9/28 Summary Post

Anne Fausto-Sterling begins by discussing an important incident from the 1988 Olympics, when a female athlete on the Spanish team was not allowed to participate in the competition due to her failure to pass the sex-test. Although she appeared female and had trained as a female her entire life, according to the Olympic scientific gender test, she was technically male because they had a Y chromosome and had neither ovaries nor a uterus, instead had testes. Fausto-Sterling continues by demonstrating that views of sex have significantly changed throughout time. Prior to 1968, female Olympic competitors were often asked to show themselves naked in front of a board of examiners and breasts/a vagina were the only necessities to certify one's femininity. The issues behind the differences between social expression of gender and the physical underpinnings of gender have been an intense topic of debate. In 1972, sexologists John Money and Anke Erhardt first popularized the notion that sex and gender are different and distinct categories. Sex is anatomically and genetically determined while gender is a psychological transformation of the self. Fausto-Sterling argues that scientists have simply created these so-called truths about sexuality; how our bodies serve to re-enforce these truths and how these truths also serve to mold our cultural environment. Many of these "facts" about the modern world are not actually universal truths but are "rooted in specific histories, practices, languages and peoples" (Haraway). Society, Anne argues, attempts to divide everyone into simply male or female. There is no in between or mix between the two because modernity considers progress to be making everything "normal". This "two-sex model" is challenged by feminists on a daily basis. In addition to limiting the world to only two sexes, modern anthropology limits the development of sexuality to simply nature or nurture. Anthropologists reflect two contradictory strains of thought: (1) "cultural influences model of sexuality" which emphasizes the importance of culture in molding sexual behavior but assumes the main driver of sexuality is biologically determined and (2) to interpret sexuality completely in terms of social construction, not taking into account any biological influence. Fausto-Sterling points out that one of the weaknesses of anthropology is that they must "invent categories into which they support collected information" (19); therefore any and all discoveries made by anthropologists are simply socially constructed ideas. Euro-American ways of understanding the world rely on the use of dualisms, or pairs of opposing concepts, objects or belief systems. Three of the main ones focused on in this text are sex/gender, nature/nurture and real/constructed. The dualism of nature/nurture has been challenged by a group of developmental systems theorists, who deny that there are only two kinds of processes: one guided by genes and biology and the other guided by the environment. The dualism of real versus constructed is commonly used in the idea that sex and nature are considered real while gender and culture are constructed. Despite the scientific evidence of hormones, brain development and sexual behavior, these scientific understandings are simply "constructed in and bear the marks of specific historical and social contexts" (29).

In her second chapter, titled "That Sex Which Prevaileth", Fausto-Sterling describes how particularly Europeans and American culture is deeply devoted to the notion that there are only two sexes. Not only does our language does restrict the idea of having multiple sexes, but even our state and legal systems have an interest in maintaining only two sexes. Fausto-Sterling continues by giving the history of hermaphrodites since the time of Greek mythology. Throughout history, different cultures have dealt with intersexuals in different ways. While Aristotle argued that genitalia did not determine the sex of a baby but hermaphrodites truly only belonged to one of the two possible sexes, Galen argued that they belonged to an intermediate sex, rejecting the commonly accepted notion of a bi-sex world. Different countries and different legal/religious systems viewed intersexuality in very different ways; however all of Europe had a clear distinction between the male and female that was at the core of legal and political systems in place historically and today. As biology emerged as an accepted science in the late 18^th century, it started to gain authority over the determination of sexually ambiguous individuals. Biologists including Saint-Hilaire and James Young Simpson attempted to classify hermaphrodites in the modern world. New standards of hermaphroditism were created to facilitate in the classification. Fausto-Sterling also references how women’s increased demands for equality in the US and England had “profound implications for the scientific categorization of intersexuality. More than ever, politics necessitated two and only two sexes” (40). The more social activist movements attempted to get rid of the divisions between the sexes, the more doctors and scientists insisted on the absolute division between males and females. Moving into the 20^th century, further understanding of the physiological base of intersexuality began to facilitate the diagnosis of intersexuals at the moment of birth. The motive for conversion, although genuinely humanitarian, is deeply rooted in the ideas that there should only be two sexes; that only heterosexuality is normal; and that specific gender roles defined the psychologically “healthy” man and woman.

In the excerpt called “One Bad Hair Day Too Many, or the Hairstory of an Androgynous Young Feminist”, Myhre describes how her decision to get a crew cut and dress in a more masculine way and the reactions she witnessed in response to her choice. She argues that “feminity isn’t inherent, natural or biological”. She describes how her decision to dress a certain way is a constant reminder to those who believe an individual can only be masculine or feminine. Her description of life as being a “butch” woman further emphasizes the points made in Sexing the Body about how our culture and society do not truly accept intersexual people. If you don’t fit into one of the two sexes then you aren’t really accepted.