Sex Assigned at Birth

In the Ted Talk, “The way we think about biological sex is wrong,” Emily Quinn, artist, activist, and author speaks about being intersex and society’s expectations about sex assigned at birth.  It controls the way we think about ourselves and the way others perceive us. Quinn introduces the fact that there is another term that people tend to ignore. Intersex. A person who is intersex is born with male and female biological traits. As a woman born intersex, Quinn makes it clear that the gender a person is born with, defines that person for a long time, until the day that person might not feel comfortable in their body. Throughout the Ted Talk, Quinn tends to make a lot of jokes about her body and genitalia. Jokes that she made before anyone else could make them about her as if it was some type of defense mechanism that she learned to develop. “I have a vagina…The thing is, I also have balls.” Being intersex caused this humor, confidence, and personality that is shown by Quinn’s public speaking. Because of how Emily Quinn was born, she developed a dialect that cannot be seen just by quotes on a page. The point of this is to stay relatable, entertaining and focused on the audience through her charisma, which works. “I want to change the way that we think about biological sex in this society — which is a lot to ask for. You could say it’s ballsy, I guess.” Through her words and credibility, she explains the variety in human biology and that though genitals don’t tell us anything about the character of a person, we tend to define ourselves with them. By using herself as an example, Quinn explains that our society obsesses over this sex and gender binary when it is really a spectrum. And until the non-binary gender spectrum is normalized, the gender norms in this society will continue to cause us to push the sex assigned at birth as our whole identities.