Gender on a spectrum

This article in the New Statesman caught my eye.

If you want, you can read it here.

Someone asked why the article caught my eye.

This is my reply:

I try to look at the headlines from BBC and Guardian, for instance. I respect both of those institutions for what they are, but they are very mainstream. So I have The Register, New Scientist and New Statesman headlines on my Google homepage.

The Gender On A Spectrum line caught my eye. I like the idea of a spectrum - as opposed to, say, a line or a fixed point. There is probably not a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow - maybe the rainbow itself is of more value than bits of metal.

That took me into the first paragraph of the article. I too distrust the word "weird". Vaccination, flight and long distance/wireless communications are "weird". And the idea of "discomfort" as an incentive to learning - yes, I find that interesting. Maybe the start should not be "Are you sitting comfortably?"

Gender, sex, spectrum? I grew up in Ireland at a time when there was little information about sex. One of the first informed conversations I had was with a friend's mother. I must have been about 9 or 10 at the time. She had some sort of social worker role in Dublin, 20 miles away. She described to me and one or two others how she had visited a convent in Dublin where the nuns looked after pregnant girls and put their babies up for adoption. However, the convent had a large room upstairs out of the way where the nuns had accumulated a number of youngsters no one wanted - and no one knew what to do with them. These children, over 10 of them, were of indeterminate sex. They were fed, physically looked after - but no one wanted them, recognised them, or knew what to do with them.

The woman in question insisted to the nuns that she was unhappy - and demanded that she should take one of the children home for the weekend with her, to spend time with her family. He had a boys name, and to us he was a young boy - about 8 or 9. I only saw him the once, though I believe he spent more than a few weekends at home with my friends family. And I was aware that there was a bit of a 'row' going on about what was happening to the other children.

For this and other reasons, as an adult I worked with children 'on the edge' - through behaviour, abuse and other circumstances. Fortunately, being on the edge, I have only dealt with relatively small numbers - though sometime the number has gone into three figures. But I try to counter the tendency to pigeon-hole children/people. I like the idea of positioning people on a very large map of mankind.

Similary I currently look to debate as an shared exploration on a spectrum of ideas rather than on a yaa-boo posturing from set points.

Does anyone out there have anything to say?