Doing Justice to Someone, Essay Example

Judith Butler’s “Doing Justice to Someone” discusses the idea of gender and its power to determine the lives of people through their self-identification and how it relates to the norms of society. These studies present findings concerning how individuals identify themselves with gender.  Questions concerning how individuals are raised, and how their identities are related to the physical properties or the emotional background that they grew up in.

The difficulty in this determination is made evident in the example of the “John/Joan” case. Within these studies, various transgender individuals were studied in order to determine how they self-identify.  While it has been established that these individuals are effected by physical characteristics, the way in which they were brought up was also a factor. This concerns evidence of how individuals who went through these situations were affected by the studies themselves.

Many researchers, however, disagree on the outcome of these studies. “So, while some experts, such as Money, claim that the absence of the full phallus makes the social case for rearing the child as a girl, others, such as Diamond, argue that the presence of the Y chromosome is the most compelling fact or, that it is what is indexed in persistent feelings of masculinity, and that it cannot be constructed away.”  In this sense, it seems that the most important aspect to keep in mind when discussing the gender of individuals is their own sense of how they identify themselves.