Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit


MANY SEXES, EQUAL RIGHTS

By Leslie Feinberg

"Western culture is deeply committed to the idea that there are
only two sexes," Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote in the cover story of
the March/April issue of The Sciences magazine. "But if the state
and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party
sexual system, they are in defiance of nature.

"For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from
female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can
argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes--and perhaps
even more."

Fausto-Sterling's scientific bombshell was reprinted in part as an
opinion piece in the March 12 New York Times. The wallop of her
thesis is not that she is the first to document the extent of the
existence of hermaphroditic or inter-sexed infants. She demands
their rights too.

Fausto-Sterling is a respected developmental geneticist, a
professor of medical science at Brown University, and a fighter
against sexism within the scientific community.

She explains that the term "intersex" is generally used to lump
together three major groups of people with some mixture of male and
female anatomy: people with one testis and one ovary, those who
have testes and some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries,
and those who have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia
but lack testes.

"Each of those categories is in itself complex; the percentage of
male and female characteristics, for instance, can vary enormously
among members of the same subgroup," she wrote.

Fausto-Sterling described how intersexed infants are immediately
"fixed" at birth--hormonally and surgically shoe-horned into "girl"
or "boy." She noted that scientific dogma clings to the assumption
that an intersexed child would otherwise be doomed to a life of
anguish.

"Yet there are few empirical studies to back up that assumption,
and some of the same research gathered to build a case for medical
treatment contradicts it."

Anatomical hermaphroditism has always existed in the human
population. So have gender-variant or transgendered people. But the
earliest human ancestors held such people in high esteem.

The big change in human social relations came with the development
of private property and class society. Inheritance, paternity,
legitimacy and titles took on special significance for the new
exploiting classes.

"In Europe a pattern emerged by the end of the Middle Ages that, in
a sense, has lasted to the present day," Fausto-Sterling noted.
"Hermaphrodites were compelled to choose an established gender role
and stick with it.

"During this century," she continued, "the medical community has
completed what the legal world began--the complete erasure of any
form of embodied sex that does not conform to a male-female,
heterosexual pattern. Ironically, a more sophisticated knowledge of
the complexity of sexual systems has led to the repression of such
intricacy."

She warned: "The knowledge developed in biochemistry, embryology,
endocrinology, psychology and surgery has enabled physicians to
control the very sex of the human body. The multiple contradictions
in that kind of power call for some scrutiny."

Fausto-Sterling insists that intersexed children have a right to
grow up and make their own informed decisions about their bodies.
Medicine should be there to serve, not to control. This includes
the right of transsexuals to change their sex.


(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21 St.,
New York, NY 10010; via e-mail: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org.)




+        Join Us! Support The NY Transfer News Collective        +
+       We deliver uncensored information to your mailbox!       +
+ Modem: 718-448-2358 FAX: 718-448-3423 e-mail: nyxfer@panix.com +