Recently, I read an article called "Gender as a Spectrum, Not a Dichotomy" and I felt the need to share my feelings towards it. While reading this article, I was taken through a diverse aspect of what gender truly is. In today’s world, with the advancement of technology, gender is not simply determined as it used to be; today we do not simply look at the phenotype of individuals. When referring to gender, technology advancements have now driven us to look deeper into an individual and we wonder; can we just determine someone’s gender based on anatomical characteristics?

Although it is ingrained in our heads that gender is determined by anatomical features which lead to a dichotomous gender approach, situations arise where gender cannot be determined simply by the individual’s genitalia. It begins by discussing a question faced in the delivery room; Is it a boy or a girl? Once in every 1,500 to 2,000 births, a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia—external genitalia that cannot be described clearly as male or female. In the United States, there are 4 million births per year, which means that there are roughly five infants born per day with this condition. When this occurs, the physician is not able to immediately answer the new parents question, rather he/she waits until the baby can be examined further.

Ambiguous genitalia is not the only disorder of sexual development. Individuals with a disorder of sexual development may be defined as male in one category, and female in another. For example, an individual may have mixed gonadal tissue structure with characteristics of both a testis and an ovary, called an ovotestis, or they may have an undescended testis on one side and an ovary on the other side. There are individuals that may have the gonads of one sex, and the external genitalia of the opposite sex. This means that the individual could be male based on their gonads, and female based on their external genitalia. This again provides evidence of why the gender determination lies on a spectrum.

There are multiple variables that come into play when determining gender, and many of these variables lead to an individual that classifies into both male and female categories; So, what are they, male or female? Individuals with sexual development disorders are stuck with two options for gender that do not fit them.This question cannot be answered because the individual does not fall 100% into either of these two categories. The only thing that meets 100% is their confusion about why society demands that they must be 100% of anything! It’s simple when you think about it in a different way. We classify many things on a spectrum: colors, politics, disorders, etc. Let’s look at the color spectrum; You can’t classify every color as only “red” or “blue” because what about the array of colors in between? What about the color that is mostly blue but also has a tiny bit of red in it? We call that color violet and it would fall somewhere on the spectrum closer to blue, but we cannot label it as “blue”. If people would take the time to learn about gender, their opinions might change. Society bashes people that don’t fit into one category of gender, but I have never heard someone call violet an ugly color.