In order to breakdown the binary, we first have to understand that the current medical definition of sex is a social construct. In my creative project research lit review I break this down. The following is an excerpt from the paper. Read the whole paper here. You will find all my references there as well.
Sex as a Social Construct
Wilchins (1997) makes this observation about sex and gender:
The more we look, the less natural sex looks. Everywhere we turn, every aspect of sex seems to be saturated with cultural needs and priorities. … Gender is not what culture creates out of my body’s sex; rather, sex is what culture makes when it genders my body. The cultural system of gender looks at my body, creates a narrative of binary difference.
(p. 58)
The separation of sex and gender is an established concept within sociological research. However, how we define sex and gender is still up for debate. Sex is defined by several components including chromosomes, anatomy, and hormones. Yet only anatomy is used to determine sex at birth. An issue arises when the genitals appear ambiguous. In some cases, a
determination is made for the infant and the genitals are altered to fit a socially accepted version of a penis or a vagina. If an XY individual has an “inadequate” penis the individual is turned into a female even at the risk of destroying reproductive capabilities (Greenberg, 1999). These individuals fall under the umbrella term intersex.
Kaneshiro (2013) defines intersex as “a group of conditions where there is a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals (the testes and ovaries)”. While the Intersex Society of North America (2008) defines intersex a bit differently: A general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types — for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.
There is a discrepancy between how the medical field defines intersexuality and how ISNA defines it. The intersex conditions provide evidence that sex is not biologically limited to two categories. The intersex child is transformed through surgery to fit into the binary. Girshick (2008) points out that these genital surgeries are not to prevent harm or to provide a
better functioning body. The child undergoes surgery because the genitals threaten the child’s culture. There is not a universal standard on what constitutes a biological male versus a biological female. As Intersex Society of North America (2008) confirms, “So nature doesn’t decide where the category of ‘male’ ends and the category of ‘intersex’ begins, or where the category of ‘intersex’ ends and the category of ‘female’ begins. Humans decide”.
The intersex condition is evidence that sex is a categorization controlled by human opinion rather than biological fact. While nature provides evidence that sex is not limited to two categories, the social structure of binary sex is continually studied and reinforced as a natural and unquestionable fact. Our society goes as far as genital reconstruction to keep the sex binary narrative alive. Rothblatt (2005) says using the genitals as gender indicators is a burden that limits humanity.
We derive our social gender categories of women and men from this unnaturally limited biological sorting system.
Gender as a Performance
While the idea of sex as a social construct is relatively new, gender has been understood as socially constructed for decades. Gender is created through culture, language, institutions, and interactions. But what about gender as a performance built historical data?
Sociologists West and Zimmerman (1987) contend, that the ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’
These gender performances maintain gender norms. The repetition of socially acceptable gender acts creates and reproduces gender day to day and decade to decade (West & Zimmerman, 1987). These decades turn into a history of human interaction that creates socially acceptable ways to perform your gender.The norms of gender are built on human interaction and history.
Every day we enact our gender through our presentation, our mannerism, and our language. Butler (1988) frames acts of gender as guided by historical representations of gender. The representations and socially acceptable norms of gender change from generation to generation. The next generation either holds onto or disregards previous gender stereotypes and expressions. These recursive acts construct the historical institution of gender (Martin, 2004).
Butler (2004) calls gender performance “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint”. Because there is no objective gender ideal these constricted performative acts build the structure of gender. Gender is in no way a stable identity but is instituted by the repetitive acts of the body (Butler, 1988).
What does this mean? It means that we’ve continued to entertain the notion that binary biological sex is a fact when many infants are born displaying characteristics outside the binary. We just “correct” them to fit into our facts. From this incorrect idea, we perform historically created renditions of female and male through our clothing, interactions and institutions.
We have to stop feeding the narrative of a binary. We are mutilating infants and killing young people to uphold this fiction.