HIST 3960

Midterm Essay

Do we truly need a true sex?

Sex (and gender) remains one of the major organizing principles of the contemporary society.
Despite extremely influential feminist movement since 1960s and its challenges to gender
system, sex, for the most part, remains important referent. Although idea that gender is a social
construction gained relatively wide recognition, sex, as a biological, “real” entity maintains its
popularity. In order to answer Foucault’s question “Do we truly need a true sex?” (1980: vii) or
Fausto-Sterling’s (2000) “Should there be only two sexes?” (77), we need to employ
contemporary critical theories and historical records, which demonstrate that sex is far from
being a natural, inevitable fact, but rather a social, scientific, and medical construction.
Construction of “true sex” is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Western world, fueled by
various scientific developments, and not a trans-historical fact representing unchanging reality.
In this paper I will argue that maintaining the idea of true sex and sex binary inevitably produces
oppressive ideology, which excludes and represses various non-normative bodies and
perpetuates heteronormativity, therefore it should be abandoned.

Biological sex, defined as male or female, does not have a clear biological, scientific, or medical
basis. Rather it is situational, constantly produced and reinforced. Laquier (1990) traces the
changing discourse of “making sex” from “one-sex” to “two-sex” model and argues that the idea
of “opposite sex” is a recent phenomenon fueled by the scientific, medical, and epistemological
developments in the 18th century. The one-sex model meant that woman and man where just
slightly different version of the same sex, although hierarchically organized. For example, one of
the signs of this one-sex model was lack of linguistic terms to differentiate male and female
sexual and reproductive organs. He also states that “sex, in both the one-sex and the two-sex
worlds, is situational; it is explicable only within the context of battles over gender and power”
(11). Thus, the invention of inherently opposite sex, based on biology, needs to be situated
within the various historical developments in politics, science and ideas about gender and
sexuality.
Body of the hermaphrodite, or intersex person, becomes one of the sites of where natural sex and
its binary implications gets challenged. Foucault (1980) identifies years around 1860 and 1970 as
crucial moment “when investigations of sexual identity were carried out with the most intensity,
in an attempt not only to establish the true sex of hermaphrodites but also to identify, classify,
and characterize the different types of perversions” (xii). He argues that up until that moment
hermaphrodite body was treated much more liberally, and even if gender role was typically
asked to be assigned by father, the person could choose his or her gender later on. Ideas
stemming from scientific developments during and after Enlightenment increasingly saw body as
another site of “truth,” as an element in overall order of things which could be unproblematically
categorized by various “experts”. Herculine Barbin’s body becomes a case in which scientific
authority needs to intervene by assigning “true sex” and fixing “nature’s mistake.” It is an
obvious example of violence such discourse is able to inflict on individual body, as well case in
point, where every instance of “deviance” reifies and naturalizes gender binary system. It also
reinforces heteronormativity, as exemplified by Barbine’s and her lover’s abrupt relationship’s
end. Legally and scientifically defined “truths” about sex might be informed by certain ideas
about gender and sexuality while at the same constructing ideas and material bodies.

Although “true sex” appears to be a fiction, rather than reality, the tendency has been to uphold it
as natural by scientists, politicians, and medical establishment, as well as popular culture. Social
meanings attached to sex binary and heterosexuality resist any challenges to the dominant logic
as represented by various non-normative bodies as simply pathologies. Fausto-Sterling (2000)
states, that whenever we need to, we change “our scientific narratives to conform to our cultural
transformation” (73). In her discussion about intersex surgeries, she argues that while science
does not have clear-cut guidelines what constitutes male or female sex, the doctors base their
decisions to intervene on conservative gender and sexuality assumptions. For example, whether
the size of the penis will be adequate for heterosexual intercourse for a man is a more important
factor than the pleasure that could be experienced from a larger clitoris for a woman. On the one
hand it could be argued that doctors simply play benevolent role by conforming to the existing
ideas about gender and sexuality, on the other hand, however, it is a clear instance where regime
of gender and sexuality gets naturalized and reinforced by the medical authority, as well as
material violence is inflicted upon “deviant” bodies. In this case, gender/sex order is not merely
discursive enterprise, but a site where material bodies get produced. Fausto-Sterling argues that
ideal type, “the complete maleness and completer femaleness represent extreme ends of a
spectrum of possible bodies” (76). Simply because they are more statistically prevalent should
not justify the violence such discourse produces through its claim about “natural” and “normal”
body. Therefore, the effort should be made to move away from the idea of natural sex and gender
binary, since it does not have real basis for its legitimacy, except allusions to binary gender
hierarchy and heteronormativity. The “true” sex discourse is an ideology which attempts to
maintain superiority of certain bodies, while ignoring materiality of others.

Another example of material body that is often in an uneasy position between naturalizing sex
while at the same transgressing it is a body of the transsexual. Sex reassignment surgery became
possible relatively recently in part because of certain scientific-medical technologies. To qualify
for sex change operation required a “proof” that a person was trapped in a “wrong body” (Stone
1991: 223). On the one hand, the procedure which requires clear allegiance to desired, hyper-
normative “opposite” sex appears to be another mechanism in the binary sex ideology; on the
other hand, however, the technological tools that allow to suddenly change from one “natural”
sex to the other, challenges and destabilizes the natural order. Stone, however, after reviewing
variety of transsexual (auto)biographies, argues that transsexuals often are complicit in
reinforcing binary gender system. For Stone “passing means denial of mixture” (231). She hopes
that “in the transsexual as text we may find the potential to map the refigured body onto
conventional gender discourses and disrupt it, to take advantage of the dissonances created by
such a juxtaposition to fragment and reconstitute the elements of gender in new and unexpected
geometries” (231). Stone calls to assert difference and exercise political agency through
culturally un-intelligible body. Transsexual body can and does become another destabilizing
factor in the binary sex system. Transsexual body, whether the one that passes or not, is another
example of the real material bodies that cannot be simply put into a category male or female.
Such body can simultaneously refer to “natural sex” as a desirable end, while simultaneously
proving that it is a fiction to be transgressed.

Historically, establishment of sex as natural produced various effects. For example, the
establishment of “separate spheres” along the gender lines during the rise of bourgeois society
and particular family ideal in the 19th century, in which women were “naturally” inclined towards
private, while men were seen as more productive in the public because of their innate rationality.
That is not to say that various gender did not play role in previous period, but establishment of
sex as scientific reality allowed various new developments in which women was clearly to
occupy inferior, although perceived as complimentary, role. Disciplines such as psychoanalysis
also played role in reinforcing women’s “natural” inferiority, although, as in case of Freud, “it
aspired to the liberation of women (though not from men, but from their own neuroses)” (Porter
1992: 222). Naturalization of sex and the urge of various scientific disciplines to know the
“body” led also into establishing of category homosexual, along with variety of other sexually
“deviant” categories. Although the link might not be clear, it should be seen as stemming from
the same scientific developments informed by the patriarchal and heteronormative ideas. Even
some feminists in the 1970s while fighting to gain rights and more power for women, sometimes
fell into a trap of essentialism and reproduced certain exclusionary politics, as Janice Raymonds
attack on transsexual women demonstrates. Identity politics in general has been an enormous
battlefield in which boundaries for rights, recognition, and progressive politics got blurred with
biological essentialism, for example, of gender and race. Although sex, as a category, was and
possibly might be employed for certain progressive causes, the binary sex system in place does
not need to remain in place, since it always by its inherent logic will produce exclusions, and
most likely, heteronormative ideology to maintain itself.

Whether it is doctors’ unwillingness not to “fix” ambiguously sexed bodies or transsexuals

unable or unwilling to pass, should be situated within a larger context, which polices and
punishes gender deviance in various ways. Individuals who do not fit normative gender and
sexuality order are often excluded from various institutions, socially marginalized, and
sometimes violently attacked. However, it is relatively obvious that upholding such system in
place and encouraging “passing” as a solution to all those marked as “deviant” is not a way out
either. Redirecting attention from the dominant power discourse which claims true knowledge
and scientific expertise about sex and sexuality, to individual might be sensitive at times, but
unproductive in a long a run, politically defeatist, and largely unethical.

Contrary to the Western tradition answering in affirmative to the questions “Do we truly need a
true sex?” in this essay I argued that no, we do not. However, variety of questions remains still to
be considered. For example, the relationship between gender and sex remains at best ambiguous.
Although we tend to see, at least in gender studies, both – gender and sex – as socially
constructed, the relationship varies from text to text. Although radical call for action by Susan
Styker (1994) sounds inspiring, that “the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists, even
within fields of domination that bring about the universal cultural rape of flesh” (254), who is
able to exercise agency, to what degree, and what is their material and discursive context often
remain underrepresented or undertheorized.