!", a commitment is made, on our behalf, that our sexuality and identity will have a certain shape - we shall not fantasize about shagging other dudes, we shall not wear pretty pink dresses. We shall let the hair on our legs grow long and own fewer than 10 pairs of shoes, none of which puts us in extraordinary pain.
What a travesty. We would not have anyone tell us whom to shag or how to dress. Yet we are by and large not bothered by the uninformed and hastily drawn conclusion that we are heterosexual men or women on the mere basis of our body parts.
Thus we arrive at this week's topic, which is questioning, discovering and expressing your sexual and gender identity - in other words, coming out.
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