The Radical Notion That Sex Isn’t So Natural After All

Before I dive into what can quickly an essay on the social, not biological, construction of “sex”, I have to give credit to Professor Martin Weinberg, with whom I have taken the course Constructing Sexuality and will hopefully work with more throughout my graduate training.  My undergraduate training in sociology and gender and women’s studies provided me the skills to articulate the perspective that gender is not natural, rather it is a social construct; we as humans come up with the categories of “woman” and “man”, determine the criteria for appropriately falling into either category, and have in place a number of consequences for failing to be a woman or a man.  But, I must say, I was at first confused by Martin’s scheduled lecture on “the social construction of sex.”  At that point, I thought we had given sex over to biology and would settle for the nagging reminder that there’s not just male and female – there’s also intersexed.

As a sociologist, I’m not really interested in the biological components of sex.  But, it is the unmistakable social components of sex that do interest me.  I should pause a moment to avoid using too much academic (and sociology-specific) jargon.  Social constructionism is a perspective of the social sciences that argues for questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and highlights that a great deal (if not all) of what we know is specific to the culture we live in and point in history in which we’re living.  So, for example, by looking at homosexuality as a behavior among the Greeks in ancient times to homosexuality as a mental illness in the modern world until the mid-1970s (in the US, at least) to non-heterosexual sexual social identities (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer), we can see that it has changed and continues to change throughout history.  If we compare the high degree of prejudice and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer people in the US compared to the expectation of homosexuality in young boys as a rite of passage into manhood among the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, we can see that homosexuality differs across cultures. 

But, what does that have to do with sex?  I’m sure most of this blog’s audience can digest the notion that gender is socially constructed, but pulling sex into the realm of social constructionism may be a leap.  Though humans do not create hormones (e.g., testosterone, estrogen, androgens, progesterone), or chromosomes (e.g., XX, XY, XXY, XYY, XXX, XO sex chromosomes), or bodies at birth, we do create the categories into which people fall presumably based on chromosomes, anatomy, and hormones.  For so long, we have considered “female” and “male” to be the sole and opposing categories for sex; thus, we have denied the existence of intersexed people whose hormones, genes, and/or anatomy do not match up neatly.  In more recent years, intersexed people have become increasingly visible and there has been more and more pressure applied on doctors to cease operating and medicating babies to force them into either the female or male categories.  This is clearly one sign of the historical specificity of sex – it has always been male and female (or so we said) and now it’s male, female, or intersexed.  And, with respect to cultural specificity, we can look to American Indian tribes (historically and today) and to parts of Mexico, India, and a few other countries to realize that the idea of two sexes is not universal. 

Others have made this argument before me, and with a great deal of evidence to back their argument.  For example, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s book, Sexing the Body, as well as some of her published articles, is widely cited for her work on “the five sexes,” as she calls it, highlighting that there is more than female and male – there is a great deal of variation in sex among humans.  Even among those individuals who fall into “female” and “male” without question there is a great deal of variation in hormone levels, chromosomal make-up, and anatomy.

With the recent news about South African gold medalist runner Caster Semenya’s sex – after suspicion of her sex because of her success in a race – we see again how arbitrary “female” and “male” are.  In fact, the sheer number of tests she was subjected to in order to determine her gender further highlights how complex sex and gender are, and, that there is nothing purely natural about either.  She was raised as a girl, she looks feminine, she was said to have female external organs – but, because they discovered “internal male organs” and a level of testosterone considered abnormal for females, she was quickly moved from the “female” box to the “intersexed” box.  And, this may mean that she loses her gold medal because she supposedly has an unfair advantage over the other presumably female runners she competed against.  (I have both internal and external male organs and I can tell you they seem to do nothing for my athletic abilities.)  The controversy surrounding her sex and gender will likely cause lifelong trauma to her sense of self and privacy, not to mention that her privacy and human rights have been violated.  But, it has allowed for more open dialogue about what sex and gender are. 

Fortunately, I haven’t seen “the other side” of the debate about Semenya, but among the blogs and media outlets I do pay attention to, it seems clear that more people are recognizing how arbitrary the definitions of “sex”, “female”, “male”, and “gender” are.  Even allowing for biology to play some role in the development of sex, I am pleased to see that more people are becoming aware that we humans also play a role in constructing sex.