Sex talk and Occupational Therapy

I learned in class last night about creating online surveys. These are trickier to design than you might think. Take the simple act of requesting demographic information. Researchers really benefit from getting demo info. (Nielson makes a ton of money on demo's alone) Anyway, in my pursuit of developing the best Occupational Therapy focused website, I will need to know about the demographics of my constituency (my prof keeps insisting I call it the frame, but that is just confusing to me... so I am sticking with constituency).

So we were sitting in class discussing the development of an online survey that includes demographic information. So, the first think we talk about is sex (ahem, gender). This one should be easy right... wrong (mind you we were getting a bit punchy) but he said there are only two genders so the type of question should be nominal (where you just name stuff) and have a setting where you can only choose one. Someone then pointed out (correctly so) that there are some people who are both sexes. Then another person said, 'oh like cross dressers'. The conversation shifted to discussing how there is a difference between gender and sex. (um... yeah, one is way more fun than the other... ---oops must maintain G rating... anyway I digress) The conversation explored how people are born with a sex and they choose a gender. That is all well and good until you recognize that some people are born with all the mm... 'parts'. The class continued to banter on this distinction and I lost interest in what they were saying.

My mind started to wonder and I found myself having an internal discussion about how people focus much of their lives around how they define themselves. We are sexual beings and anyone who denies this is just not thinking in broad enough terms. As an occupational therapy student, we had a class session devoted to the discussion of how we can help our clients with needs that arise around sex.

Not only to we as OT's have to be sensitive and responsive to our client's needs we need to also recognize that as an OT we might need to help someone say for example a transvestite re-learn dressing. This population may have a few very different needs than a traditional male/female dressing components. I don't know much about this, as I don't have any friends who are transvestites. But if I did, I might ask them about the challenges they might face if they were hurt in such a way that would make dressing difficult. I see the topic of transvestitism occasionally on TV, but that is my only experience and we all know you can't blindly trust what you see on TV. Regardless, I think that there are other sex/gender issues that may be at issue for a client/patient of an OT. We as OT's need to be aware that these are real issues that real people face.

As for my class... we then moved on to culture/ethnicity... you guessed it... we then had a half hour discussion (where some very good points were made) about defining culture vs. ethnicity…

And I was already tired and a little sad from the sex (or is it gender... I am still confused) talk.