For this week's assignment, we are taking this discussion a step further and explore how such idealizations around gender, which arebased on a binary understanding of male and female, also involves sexuality. The author of this week's article, Gayle Rubin, is an Americananthropologist best known as an activist and theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects includingfeminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography, and lesbian culture as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, especially focused in urban contexts. The article assigned for this week, "Thinking Sex", is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She is an associate professor of anthropology, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For this week, please explain how Rubin's hierarchical system of sex value how expressed in the quote below is of outmost importance to understand our administration's aspiration to marginalize queers as it is, for example, described in the attached NYT-article on transgenderanti-discrimination rights during the Trump-era.

Gayle Rubin's quote on the hierarchical system of sexual value:

Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to ahierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals (Rubin p. 151)