Medicalization Of Gender

Essay # 1

Race is a specific characteristic, used to classify individuals into groups. It is considered a cultural construct because there are no biological affiliations with race. It is something that our society has culturally defined, agreed upon, and accepted. I will be presenting three different scientific facts to support this statement. First, race is produced by the dominant group of society and classified by analyzing a person’s skin color.

This was first seen within the time of slavery, with white European slave owners exerting ethnocentrism over black African American slaves. Skin color was used to determine a person’s status, free or slave. However, a person with more European than African decent was still considered black and

As the condition is medicalized, they receive government grants and funding to better the treatment quality and technology given to patients. I feel government representatives also support this medicalization because it focuses the attention off of social components, like the strict gender categories and roles a person must belong to, and onto biological components, to which they are not responsible for. The trans-gender community can be seen to support and reject medicalizing Gender Dysphoria, as it allows treatment to be more accessible, but also increases stigmatization. Strong religious groups advocate against the medicalization of this disorder, as they put the blame on the individual’s parents and argue for prayer and counseling to guide the individual back in the right direction

However, there are distinct difference between them. A disease is a medical condition that is clinically recognized to be caused by a biological or chemical factor. Diseases are medical conditions that directly affect internal organs and can be consistently diagnosed throughout the world, regardless of cultural differences. Illness, on the other hand, is the overall experience of being ill. In addition, illness is how a patient makes sense of his feelings of being un-well. Often times, disease and illness coincide with one another. An illness, or feeling of being un-well, can be caused by a disease. For example, the medical condition, anorexia, is considered an illness. Patients suffering from this illness may have poor body image, low self-esteem, or distorted views of food. These perceptions all contribute to the many reasons why a patient suffering with anorexia chooses not to eat. If this illness persists, diseases, such as heart failure, can develop. This is a disease because it effects an organ and can be studied with the same diagnosis worldwide. As diseases remain consistent among different cultures, illnesses vary tremendously. In America, our culture views a healthy woman’s body to be slender and athletic. These cultural pressures influence anorexia and feelings of body insecurities. In Latin-American cultures, anorexia isn’t as prevent because they value their women to have a “curvy” figure. Even though the