What Is a Normal Human?

Some­times you learn some­thing new that is really sur­pris­ing. Often it is some­thing that the gen­eral pub­lic is not exposed to sim­ply because gen­eral pub­lic sen­si­tiv­i­ties try to hide facts that we should prob­a­bly be more aware of than me are. We found the link to this page on the Inter­sex Soci­ety of North Amer­ica site through a Tweet from Auda­cia Ray.

We sus­pect that many Amer­i­cans would be very sur­prised to learn just how many births occur where the child is not bio­log­i­cally purely nei­ther male nor female. The fre­quency of occur­rence was extremely sur­pris­ing to us. The fact that one birth out of 1,166 births is nei­ther XX nor XY is an amaz­ing sta­tis­tic. But the sta­tis­tic that is most amaz­ing is that for one per­cent of births, the child’s body dif­fers from stan­dard male or female in some way. Only one or two out of 1,000 births receive surgery to “nor­mal­ize” gen­i­tal appear­ance. This is only 0.1%-0.2%. So this means that 0.8%-0.9% of Amer­i­cans walk­ing among us have some rec­og­niz­able form of “non-normal” gen­i­tal appearance.

Given society’s tremen­dous pres­sure to fit in, it is any won­der there is an emerg­ing indus­try built around labi­aplasty and sim­i­lar pro­ce­dures? We become so con­vinced there is a norm that peo­ple seek to look like this imag­i­nary stan­dard. And what of peo­ple who devi­ate from this imag­i­nary stan­dard to per­haps greater degrees. Soci­ety often chooses to label them as not nor­mal by some choice the per­son has made.

Unfor­tu­nately, sex­u­ally vari­a­tion is prob­a­bly run­ning way behind other forms of human vari­a­tion in terms of soci­etal accep­tance. Our soci­ety is barely get­ting around to accept­ing dif­fer­ent races, we have made some progress but have much more to make. We are just start­ing to accept the idea that per­haps we should accept gays and les­bians, at least in a few com­mu­ni­ties. But our soci­ety is still a long way from accept­ing with open arms that peo­ple who are vis­i­bly phys­i­cally dif­fer­ent are just peo­ple too. If the dif­fer­ence is sex­u­ally appear­ance, most peo­ple react with more that lack of accep­tance, most peo­ple recoil with disgust.

Maybe some­day we will real­ize that we are dif­fer­ent and thus all the same.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too