As biology emerged as an organized discipline during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it gradually acquired greater authority over the disposition of ambiguous bodies.19 Nineteenth-century scientists developed a clear sense of the statistical aspects of natural variation,20 but along with such knowledge came the authority to declare that certain bodies were abnormal and […]

Intersexuality is old news. The word hermaphrodite comes from a Greek term that combined the names Hermes (son of Zeus and variously known as the messenger of the gods, patron of music, controller of dreams, and protector of livestock) and Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty). There are at least two Greek […]

The S exual Continuum In i 843 Levi Suydam, a twenty-three-year-old resident of Salis­bury, Connecticut, asked the town’s board of selectmen to allow him to vote as a Whig in a hotly contested local election. The request raised a flurry of objections from the opposition party, for a reason that must be rare in the […]

Grosz postulates innate drives that become organized by physical experience into somatic feelings, which translate into what we call emotions. Taking the innate at face value, however, still leaves us with an unexplained residue of nature.112 Humans are biological and thus in some sense natural beings and social and in some sense artificial—or, if you […]

‘‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.’’ So Shake­speare’s Prospero denounces Caliban in The Tempest. Clearly, questions of na­ture and nurture have troubled European culture for some time. Euro- American ways of understanding how the world works depend heavily on the use of dualisms—pairs of opposing concepts, objects, or belief […]

While historians have looked to the past for evidence of whether human sexu­ality is inborn or socially constructed, anthropologists have pursued the same questions in their studies of sexual behaviors, roles, and expressions found in contemporary cultures around the globe. Those examining data from a wide variety of non-Western cultures have discerned two general patterns.74 […]

I enter the debates about sex and gender as a biologist and a social activist.18 Daily, my life weaves in and out of a web of conflict over the politics of sexual­ity and the making and using of knowledge about the biology of human behav­ior. The central tenet of this book is that truths about […]

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 […]

Male or Female? In the rush and excitement of leaving for the 1988 Olympics, Maria Patino, Spain’s top woman hurdler, forgot the requisite doctor’s cer­tificate stating, for the benefit of Olympic officials, what seemed patently ob­vious to anyone who looked at her: she was female. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had anticipated the possibility […]

This book took more than six years to write. During that time I have had the consistent support of family and friends who put up with my obsession and my withdrawal from polite company whenever I focused on a new deadline. I thank all of them and each of them. Each of you (and you […]