Until 1968 female Olympic competitors were often asked to parade naked in front of a board of examiners. Breasts and a vagina were all one needed to certify one’s femininity. But many women complained that this procedure was degrading. Partly because such complaints mounted, the IOC decided to make use of the modern ‘‘scientific’’ chromosome test. The problem, though, is that this test, and the more sophisticated polymerase chain reaction to detect small regions of DNA associated with testes development that the IOC uses today, cannot do the work the IOC wants it to do. A body’s sex is simply too complex. There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference. In chapters 2—4 I’ll address how scientists, medical professionals, and the wider public have made sense of (or ought to make sense of) bodies that present themselves as neither entirely male nor entirely female. One of the major claims I make in this book is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place.
Over the last few decades, the relation between social expression of masculinity and femininity and their physical underpinnings has been hotly debated in scientific and social arenas. In 1972 the sexologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardt popularized the idea that sex and gender are separate categories. Sex, they argued, refers to physical attributes and is anatomically and physiologically determined. Gender they saw as a psychological transformation of the self—the internal conviction that one is either male or female (gender identity) and the behavioral expressions of that conviction.9
Meanwhile, the second-wave feminists of the 1970s also argued that sex is distinct from gender—that social institutions, themselves designed to perpetuate gender inequality, produce most of the differences between men and women.10 Feminists argued that although men’s and women’s bodies serve different reproductive functions, few other sex differences come with the territory, unchangeable by life’s vicissitudes. If girls couldn’t learn math as easily as boys, the problem wasn’t built into their brains. The difficulty resulted from gender norms—different expectations and opportunities for boys and girls. Having a penis rather than a vagina is a sex difference. Boys performing better than girls on math exams is a gender difference. Presumably, the latter could be changed even if the former could not.
Money, Ehrhardt, and feminists set the terms so that sex represented the body’s anatomy and physiological workings and gender represented social forces that molded behavior.11 Feminists did not question the realm of physical sex; it was the psychological and cultural meanings of these differences— gender—that was at issue. But feminist definitions of sex and gender left open the possibility that male/female differences in cognitive function and behavior12 could result from sex differences, and thus, in some circles, the matter of sex versus gender became a debate about how ‘‘hardwired’’ intelligence and a variety of behaviors are in the brain,13 while in others there seemed no choice but to ignore many of the findings of contemporary neurobiology.
In ceding the territory of physical sex, feminists left themselves open to renewed attack on the grounds of biological difference.14 Indeed, feminism has encountered massive resistance from the domains of biology, medicine, and significant components of social science. Despite many positive social changes, the 1970s optimism that women would achieve full economic and social equality once gender inequity was addressed in the social sphere has faded in the face of a seemingly recalcitrant inequality.15 All of which has prompted feminist scholars, on the one hand, to question the notion of sex itself,16 while on the other to deepen their inquiry into what we might mean by words such as gender, culture, and experience. The anthropologist Henrietta A. Moore, for example, argues against reducing accounts of gender, culture, and experience to their ‘‘linguistic and cognitive elements.’’ In this book (especially in chapter 9) I argue, as does Moore, that ‘‘what is at issue is the embodied nature of identities and experience. Experience… is not individual and fixed, but irredeemably social and processual.’’17
Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-cut answers about sexual difference. The more we look for a simple physical basis for ‘‘sex,’’ the more it becomes clear that ‘‘sex’’ is not a pure physical category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas about gender. Consider the problem facing the International Olympic Committee. Committee members want to decide definitively who is male and who is female. But how? If Pier re de Couber tin were still around, the answer would be simple: anybody who desired to compete could not, by definition, be a female. But those days are past. Could the IOC use muscle strength as some measure of sex? In some cases. But the strengths of men and women, especially highly trained athletes, overlap. (Remember that three women beat Hermann Ratjen’s high jump). And although Maria Patino fit a commonsense definition of femininity in terms of looks and strength, she also had testes and a Y chromosome. But why should these be the deciding factors?
The IOC may use chromosome or DNA tests or inspection of the breasts and genitals to ascertain the sex of a competitor, but doctors faced with uncertainty about a child’s sex use different criteria. They focus primarily on reproductive abilities (in the case of a potential girl) or penis size (in the case of a prospective boy). If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery and hormones to carry out the decision. Choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines.