The Biology of Gender and the Construction of Sex?

Biomedicine has long had a contentious place in homosexual politics and queer studies. Paeans to the liberating role of science go back to the Victorian origins of the term homosexuality itself, when "sexual inverts" such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld argued for biological models of the hereditary and hormonal basis of "innate" homosexuality.¹ Homophile groups of the 1950s and 1960s were also accommodating to doctors in the hope that these figures of authority could liberalize public opinion. The argument that science was irrelevant to homosexual emancipation was made most astutely in the mid-1950s by Franklin Kameny, a leader of gay liberation.² He pointed out how societal homophobia repeatedly tainted researchers' methodology. His critique helped instigate the assault that forced the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove the diagnosis of homosexuality from the psychiatric nosology.³

Nevertheless, interest in the biological determinants of sexual orientation continued to be central to the essentialism-versus-constructionism wars that riled us all in gay and lesbian studies in the 1980s. By the early 1990s the debate had grown tiresome and was ably dissected and put in formaldehyde by Edward Stein's anthology on the topic.⁴ The debate built on the feminist legacy of suspicion (if not hostility) toward sexual science, which often reified male chauvinist constructions of biologically essential female inferiority.⁵ Similar critiques of biological essentialism have been waged around issues of race and a long history of scientific "proof" of the inferiority of non-European races.⁶

Yet biology soon came back to haunt us. The gay twin studies, the "gay hypothalamus," and the "gay gene" study of the early 1990s were front-page news and were fairly uncritically accepted by the gay press as well.⁷ Genetic explanations of homosexuality have been enthusiastically embraced by many gays and lesbians.⁸ In my psychiatric practice I regularly hear these explanations from gay and lesbian clients of all ages.⁹ Elsewhere I have analyzed why the American gay community (middle-class men in particular) have embraced the notion of a gay gene, and I have argued that molecular genetics is itself a social construct.¹⁰ Meanwhile, transgendered and intersexed people were forging new political movements that forced me to reconsider the place of the body and biology.

Sandy Stone's 1991 essay, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," was a rallying cry for a new generation of transgender activists and theorists. She called on transgenders to tell their full stories and not the stereotyped clinical narrative required by the gender reassignment gatekeepers in the medical profession.¹¹ This meant proclaiming an identity as transgendered rather than following the medical expectation to discard a past gendered history and pass as either male or female. A new generation of transgendered theorists deployed antiessentialist, feminist, and queer theory to further flesh out the "post" in fin de siècle transgender ontology. Susan Stryker, in the introduction to the groundbreaking transgender issue of GLQ, fully embraced a performative/discursive model of queer, transgender identity. For Stryker, queer transgenderism was a radical, antiheteronormative praxis of self-transformation through performance—not only of gender but of sexuality and anatomy.¹²

Other theorists have been critical of the aleatory quality of transgender identity in these performative models and have returned to a certain ineluctable materiality of the body and sex, as well as an irreducibility of gender. Even at the risk of falling into a somatic determinism and gender essentialism, Jay Prosser examines the gender experience of transsexuals and the real, poignant ways in which gender identity maps onto anatomy. Prosser aggressively wrestles with the discursive theory of Judith Butler and, more broadly, with the queer theory appropriations of trans identity. Prosser is particularly critical of Butler's reluctance to grapple with the materiality of the body and with her repeated "deliteralization of sex." Prosser points out that...