Jesse Cole English 102 April 20, 2015
Rhetorical Analysis Essay (Rough Draft)

In the essay “Are We Worried about Storm’s identity –or our own”, author Patricia William’s point was to express her feelings and beliefs on sexual identity and everything that came along with the parents that refused to reveal Storm’s sex. William’s purpose in this essay, was to consider the few reasons the parents had to keep Storm a gender deprived alien, but she ultimately argues against doing this; yielding negativity and discrimination in our day to day lives. Williams illustrates how overwhelmingly negative the response was, once publically announced that Kathy Witterick and David Stocker decided not to share Storm’s sex for now. The reasoning was described as “A tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation.” Williams expressed it to be “hardly a full-fledged commitment to life-long gender suppression or neutered identity.” After all, it is a much under-interrogated political truism that “we’re all just people” or “were all equal” or “it doesn’t matter what your religion is” or “I don’t see race.” Who cares about anything else if “Were all American citizens”? It seems as if she is writing to a conservative audience. Speaking as if she was running among a selective party in a campaign and she is putting the icing on the cake with deliberately exercising how these parents have endangered their child’s life by keeping its gender a secret, not only in a social way but almost discriminatorily. There are people who do follow such identity-erasing truisms to their logical, uncomfortable ends, refusing altogether to engage in the conventions of gendered identity. Their logic is unsettling: “We’re not supposed to talk, to think, about difference based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion et al.” Williams proves that denial is self-belief, upon ones certainty to demoralize themselves or others. “Only when the marks, the phenotypes, the stigmas, are clear—indeed so clear that all conversation coagulates around the dynamics of denial: “I didn’t notice you were black—what a reverse racist you are for labeling yourself!” and also “Why