THE THIRD SEX. WE EXIST, BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHO WE ARE?
Acrylic on canvas
200cm x 150cm (+ 2 cm tray frame in black)
It is true that for people living in the twenty-first century, sexuality has lost the innocence and spontaneity of the past. Like fast food chains providing a quick meal, future sex-change chains will soon be providing a new and quick sex-change, quicker than Kwik Fit changes tyres, happily chosen from a menu that goes from sex-reversal to bio-technological sex enhancements leaving the non-binary camp waiting to feel what sex nature had in store for them. However, I can’t shift the feeling, that this might sound a bit cynical, if not wrong altogether. There is clearly a third sex out there, it is called non-binary. I feel for it. Yes, I really do because science, in today’s age, is still against it. One can’t bear children without a womb. Fact. But does the womb alone identify a woman as a woman? The sheer arrogance from the scientific camp would suggest so, but not the bio-psychological one. So, who are we to patronise? How difficult must it be, per se, to have a female brain trapped in a male body, or a male brain in a female body. It must be simply put, ghastly. Who in the right mind would go through a gender-affirming-surgery, if it wasn’t a well thought through emergency? Exactly, no one. Starting with the sheer abundance of steps, that potential sex-change individuals must take to reach their final goal.
Well, the first step prior a gender-affirming surgery, is the customary hormone therapy. Androgens are given to women to help them develop secondary male sex characteristics such as a beard and body hair. Oestrogen and anti-androgens are given to men to help change their musculature, skin, and fat distribution, all of which will make them appear more feminine. It is said that the hormones' most important contribution is to reduce the dysphoria transgender people have been struggling with all their lives. After a month or two, their bodies and brains begin aligning. Finally, after approximately a year, follows the male to female or female to man surgery which is a type of sex reassignment surgery. In a male to female surgery, the testicles and most of the penis are removed (orchiectomy and penectomy) and the urethra is cut shorter. Some of the skin is used to fashion a largely functional vagina (vaginoplasty). A neoclitoris, that allows sensation, can be created from parts of the penis. Men retain their prostates.
Other surgeries include mammoplasty, chondroplasty (tracheal shave), voice feminisation surgery among others. In a female to male surgery, clitoris is changed into a penis, a neopenis (metoidioplasty and phalloplasty). During the procedure, the surgeon also removes the vagina, in a vaginectomy. In addition, they lengthen the urethra and position it through the neopenis. To achieve the lengthening, the surgeon uses tissues from the cheek, labia minora, or other parts of the vagina. The aim of this is to allow the person to urinate while standing. Other surgeries include scrotoplasty (create a scrotum) and hysterectomy (surgical removal of the uterus) among others.
I probably have missed out a myriad of steps and probably misspelled most of its technical terms, but I hope it gives you the gist. Oh boy, these are a lot of “PLASTIES’ and ‘ECTOMIES’, right? A woman’s brain can be trapped in a male body, like a male one in a female body. So, in the case of binary oppositions which side should win? Even the word win sounds wrong, right? Yes, because it suggests a loser. A losing side within your body. Maybe there wasn’t anything to win or lose in the first place? Correct, because one is what one becomes. Nevertheless, this is a bigger question than you might think, because whichever side wins and what they represent might be being portrayed as the correct option. Let’s take step back, the time before the healthy surgery craze. Nothing seems stranger to us nowadays than the sexual revolution in the 60s, the sexualisation of society, phallocentric dominant society in relation to gender equality, and yet for most of us, sexuality has become complicated, obscure, often difficult to handle. Men and Women are completely equal. And therefore, the difference has no social value of any kind, right? Does that mean that sexuality a sociocultural construct? Is animal sexuality natural and human sexuality cultural? Who am I?
Martin Heidegger showed that the difficulty of knowing oneself is one of the paradoxes of our technical and scientific culture. We cannot depend on science to tell us who we are, right? What the modern world shows us, is that despite our technical, scientific, and economic developments, we are in constant danger of losing our way in life, even our humanity. Immanuel Kant made a distinction between physical anthropology, or what nature makes of man, and pragmatic anthropology, or what man makes of his nature. It seems that human beings are brilliant at resolving countless problems, but on the other hand they constantly create as brilliantly new ones. The last and most important paradox, probably the deepest is that a person’s image is not made by man or by culture but discovered through the relationships each of us has with ‘his’, ‘her’ and ‘its’ origin and destiny. Yes, human beings need to know not only who they are, but above all in whose image they are made. Maybe God? Maybe nature? Maybe a gender ideologist? Maybe a biotechnologist? Maybe a crazy geneticist? Maybe an alien? Let’s go back to the third sex, the non-binary? Whatever their birth physicality, there are non-binary people who won’t identify as a single fixed gender position, as male or female. There are those who have a fluid gender. There are those who have no gender. And there are those who disagree with the very idea of gender. However, the proportion of the general population who are non-binary, in our times, is very difficult to measure. Humans need incubators, shelters, and artificial containers, in short, material and symbolic immunity scaffoldings, to protect themselves from a world that they are not well equipped at birth to inhabit. They are somehow compelled to form their world rather than simply expose themselves to its sheer facticity. Can we see the third sex as a new incubator? Never has humanity been as enthused by the prospect of a total and permanent transformation as in our age, up until now this has failed to produce anything other than “a cybernetic optimisation system, where we are guaranteed all human rights, except for the right to exit from facticity. Would the third sex exit our facticity? We all need at one point a bit of anthropotechnical help, right? We do with new pain medication for starters, not to mention eye laser surgery to name a few. We are already living, fully immersed, in an altered, anthropotechnical, world. Fact. Are we not all digging ourselves out, like Dumas’ the Count of Montecristo, from our prison, called facticity? Last but not least I want to touch upon the limits of language to define our sexuality. For Ludwig Wittgenstein the limits of language meant the limits of the world. Fascinating, but at the same time quite frightening, right? Unfortunately, we live in a tsunami of overzealous word-architects, that feel the need to describe the indescribable. Within our trio of sexualities, now we can find a plethora of new word creations that make for an interesting read. For starters there are Xenosexuals, who are attracted to non-human species and fantasies about having sex with aliens and robots. That was easy, right? Then you have Uranics, who are non-binary, that are attracted to men and other non-binary people with masculine traits. They are not attracted to women of feminine presenting genders but are not Androsexuals. Because Androsexuals are people of any sex or gender who are sexually and romantically attracted to masculinity. Are you still following me? Good. Following on we have Cupiosexuals, who are not attracted to anybody. I think we called them Asexuals in my time, right? Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Unlike Asexuals, Cupiosexuals still desire to be in a relationship, despite rarely having the mojo to do anything about it. Please, don’t make the terrible mistake to call an Iculasexual and Cupiosexual, because and Iculasexual is someone who has no sex drive but is open to having sex to anyone of any persuasion. Oh dear, the delicate ambiguity escaped me, are you feeling confused too? Join the club. Of course, a Kalosexual is somebody who desires to be in a sexual relationship but doesn’t have sexual feelings. But then you knew that, right? The list extends to infinity from Omnisexuals, through Pansexuals, Minsexuals, Ninsexuals to Sapiosexuals. However, after having lost my interest for a while, and focused mainly on making myself a sandwich, I came across two interesting new words that reminded me that I possess a mastodontic Achilles’ heel knowledge wise that runs up my whole body. Well, it hit me with sinus-clearing clarity. Yes, here was a chink in my knowledge armour, that made me feel inadequate and small. Trixic and Toric. Really? Trixic is somebody non-binary who is attracted exclusively to women. In my days it they would be called men or lesbians, right? Toric is somebody non-binary attracted solely to men. This eluded my grasp entirely. Maybe women and gays? But here was that bone-chilling failing again, to my chagrin, just as bad as ever. A defeated weariness stole over me, and I finished my sandwich and called it a day. So enough, about new words, the subject is confusing enough. Our friend Ludwig would have said: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
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