Middle Sexes: film review

The United States and most western cultures have a strong belief that someone is either male or female. The film Middle Sexes Redefining He and She shows how incomplete this belief is and examines how varied gender really is. The film reveals the beliefs of different cultures such as, Africa, India, and Thailand. In these cultures, homosexuality and transgender are not thought of in the same way they are in western predominantly Christian cultures. For example in the United States, transgendered individuals are diagnosed with the psychological disorder of Gender Identity Disorder, this is explained in the following video segment by In the Life.
This is not the case in many of the cultures examined in the film Middle Sexes. In Thailand the Katoy are the accepted third gender of people that are transitioning or have transitioned from male to female. The Katoy and India’s Hijras are very convincing argument for more than two genders. However, it was not necessary to discuss the homosexual behaviors of the animal kingdom as a valid argument, because animals do many things humans do not do and vise versa.
Unfortunately, transgendered people are still considered some of the most deviant members of society and many times subject to violence, as shown in the film.
In the blog post, Why does the media show transgender children more sympathetically? Emily Manuel explains that children are not seen as sexual beings and that allows society to see transgender in children as not a sexual choice. The film depicts this idea with Noah a biological boy wishing to live as a girl. This idea of sympathy for transgendered children could be investigated further by selecting individuals, which claim to not approve of transgendered people and show them videos of both transgendered adults and children while monitoring their heart rate and blood pressure. I suspect they would have somewhat of an anger reaction to the adults and not so much the children. This may help to give people a better understanding of transgendered people and how to get us closer to more than one gender in western cultures as suggested in the film Middle Sexes.