It's a boy. It's a girl. It's a hermaphrodite!

Spencer Tracy: What is the first thing you notice about a person?
Katherine Hepburn: Well I guess whether the person is male or female.
(from the movie "Desk Set")

This distinction between male and female is a subtle element of social communication hardly ever noticed until we meet that one person with boobs and a crew-cut and suddenly we don't know how to act because their sex is indeterminate and thus we can't cater to their gender.

Sex: the biological factors which categorize one as male or female

vs.

Gender: the social roles assigned based upon biological factors and referred to as either masculine or feminine.

In the Renaissance time period, the transvestite theater was the perfect medium for exploring this idea of distinguishing one's gender despite their sex. Boy actors played women onstage, particularly in Shakespearean plays, and it was a point of pride for these boy actors to attend dinner parties where, lined up with other women, guests would attempt to pick out the "false" girl. Many of these actors were so perfectly disguised they couldn't be discovered. Imagine being a biologically distinct girl in that line-up and chosen as the fake girl! So glad that wasn't me, my fuzzy upper lip and unshaven legs might make the chooser question my sex.

This combining of the male and female as well as masculine and feminine becomes the basis of the hermaphrodite. This being, originally upon the earth in three forms, male-male, female-female, and male-female, was thought to possess a whole or complete state of knowledge and being. When the hermaphrodite became a bit bold in their boastings, Zeus split the one into two and thus made the state of man divided, always found wanting. Only when the two parts combined, the two making one, would that divided state be whole for a time.

Well, that's nice but what does it have to do with life today besides having the occasional "weirdie" whose genderless state society shuns? Believe it or not, society is much more tolerant of the hermaphrodite than one would think. One word:

Avatar

Online avatars, or online social identities, allow the digital representation of the human become whoever they want to be. My friend, Krista, related the following experience:

I used to write for an online question-answering service, and for several months I didn't disclose my gender because I didn't want men or women to be able to disregard what I was saying because they thought the other side's (or their side's) point of view was irrelevant. I tried to write a little more "masculine," whatever that is, so that it was even more ambiguous, and I had people guessing both genders.

The world wide web has become the ultimate stage for exploring the fluidity of gender. What are the benefits of such a hermaphroditic social medium? Could this be proof that gender is simply a social role we play, not a way we "need" to be? Does this genderless forum enhance one of our foundational rights "freedom of speech" without impairment of a gender-bias opinion? Or does it create confusion within a society so dependent upon social cues established by gender?

This is just the beginning of a large issue which will be explored a little bit with each posting but I would LOVE to hear your opinions, as well as any articles you might have read which helped for, that opinion. Comment, comment, comment!