The Roles We Play

The cover of a recent issue of Newsweek magazine shows an 8 month old baby dressed in half blue and half white and entitled "The Mystery of Gender". Is they baby a boy or a girl? I guess it doesn't mater because at that age it's impossible to tell by a look at a photo. And the point of the article inside is that it's also sometimes hard to tell about adults too. What makes a person male or female (apart from the sexual organs we possess)? Is our gender determined by heredity or environment?
Well, there aren't any answers in the article, the point being that now more and more people in the U.S and the rest of the world are being confronted with those kinds of questions as more "transgendered people" come out of the closet (Relax, I know my identity and am not confessing anything today- I am definitely a 100% male pig....oink) and say they are not the biological sex they appear to be. I guess society is at a questioning stage about sex roles, what they are should be or may be. My impression is that Newsweek gives up in attempting to define normality in sex roles, and that may be the wisest road to take to the seemingly unanswerable dilemma some people have in knowing what sex role they should assume. The "some people" is approximately 1% of the population in any culture, nationality, religious or racial group. That's the estimated percent Newsweek says struggles with the accepting the sex role with which we were born. Interestingly this gender "confusion: has always existed in about the same numbers. Cross dressing (No, I am not typing in a dress today!) was a common activity in ancient Greece and Rome as well as the American Indian tribes here. Every society has had some visible evidence of the same. There was once a Roman Catholic female pope who reigned in secrecy by showing a convincing maleness that was never detected to be false. You get the idea of a modern version if you just think of the male athletes who competed in Olympic contests as females or the many sex change operations in Thailand that produces some very beautiful yet artificial ladies. Anyway, a transgendered person is defined as one whose gender identity or expression of it differs from the sex of their birth. This means they can have had surgery or taken steps to change their look or not done so. A point of the article is the openness of societies today makes transgendered people more visible (I have never known one personally, have you?) and challenges the old rules about sex identity. Further, it is making many non transgendered people wonder if the traditional male or female categories should also include one that overlaps the two? I feel empathy for those people who do not define their sex roles in a traditional way, for there is as much discrimination against them by society as of any other minority group. Maybe the re emergence of more public and open displays of transgendered sexual roles and the increase in legal protections of people who are transgendered will change that intolerance. The fact that Newsweek featured the subject in an issue is a good illustration that some sex roles are being redefined and more freely accepted as not deviant. Uh....there is one aspect to the transgendered that I think will forever be a mystery to me and that I challenge you to solve. Hehe Exactly what is Michael Jackson???????????????