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 annals of American democracy: it was said that Suydam was ‘‘more female than male,’’ and thus (since only men had the right to vote) should not be allowed to cast a ballot. The selectmen brought in a physician, one Dr. William Barry, to examine Suydam and settle the matter. Presumably, upon encountering a phallus and testicles, the good doctor declared the prospective voter male. With Suydam safely in their column, the Whigs won the election by a majority of one.
A few days later, however, Barry discovered that Suydam menstruated regularly and had a vaginal opening. Suydam had the narrow shoulders and broad hips characteristic of a female build, but occasionally ‘‘he’’ felt physical attractions to the ‘‘opposite’’ sex (by which ‘‘he’’ meant women). Furthermore, ‘‘his feminine propensities, such as fondness for gay colors, for pieces of calico, comparing and placing them together and an aversion for bodily labor, and an inability to perform the same, were remarked by many.’’[1] (Note that this nineteenth-century doctor did not distinguish between ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘gender.’’ Thus he considered a fondness for piecing together swatches of calico just as telling as anatomy and physiology.) No one has yet discovered whether Suydam lost the right to vote.2 Whatever the outcome, the story conveys both the political weight our culture places on ascertaining a person’s correct ‘‘sex’’ and the deep confusion that arises when it can’t be easily determined.
European and American culture is deeply devoted to the idea that there are only two sexes. Even our language refuses other possibilities; thus to write
about Levi Suydam (and elsewhere in this book) I have had to invent conventions—s/he and h/er to denote individuals who are clearly neither/both male and female or who are, perhaps, both at once. Nor is the linguistic convenience an idle fancy. Whether one falls into the category of man or woman matters in concrete ways. For Suydam—and still today for women in some parts of the world—it meant the right to vote. It might mean being subject to the military draft and to various laws concerning the family and marriage. In many parts of the United States, for example, two individuals legally registered as men cannot have sexual relations without breaking antisodomy laws.3
But if the state and legal system has an interest in maintaining only two sexes, our collective biological bodies do not. While male and female stand on the extreme ends of a biological continuum, there are many other bodies, bodies such as Suydam’s, that evidently mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males and females. The implications of my argument for a sexual continuum are profound. If nature really offers us more than two sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits. Reconceptualizing the category of ‘‘sex’’ challenges cherished aspects of European and American social organization.
Indeed, we have begun to insist on the male-female dichotomy at increasingly early ages, making the two-sex system more deeply a part of how we imagine human life and giving it the appearance of being both inborn and natural. Nowadays, months before the child leaves the comfort of the womb, amniocentesis and ultrasound identify a fetus’s sex. Parents can decorate the baby’s room in gender-appropriate style, sports wallpaper—in blue—for the little boy, flowered designs—in pink—for the little girl. Researchers have nearly completed development of technology that can choose the sex of a child at the moment of fertilization.4 Moreover, modern surgical techniques help maintain the two-sex system. Today children who are born ‘‘either/or—neither/both’’5—a fairly common phenomenon—usually disappear from view because doctors ‘‘correct’’ them right away with surgery. In the past, however, intersexuals (or hermaphrodites, as they were called until recently)* were culturally acknowledged (see figure 2.1).
How did the birth and acknowledged presence of hermaphrodites shape ideas about gender in the past? How did, modern medical treatments of intersexuality develop? How has a political movement of intersexuals and their supporters emerged to push for increased openness to more fluid sexual iden — [2] I
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figure 2. і: Sleeping hermaphrodite, Roman second century в. c. (Erich Lessing, from Art Resource; reprinted with permission) |
tities, and how successful have their challenges been? What follows is a most literal tale of social construction—the story of the emergence of strict surgical enforcement of a two-party system of sex and the possibility, as we move into the twenty-first century, of the evolution of a multiparty arrangement.