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1 The Social Construction of Biological Facts I think that my transgenderism was caused by a prenatal misprogramming of my posterior hypothalamus, just as I know, medically, that my Intersex condition was caused by a congenital misprogramming of my anterior hypothalamus and adrenals. (Raven, transgendered FtM intersexual) To the best of my knowledge I wasn’t diagnosed as hermaphrodite at birth. The medical records I have been able to obtain only indicate unusual genitalia, but not the word hermaphrodite. I don’t see any scarring on my body that would indicate infant surgery. Keep in mind I was born in ’69 in a tiny rural town in the Deep South. When I was taken to the doctor at age 7 for precocious puberty is when doctors really noticed I was “di=erent.” My family didn’t have money for doctor visits, plus my mom being mostly raised by her Native American grandmother didn’t believe in “white medicine .” So for those reasons I think I escaped the doctor’s scalpel. After the doctors paraded me around to their other doctor friends and nurses as a circus freak, I begged mom not to take me to the [doctors] again and she never did. (Dawn, hermaphrodite) The physical di=erences between the sexes are in themselves of little relevance to the human capacities required in most of life’s undertakings —except for reproduction. In the face of the fact that some infants are born with some combination of “male” and “female” reproductive and sexual characteristics—“incontrovertible evidence”—doctors still cling to the idea that there are only two “natural” options (Kessler 1990, p. 4). This makes the questions asked by Erving Go=man (1977, p. 319) all the more compelling: “How in modern society do such irrelevant biologi- cal di=erences between the sexes come to seem of vast social importance? How without biological warrant, are these biological di=erences elaborated socially?” When I use the term sex or biological sex, I am referring to an individual’s chromosomal makeup, external genitalia, internal reproductive organs, hormone levels, and gonads (ovaries and testes). As we shall see, even biological sex manifests di=erently from person to person. Doctors observe these di=erences, and many step in to decide, for example, what is an acceptable size for a penis or clitoris. As intersex individuals have learned, doctors may surgically transform an appendage labeled a “micropenis” into a vagina; they may reduce the size of an “enlarged clitoris.” What biological “fact” made the penis too small or the clitoris too large? None. Instead , doctors and other medical/scientific personnel have interpreted a set of biological traits to fit their notion of a binary gendered reality: penises should be large, and clitorises should be small. But as we shall see, biology itself defies the binary. The presumption that two genders correspond to two sexes is shown to be false when we realize that there are more than two sexes and, therefore, more than two genders. According to Roughgarden (2004, p. 27) bodies are sexed according to only one biological fact: the size of the gametes (sperm and eggs) of the species. Sperm are small and eggs are large. Period . This gamete binary (small and large) does not correspond to anything else in the body such as body type, behavior, or life history; it is a minor “sex marker” in a much wider constellation of biological sex traits. In the course of extensive research, Roughgarden has found that most kinds of plants, and half the species in the animal kingdom, consist of individuals that can be male and female at the same time or at di=erent times in their life span. Goby fish, for example, crisscross their sex for the purpose of reproduction. Variations in mammals can involve the presence of gonads (ovaries and testes) and/or the making of gametes (sperm and eggs). These variations are intersex combinations. For example, 10 to 20 percent of female grizzly bears, brown bears, American black bears, and polar bears mate and give birth through the tip of a clitoris rather than having a separate uterus. All female spotted hyenas of Tanzania have a clitoris that resembles and functions like a penis, and fused labia that form a scrotum. This spotted hyena gives birth through the penile canal. In Europe, male old world moles have testes, but females have both ovarian and testicular tissue. Among marine mammals, some striped dolphins have external female genitals with testes and...

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