I have just heard the row on UK Breakfast TV show Good Morning Britain, a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding this gender neutral award on MTV.  Kelly Maloney and Piers Morgan getting themselves in a spin over the award and the many gender names on facebook (yuk) to describe a persons gender.  Piers adding his own spin as per usual with his own personal one “Arsenal Sad Flap” of something.

What’s so hard to understand about sex and gender?

My insignificant non socially connected and lone voice will make no difference what so ever on this but what I am about to write is correct.

• There are only two names for your birth sex – female and male (with the exception of hermaphrodites).
• There are many ways of identifying a persons gender.

That’s it …fact, easy.  Sex identification is how you were born, based on your  chromosomes etc, and cannot change no matter what surgery or hormone treatment you have, a sex change DOES NOT CHANGE YOUR BIRTH SEX OR CHROMOSOMES.

Gender identification is how you identify as a person in the world and can include surgery, hormones, how you dress, what you look like to but CANNOT change your sex chromosomes.

No amount of surgery, hormone injections or anything else will change someone’s DNA from a man’s to a woman’s (or vice versa). As you know, for humans, sex is determined by the presence of a Y chromosome — humans with an X and a Y chromosome are male and those with two X chromosomes are female.

23 Jul 2004 – sex change – Understanding Genetics – The Tech genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask35

Two types of sex, many types of gender

The whole storm in a tea cup is as simple a that.  Two types of sex many types of gender, in fact the gender options are almost limitless as they are totally personal ways of identifying yourself.  Two Spirit, Transgender, Bi Gender blah blah … WOMAN OR MAN are all gender types.

ALL GENDER TYPES ARE EQUAL and each of the gender types is a personal definition there is NO SINGLE UNIVERSAL DEFINITION OF GENDER.  Gender is personal and unique.

It’s easy … so really MTV’s gender neutral award is actually on one hand really silly and yet on the other hand really sensible but equally misguided.

If you have an award for best FEMALE actor and another for best MALE actor then you don’t need the award for best GENDER NEUTRAL actor.  The first two are sex categories the third one is a gender category.  WRONG.

Now, you could have awards for best Woman Actor and Best Man Actor (both gender names) and then an award for best Gender Neutral Actor.  This system would be correct.

HOWEVER … given that Females are striving for equality in every area of life excluding physical competition, were they are often naturally at a disadvantage, shouldn’t acting awards be best ACTOR irrespective of them being Female of Male?

At the end of it all artists such as actors and painters, dancers and well, all humans in ‘the arts’ are all simply artists.  So should it matter if someone is a female painter or a male dancer.

Wouldn’t is be better to have an award simply for best Human Actor?  Was Eddie Redmayne’s performance of Lili Elbe in the Danish Girl equally as good as Brie Larson acting in the Room?  In some ways couldn’t it be argued that given both actors played people that identified as Women and that Eddie Redmayne given he was born male and had no leaning or desire to identify as a Woman, didn’t he make the bigger acting leap?  So given acting is in part about ‘playing’ a character didn’t Eddie Redmayne have to ‘play’ harder than Brie Larson? I’m no expert in these things it’s all personal opinion.  If it was up to me Eddie Redmayne would win my award for Best Human Actor out of these two individuals.

Anyway I shall leave my insignificant contribution to bob along on the tsunami of noise on this topic, it will be lost like a grain of sand on a very large beach.  However every grain of sand helps make the beach so beautiful.  So we are all equally important and yet all equally insignificant.

Tread lightly

Want to find out more about Gender read this great book it’s based on a Gingerbread person.