Harrison 1

Aubrey Harrison
Professor Katz
GN 199 – Senior Seminar
December 18, 2006
Senior essay

Sex Transmissions and Peripheral Bodies:

Constructing Intersexuality in Medical and Feminist Discourses

The medicalization of non-normatively sexed bodies has been underway for centuries

in the United States and Western Europe. As early as the sixteenth century, intersexed

individuals—then called hermaphrodites—were positioned in Western cultures as medical

curios and posed as bodily problems.1 In early medical reports, physicians, to a degree,

embraced the presence of two sexes in one body, considered one to be a “naturally dominant”

sex, and assigned gender without making surgical alterations.2 In the late nineteenth century,

however, medical attitudes shifted significantly. The nascent field of sexology and the

revitalized medical institution looked for bodily manifestations of psychological and

behavioral pathologies. Whereas the earlier model looked primarily to the body to find a

dominant sex, Victorian-era physicians believed the sexed body interacted with the mind, and

that each body had a single, “true” sex. During the fin-de-siècle, practices such as

phrenology (the study of cranial bumps as indicators of personality and intelligence)

suggested that bodies could reveal a reality that a subject could (or would) not disclose. In

other cases, the body mandated personal characteristics of its owners. In studies of lesbians,

or “inverts,” for instance, the racially coded genitals of black women necessitated the

“unrecoverable” homosexuality of their owners, while the “normal” genitals of white women

1
Germon, Jenz and Myra J. Hird. “The Intersexual Body and the Medical Regulation of Gender.” Constructing
Gendered Bodies. Ed. Kathryn Backett-Milburn and Linda McKie. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 162.
2
ibid, 163.
 Harrison 2

made their queerness situational, and not a bodily mandate.3 In a medico-social climate

where bodies betrayed subjects, individuals born with genitalia that could not be clearly

compartmentalized as either “female” or “male” became objects of spectatorship, as doctors

and sexologists struggled to decipher the “truths” that those bodies supposedly attempted to

tell, or the psychological impact of having such a sex. In the 1950s and 1960s, doctors such

as John Money began what Cheryl Chase calls the “imposi[tion of] normalcy on unruly

flesh,” surgically assigning a single, “real” sex to infants at birth.4 The sixteenth century

concept of the peaceful coexistence of two sexes in one body was literally excised from

children with intersexed genitalia.

By the 1980s, surgical procedures and policies had changed little, but the first

generations of surgically sexed adults were beginning to organize on a national and

international scale. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) formed and protested

what had become rote procedure for addressing ambiguously sexed infants, arguing instead

that gender assignment surgery should not take place until the patient was old enough to

provide informed consent. The ISNA sought political allies in feminists, but intersexual5

3
Sander Gilman. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality.” Race, Writing
and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985: 235.
4
Chase, Cheryl. “’Cultural Practice’ or ‘Reconstructive Surgery’? U.S. Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement,
and Medical Double Standards.” Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics. Ed.
Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 141.
5
Understandings of “proper” names for intersexed people are still very much in flux, even within the community
of intersexed activists. Despite activist attempts to reclaim the “hermaphrodite” label (Chase, “Hermaphrodites
With Attitude,” 37), given its sensationalist and historically oppressive connotations, I will avoid it altogether.
Suzanne Kessler uses the term “intersexual” to refer to those with intersexed bodies who have claimed an
intersexed identity. Since this essay primarily concerns discursive constructions of intersexuality, I will refer to
the subjects (or, in many cases, objects) of that discussion as people with intersexed bodies. My aim in doing so
is to emphasize the constructedness of the intersexed body and to emphasize its connectedness and
disconnectedness to gendered subjectivity. It should also be noted that “intersex” is an umbrella term that
encompasses a wide array of bodily formations, ranging from Klinefelter’s Syndrome (in which the patient has
three sex chromosomes) to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (in which patients with testicular tissue present as
hyperfeminine). For the purposes of this paper, I will largely focus on individuals with ambiguous genitalia,
who have distinct and well-documented interactions with the medical institution and with feminist discourse.
 Harrison 3

activists found many unwilling to engage with their politics. “Forward International, a

London-based, anti-female-genital-cutting organization, replied to German intersex activist

Heike Spreitzer that her letter of inquiry was ‘most interesting’ but they could not help

because their work focuses only on genital cutting ‘that is performed as a harmful cultural or

traditional practice on young girls.’”6 Some organizations, like Forward International,

offered overtly and admittedly political reasons for their distance from intersexed activists.

Others simply found little room for subjects that were not “properly” gendered, much less

“properly” women.7 Like medical doctors, many feminists found it difficult to negotiate the

politics and subjectivity of bodies that could not be normatively sexed.

Intersexed bodies have long problematized many cultural constructs that engage sex,

gender and sexuality as correlative. As such, the discourses that produce those constructs

also conceptualize intersexed bodies and subjects in such a way as to minimize the

destabilizing threat that they pose. Granting that intersexuality is as biologically real,

productive, and valid as normative sex would, I will demonstrate, require acknowledging the

constructedness of sex, gender and sexuality; acknowledging the persistence of imperialist

attitudes in the West, the fallibility of medicine; and would disrupt the optimistic progression

narrative proffered by western science, medicine and thought. Instead of disrupting such

major constructs, the two primary arenas that engage and discuss intersexuality—feminist

theory and medical literature—utilize the intersexed body as a site of reinscription of the very

hierarchies, binaries, discourses and values they threaten to upend. That is, while both

medicine and feminist theory have professed an interest in maximizing the agency and

subjectivity of intersexed people, in attempting to contain the threat that their bodies pose,

6
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 142.
7
ibid, 134.
 Harrison 4

both have perpetuated the marginalization of non-normatively sexed individuals.

Sex and Subjectivity

While medical and feminist discourses often seem to be at odds with one another, they

not only reaffirm the dominant systems of meaning that intersexuality destabilizes, they are

moreover threatened by the same aspects and implications of intersexed bodies. In many

ways, this is because both are born of and engage with dominant Western cultures, which are

themselves deeply invested in the perpetuation of binary gender and a normative link between

sex, gender and sexuality. Addressing intersexed bodies on a societal level queers not just

concepts of gender, but also of the system of meaning that has grown out of sexual object

choice, of gendered subjectivity, and of the link between sex, gender and sexuality. All of

these anxieties are reflected in medicine and feminisms’ negotiations of sex in intersexed

bodies.

Physicians’ interest in “properly” sexing bodies became much more rigid and dogged

with the aforementioned work of doctors such as John Money, who drastically altered the

medical epistemology of sex by arguing that intersexed bodies had a “real” male or female

sex that must be liberated by trained professionals. “The emergence of a one sex per body

model created the role of expert for physicians via the medical examination: the ritual

employed to decipher a true sex.”8 Money’s reasoning reinscribes naturalizations of the two-

sex system, medicalizing social values and cementing them in the scientific tradition that

declares itself asocial, apolitical and transcultural. Within his “one sex per body model,”

intersexed bodies emerge as somehow deficient, as defective products of nature’s assembly

8
Germon and Hird, 166.
 Harrison 5

line. And while Money’s work has become known for its emphasis on the social—he has

asserted repeatedly that a child’s gender assignment can be changed at any point in the first

two years of life with minimal psychological impact9—his perspective ultimately reinforces

commonplace understandings of subjectivity as rooted in the body. “By the rules of infantile

reasoning, [children] are entitled to the logic that the sexes are definitively discriminated on

the basis of names, clothing, haircut, and sex-stereotyped behavior of a general type.”10 In

making such a politicized statement in a medical context (and in arguing that questioning a

causal relationship between sex and gender is “infantile”), the doctor further marginalizes

non-normative experiences of sex and gender, and the subjectivity of intersexed individuals is

further restricted. The authority and worth of medical science, on the other hand, remains

intact.

The twentieth century framework of sexing and understanding intersexed bodies also

suggests that there might be some “simple genetic, algebraic solution to sex variation.”11 This

rhetoric can be seen at work in the International Olympic Committee’s practice of

karyotyping athletes who compete as women to ensure that only chromosomal XX athletes

may participate in women’s events, implying that males (the only non-female option in this

model) are not “masquerading as women” and holding an unfair advantage over “’real’

women.”12 In short, the Money model of interpreting non-normative bodies figures intersexed

people as inherently, naturally, and biologically marginalized. His framework minimizes

9
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic
Books, 2000. 46, 63.
10
Money, John. Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair-Bonding. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 146.
Dreger, Alice Domurat. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University
11

Press, 1998. 4.
12
ibid, 7.
 Harrison 6

their subjectivity within the very medical institution that forms their bodies. As Spanier

argues, reframing the biological determinism so effectively utilized by dominant

marginalizing discourses is tantamount to dismantling the master’s house with the master’s

tools.13

ISNA founder Cheryl Chase states in her landmark article “Hermaphrodites with

Attitude” that common understandings of a unified and “real” sex are vastly oversimplified.

“The concept of bodily sex, in popular usage, refers to multiple components including

karyotype (organization of sex chromosomes), gonadal differentiation (e.g., ovarian or

testicular), genital morphology, configuration of internal reproductive organs, and pubertal

sex characteristics such as breasts and facial hair.”14 Despite these nuanced distinctions that

are themselves born of medical research, physicians continuously seek to discover a

preexisting single “real” sex. In discussing statistics on Klinefelter’s Syndrome, a diagnosis

of intersexed bodies, Dr. John Money cites it as occurring in one in five hundred “male”

births.15 Individuals with Klinefelter’s Syndrome, rather than karyotyping as XX (female) or

XY (male), show up as XXY on such tests, disrupting binary sex on the chromosomal level.

For Money, however, they must be deficient men, always expressed in relation to two polar

and “true” sexes.

Pediatric surgeons exhibit a particularly strong determination to “uncover” a

“naturally occurring” and “true” sex, and their doggedness in doing so is reflected in their

interactions with the parents of intersexed infants. One doctor told a parent, “‘[y]our baby

13
Spanier, Bonnie B. “’Lessons’ from ‘Nature’: Gender Ideology and Sexual Ambiguity in Biology.” Body
Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge, 1991. 344.
14
Chase, Cheryl. “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism.” Queer
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Ed. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi. Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell, 2003. 31.
15
Money, 134.
 Harrison 7

knows what he [sic] is and will tell us after we run some tests.’”16 Most parents are largely

and understandably unaware of past medical literature on intersexuality, and the initial

medical descriptions of their child—“know[ing] what he [really] is”—encourage any distress

they may feel and depict their newborn as somehow incomplete, hemming in the rhetorical

agency of the child in the parent’s eyes. The child cannot properly act or interact until s/he17

“tells us” what s/he “really is.” As Suzanne Kessler points out, doctors are not impervious to

social influence. “[P]hysicians hold an incorrigible belief that female and male are the only

‘natural’ options.”18 As such, bodies must hold a “natural” sex, and physicians must uncover

it. Of course, this medicalized process occurs at the cost of the intersexed body and, in asking

the question, “what is the body?” implies that the answer is already “nothing” or

“insufficient.” The intersexed body, then, is drastically devalued, and the subjectivity of its

owner is denied.

Descriptive Sexing

When a “true” sex remains undetermined, both medical and feminist discourses seek

linguistically to reinscribe binary sex on arguably unsexable bodies. Take, for example, the

David/Brenda Reimer case. David was born a properly sexed male, but his penis was burned

off in a botched circumcision. Dr. John Money, an intersex specialist, persuaded David’s

parents to alter his genitalia and raise him as a girl. David became Brenda and, at puberty,

Kessler, Suzanne J. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
16

1998. 92.
17
As before, my intent in using the “s/he” pronoun is to emphasize the imposition of a sex/gender formulation
upon the non-normative body. Other gender-neutral pronouns, such as “ze” and “fe” are primarily linked to
particular identities and politics, not to a distinct medicalized body. Rather than conferring identities on
intersexed bodies, I want to refer to their bodies in shorthand while leaving their gendered identities to their own
determination.
18
Kessler 13.
 Harrison 8

discovered her body’s past and transitioned back to being David. The case was an

extraordinarily high-profile one, providing the topic for a lecture series by Dr. Money and

resulting in a bestselling non-fiction book, As Nature Made Him. While dominant

interpretations of the Reimer case did not look to David’s body for evidence, they did seek to

“uncover” his “true” identity as either socially and psychologically constructed (which a

“female” identity would supposedly support) or biologically mandated (which a “male”

identity would support, as though masculinity were impervious to social influences, and as

though the male body was biologically originary). That is, if David/Brenda were found to be

“truly” female, then Money’s experiment of assigning h/her as a woman would’ve been a

success, supporting his ethic of infant body alteration. On the other hand, if s/he were found

to be “truly” male, then h/her body would have made its “real” sex clear, and the perception

that masculinity is somehow impossible to imitate (and thus that femininity is less essential,

more malleable, and ultimately less “real”) would be reinforced.19 As Judith Butler writes in

her essay on the Reimer case, both academics and physicians “ask[ed] David how he feels and

who he is, trying to ascertain the truth of his sex through the discourse he provides.”20

Although David is treated as a subject who can speak to his own experiences, those very

experiences, like non-normatively sexed bodies, become “proof” of a “true” sex. Once again,

agency is denied an interstitial life, and can only exist at one of two poles.

David/Brenda Reimer is the most recognizable name frequently linked to

intersexuality, due to h/her infant genital surgery. It is worth noting, however, as Butler has,

that David/Brenda was born into a normatively sexed male body. The increasingly high

19
In her essay on the Reimer case, Judith Butler argues that “uncovering” h/her “true” identification as Brenda
could be claimed “in the name of normalization,” whereas a “true” identification as David could be claimed “in
the name of nature.” (Butler, Undoing Gender, 66.)
20
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. 67.
 Harrison 9

profile of h/her case might be considered another way of containing the threat of

intersexuality—that is, by examining a case study that sidesteps the multiple, messy facets of

what is otherwise presented as a single, unified sex, the promotion of the Reimer case

primarily implicates the mind. The case largely emphasizes Money’s ability to successfully

(or unsuccessfully) socialize Brenda as a woman, rather than looking at a biologically

intersexed individual, where a unified body is not positioned in conflict with a unified mind,

but rather refuses binary sexing within itself. Discursive sexing takes place both within the

rhetoric of the Reimer case and by the simple fact of its promotion and popular influence.

Intersexed bodies and agencies are also discursively defined. The bodies of infants

with ambiguous genitalia (as opposed to the transsexual body of David/Brenda Reimer) are

frequently described in properly sexed terms. In discussing an intersexed body, John Money

tidily describes h/her sex: “[t]hus the baby is born as a boy with a uterus.”21 Though the child

cannot be properly sexed, s/he can be described in sexing terms: a “boy with a uterus” is

much more normative and normatively understandable than the potential of an intersexed

body that is neither male nor female and exhibits its own biological logic and physical

integrity. Similarly, feminist scientist Anne Fausto-Sterling describes “females” with

“masculinized external genitalia.”22 She goes on to formulate categories of intersexuality that

impose normative sex on non-normative bodies. “[W]e should also accept the categories

herms (named after ‘true’ hermaphrodites), merms (named after male ‘pseudo-

hermaphrodites’), and ferms (named after female ‘pseudo-hermaphrodites’).”23 Her schema

only slightly expands the otherwise predominant categories utilized by contemporary doctors

and by physicians since the nineteenth century: “’true’ and ‘male-pseudo’ or ‘female-pseudo’
21
Money, 134.
22
Fausto-Sterling, 53.
23
ibid, 78.
 Harrison 10

hermaphrodites.”24 Although Fausto-Sterling has since modified her five sex model,25 it has

remained highly influential in feminist critiques of science and medicine. Even to a feminist

scientist resisting dominant norms of sexing what is, in binary terms, the unsexable,

intersexed bodies must be made intelligible through the framework of maleness and

femaleness.

Stephanie Turner, another feminist discussing intersexuality, exposes the tense

relationship between improperly sexed bodies, sexing descriptions, and subjectivity. In her

article, “Intersex Identities,” she asks, “How do intersex identities differ between female and

male intersexuals?”26 One might be prompted to ask of Turner, what bodily morphology

differentiates “male” from “female” when individuals are intersexed? As with Money and

Fausto-Sterling, Turner can only negotiate intersexuality when it is tidily compartmentalized

within the preexisting binary framework. For her, bodies cannot be addressed without being

classified.

Turner goes on to explicitly explore the subjectivity of intersexed individuals, further

delving into the difficulties of granting agency to the unnameable. “[I]ntersexed persons

insist on having bodies that matter outside of this schema. Embodying what they feel is a

failure of medicine to make them what they cannot be in the first place, they envision a

wholly new intersection of sex and gender, a kind of ‘third sex’ that evades gender

determination yet also somehow solidifies into a category of identity.”27 In attempting to

confer subjectivity upon intersexed individuals, Turner conflates bodies with identities

24
ibid, 50.
25
ibid, 78.
26
Turner, Stephanie S. “Intersex Identities: Locating New Intersections of Sex and Gender.” Gender and Society
13:4 (1999): 460.
27
ibid, 458.
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(“intersexed persons insist on having bodies” of a particular sort), identities with politics

(“they envision a wholly new intersection of sex and gender”), and organizational politics

with the wants of every member of a particular ascribed category. She never distinguishes

which intersexed persons “envision” this new sex/gender formulation, how a person with a

particular sort of body might “insist” upon a particular sort of meaning, or where she came

upon this “third sex”/gender proposition (one which the ISNA has staunchly resisted in its

protests of medical procedures28). For Turner, having a particular (non-normative) body

necessitates having a particular identity, identifying with a particular politics, and advocating

a particular policy. Within her essay, that reasoning remains uninterrogated, and that

problematic rhetorical link (between body, identity and politics) stays in place. Once again,

she can only manage to uphold this intersexed subjectivity as a “third sex,” an additional

hegemony that can never quite fit with the socially original two sexes. And once again,

intersexed bodies are marginalized, figured as deficient or aberrant. Like Money and Fausto-

Sterling, Turner minimizes intersexed agency in attempting to maximize it. Neither

physicians (Money) nor feminists (Fausto-Sterling and Turner) discuss intersexuality without

formulating it in relation to the “true” and “original” binary sexes, further tying subjectivity to

the body, privileging normative bodies, and reinscribing naturalized binary sex and gender

schemas.

Naturalizing Gender

In addition to being sexed both surgically and descriptively, the intersexed body also

becomes a site of tension for gender and engendering. Like Homi Bhabha’s subaltern

28
http://www.isna.org
 Harrison 12

colonial mimicry, gendering intersexed individuals embodies “the desire for a reformed,

recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which

is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be

effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”29 That is,

gendering non-normative bodies must conceal their aberrance while indicating the

inauthenticity of their performance. Gendered mimicry both renders the intersexed individual

largely invisible while simultaneously leaving behind tiny markers of difference and

“slippage” that point to the artificiality of intersexed gender performance. After all,

“genuine” gender can only emerge as a “natural” manifestation of a “true” sex. This tension

proves destabilizing to feminist and medical discourses insofar as it is destabilizing to

dominant Western understandings of bodies and subjectivities, which have been sites of

engagement for both feminism and medicine in their formation and continuing evolution. As

has been previously discussed, medicine fancies itself as empirical, dispassionate, and

apolitical, but, as many feminist science critics have argued, scientists often project “their

sociopolitical beliefs about what is natural,”30 and those beliefs frequently remain

unquestioned. As a result, physicians may assume the role of expert with respect to the

sexed/gendered body. “[T]he authenticity of gender resides not on, nor in the body, but rather

results from a particular nexus of power, knowledge and truth. Experts come to define the

truth by virtue of having knowledge.”31 Thus, doctors may project socially constructed values

upon intersexed patients, and depoliticize those values by conceptualizing them as empirical,

somehow linked to “data” or “facts.” Or, as Bonnie Spanier persuasively argues in

29
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 126.
Emphasis removed.
30
Spanier, 330.
31
Germon and Hird, 172.
 Harrison 13

“’Lessons’ from ‘Nature’”:

In addition to demonstrating the distorted cultural/political beliefs

about gender and sexuality in certain cases of contemporary
biology, I contend that nature can show us everything we wish to
see[. . . .] Hence, the sociopolitical construction of science and our
scientific understanding of our world and ourselves goes hand in
hand with the sociopolitical construction of gender and sexuality—
and requires the same kind of challenging and creative scrutiny.32

That is, science neither can nor does exist as dispassionate, disinterested observation; rather, it

is, as a field comprised of social beings with political interests, and both they and their work

constantly function in response to social constructions and values, of which gender is

certainly one. “Gender is […] a construction that regularly conceals its genesis,”33 and the

role of the medical expert is one hefty cog in that machinery of concealment. The intersexed

body reveals that covering-up at work, both in medicine and in dominant discourse. While

the threat of destabilizing of gender is less menacing to medicine than that of complicating

sex, the gendering of the intersexed body nevertheless becomes a site of reinscription of

dominant values.

Particular feminisms’ engagement with gender vis-à-vis intersexed experience has

proven much more fraught. As with transfeminists, intersexed activists have encountered

deep-rooted, naturalized attitudes toward gender in some feminist communities. When she

encountered the medical records that revealed her infant gender assignment surgery, Cheryl

Chase was part of a lesbian feminist community that valued separatism. “Men were rapists

who caused war and environmental destruction; women were loving beings who would heal

the earth; lesbians were a superior form of being uncontaminated by ‘men’s energy.’ In such

32
Spanier, 335.
33
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Performing Feminisms. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 522.
 Harrison 14

a world, how could I tell anyone that I had actually possessed the dreaded ‘phallus’?”34

Needless to say, separatist feminist communities find little room for bodies that do not

conform to the strict, moralizing binary put forth by their supporting rhetoric. As in so many

other contexts, amongst separatist feminists, the intersexed body becomes a threat to be

managed.

While materialist feminisms are less wont to thoughtlessly reproduce gender norms,

their engagement with gender vis-à-vis intersexed experience proves problematic. Nelly

Richard, in Masculine/Feminine, appropriates incongruous sex/gender presentation as a

strategy for feminist politics.

From ‘the grotesque ugliness of its transvestite imitators,’ the whole

hyperrhetorical quality of the feminine springs into view, thanks to
their counterfeiting acts: the assembly of a façade offering an
iconographic cult to Beauty, the stereotyping of the model in mimetic
fabrication of women’s roles. Transvestites make all this unravel
when they explode the correspondence of sex and gender through their
own anatomical incongruence.35

For Richard, transvestites are merely leverage to call attention to the constructedness of

gender and the artificiality of the feminine. Since intersexed individuals, however, have no

proper binary sex, it follows that they also have no proper binary gender. As such, non-

normatively sexed individuals are necessarily transvestites, and they, along with those who

identify as trans or genderqueer, become casualties of Richard’s theory. Judith Butler,

materialist feminist par excellence, takes identity-as-strategy one step further in her famous

essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” “The transvestite, however, can do

more than simply express the distinction between sex and gender, but challenges, at least

34
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 134.
Richard, Nelly. Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s). Trans. Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A.
35

Nelson. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. 50.

 Harrison 15

implicitly, the distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of

popular thinking about gender identity.”36 Though Butler’s commitment to advocating for

non-binary genders (and later, as in Undoing Gender and Bodies That Matter, for non-binary

sexes as well), this earlier theory leaves trans and intersexed people by the wayside.

Remarkably, as in Nelly Richard’s theory, Judith Butler’s attempt to rethink gender identity

makes collateral damage of non-normative identities and experiences, particularly intersexed

individuals, who necessarily crossdress.

Cyberfeminist collective subRosa similarly appropriates identity as strategy. In

“Situating Cyberfeminisms,” subRosa members Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding assert

that cyberfeminism has adopted the “strategy” of “creat[ing] new images of women counter to

rampant sexist stereotyping (feminist avatars, cyborgs, trans- or non-gendered figures),”37

relegating non-normative gender identities to the realm of “feminist strategies” rather than

political identities attached to real bodies and having material effects. subRosa’s arguments

are hampered by marginalizing other categories of oppression within their model of

cyberfeminism. As Cheryl Chase argues, intersexed activists are best served by “participating

in the sorts of poststructuralist cultural work that exposes the foundational assumptions about

personhood shared by the dominant society, conventional feminism, and many other identity-

based oppositional social movements.”38 Instead of aligning themselves with the broader

cultural work advocated by activist-academics such as Chase, theorists such as Richard,

Butler and subRosa align themselves with certain iterations of identity politics that privilege

some identities at the cost of others. At the same time, physicians and surgeons superimpose

36
Butler, “Performative Acts,” 527.
Fernandez, Maria and Faith Wilding. “Situating Cyberfeminisms.” Domain Errors!: Cyberfeminist Practices.
37

Ed. Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding and Michelle M. Wright. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2002.
38
Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” 43.
 Harrison 16

their understandings and expectations of gender on non-normative bodies, and intersex

subjectivity gets lost in the shuffle.

Disrupting Difference

Both feminist and medical discourses deeply depend upon the social establishment of

difference. For biologists and medical scientists, sexed difference reaffirms Darwin’s

reproductive imperative—non-reproductive, non-normatively sexed bodies could not possibly

be acceptable or productive if both survival of the fittest and procreation are the laws of the

species. As many “improperly” sexed bodies are non-reproductive, intersexuality disrupts a

foundational tenet of contemporary science. Physicians such as Dr. John Money manage the

threat, at some times, by acquiescing to its biological presence. “The male/female dichotomy

is not, in fact, an absolute one. Just as the dichotomy of day and night breaks down in the

land of the midnight sun, so also does the male/female dichotomy fail in certain test cases.”39

He admits the biological existence of intersexed bodies, but links them to a “fail[ure]” of an

established system, the aberrant exceptions that prove the rule. And if intersexed bodies are

proof of the “failure” of “the male/female dichotomy,” then medical science is licensed, if not

obligated, to intervene. Within this description, intersexed bodies are broken, and medicine

should fix them.

While he occasionally acknowledges the naturalness of the non-normatively sexed

body, Money more frequently minimizes the potential impact of intersexuality by projecting

the medical progression narrative onto those bodies. “[H]umankind may unravel the secret of

how nature goes about programming spontaneous sex reversal in some species and apply that
39
Money, 133.
 Harrison 17

secret to human beings.”40 As before, nature has created a binary truth that humans may

reveal. This time, however, Money implies that it is only a matter of time until the “secret” of

bodily sex is “unraveled,” and we are reminded that science is always meant to move forward,

and that progress is always productive. The threat to Darwinist rhetoric is overshadowed by

the grandiosity of scientific reason and progress. Suzanne Kessler goes so far as to argue that

the “commitment to the concept of medical advancement and that of dimorphic genitals” is

what has kept sex assignment surgery follow-up data at such a minimum, while the surgeries

themselves continue on a daily basis.41 While the threat of destabilizing sexed difference has

been contained within medicine, it has only been overshadowed, and its specter remains.

Within several feminist schools of thought, sexed/gendered difference creates proper

subjects of politics. And, as Cheryl Chase notes, “intersexuality undermines the stability of

the category ‘woman’ that undergirds much first-world feminist discourse.”42 Feminists such

as Alice Dreger have recounted their own interrogations of the binary gender system when

faced with the hermaphroditic body. “When we look at hermaphrodites, we are forced to

realize how variable even ‘normal’ sexual traits are. Indeed, we start to wonder how and why

we label some traits and some people male, female, or hermaphroditic.”43 Overwhelmingly,

both medical discourse and particular feminisms rely upon sexed difference, and the very

presence of an improperly sexed body destabilizes that foundational construct.

Imperialism in Medicine and Activism

40
ibid, 136.
41
Kessler, 74.
42
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 145.
43
Dreger, Alice Domurat. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998. 5.
 Harrison 18

The hierarchized differences that intersexuality disrupts, however, are not limited to

matters of sex and gender; it also speaks to the role of the colonialist impulse in Western

medical and feminist discourses. One of the most apt parallels to intersex gender assignment

surgeries (IGA surgeries) performed on infants is that of female genital cutting (FGC). That

comparison, however, is rarely made by anyone other than intersexed and allied activists.

Instead, feminist activists all but ignore IGA surgeries, opting instead to focus on

nonmedicalized genital cutting that primarily takes place on another continent. The reasoning

that supports this emphasis on focus on nonwhite, non-Western cultures seems to imply that

the corporeal brutality of genital cutting can only exist elsewhere, in “less developed” and

“less civilized” cultures.

These representations manifest a profound act of ‘othering’ African

clitoridectomy that contributes to the silence surrounding similar
medicalized practices in the ‘modern,’ industrialized West. ‘Their’
genital cutting is barbaric ritual; ‘ours’ is scientific. Theirs
disfigures; ours normalizes the deviant. 44

As the above quote implies, this rhetoric echoes that of white Western colonialism. It relies

upon a manufactured and exaggerated difference between “us” and “them” that encourages

judgment of non-Western cultural practices while simultaneously sidestepping any critical

thinking about “our” culture. Much of the discourse surrounding FGC terms it “mutilation,”

“a word we usually apply to other cultures, signal[ing] a distancing and denigration of those

cultures, and reinforces a sense of cultural superiority.”45 Again, cultures that practice FGC

are clearly divided from the West, and is represented as barbaric and radically Other.

In addition to discouraging introspective cultural analysis, this imperialist rhetoric also

figures the West as a cultural blank slate. As mentioned earlier, some anti-female genital
44
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 143.
45
Kessler, 39.
 Harrison 19

cutting organizations have declined to work with intersexed activists “because their work

focuses only on genital cutting ‘that is performed as a harmful cultural or traditional practice

on young girls.’”46 Several important points follow from the logic of this organization’s

statement. First, IGA surgeries are not “cultural or traditional practices,” because “culture” is

depicted as existing elsewhere (that is, not in the United States) and because medicine is not a

“tradition,” but instead a rational and productive mode of response to bodily problems.

Second, IGA surgeries are not “harmful,” because they are divined by the coolly empirical

medical institution. Finally, because intersexed bodies are not properly gendered, they cannot

be considered “young girls.” On every possible level, as far as organizations such as this one

are concerned, intersexed individuals are wholly improper subjects of anti-genital-cutting

activist work. Cultures that practice “mutilation” can only be “saved” by the acultural,

apolitical West, and imperialism once again takes center stage. Furthermore, as Cheryl Chase

puts it, contrasting the treatments of FGC and IGA surgeries proffered by “first-world

feminists and the mainstream media […] exposes some of the complex interactions between

ideologies of race, gender, colonialism, and science that effectively silence and render

invisible intersex experience in first-world contexts.”47

But resisting the parallel between FGC and IGA surgeries is not just symptomatic of

international feminist activism—it also takes place in medical literature. John Money, in

writing about female genital cutting, noted that, for women who undergo the procedure,

“[c]oitus is impossible without surgical reopening of the vagina, nuptually. Scarring may

render childbirth impossible.”48 He goes on to state that, due to a lack of research on the

topic, “there is very little that can be said about the effect of […] female genital mutilation on
46
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 142.
47
ibid, 140.
48
Money, 141.
 Harrison 20

adult eroticism.”49 Even when discussing FGC and IGA within the same book, Money does

not make the clear and easy parallel between the two. Like genital cutting, gender assignment

can leave the patient with large amounts of scar tissue, which is frequently “hypersensitive”

and can result in “extreme pain during intercourse.”50 And as with FGC, follow-up studies

with IGA patients are few and far between. Evidence of sexual function offered in medical

literature is largely anecdotal, and is almost entirely provided by physicians, rarely by patients

themselves. Correlating first and third world practices would, as in the case of international

feminist activism, require acknowledging a political and imperialist influence over the work

being done, be it in a hospital or at a fundraiser.

Unfortunately, the reasoning that so tidily delineates the boundary between FGC and

IGA surgeries also relies on colonialist rhetoric. Acknowledging a parallel between FGC and

infant gender assignment surgeries would, to appropriate Homi Bhabha’s words,

“problematiz[e] the signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the ‘national’ is no longer

naturalizable.”51 In short, examining the parallel between female genital cutting and intersex

gender assignment surgeries would require probing the presence and influence of imperialism

in Western feminism, so many organizations and individuals simply eschew the issue

altogether. And, as before, the voices of intersexed people are silenced, their experiences are

set aside, and their bodies erased.

Misogynist Sex

Feminisms’ response—or lack thereof—to the requests of intersexual activists is

49
ibid, 141.
50
Germon and Hird, 170-171.
51
Bhabha, 128.
 Harrison 21

particularly surprising given the misogynist overtones of the rhetoric surrounding infant

gender assignment surgeries. Overwhelmingly, medical literature offers deeply sexist and

heteronormative rationales and guidelines for assigning sex to “indeterminate” genitalia. As

Donna Haraway has stated, “sight is the sense made to realize the fantasies of the

phallocrats,”52 and sight plays a key role in this particular realm of sexist medicine. The most

egregious instance of sexism amongst intersex medical specialists is the pediatric surgeons’

oft-quoted maxim, “you can make a hole, but you can’t build a pole.”53 That is to say that

masculinity is naturally conferred and cannot be artificially created, whereas feminized

genitalia can be sculpted with relative ease.

The “pole,” of course, exists as a part of many intersexed anatomies, but those bodies

are ultimately assigned as female, because of the many requirements of a “sufficient” penis.

Concretely, an infant phallus must measure at least one inch in order to qualify as a penis,54

but the judgment is often much more subjective. Babies must have a phallus that will allow

for standing urination during childhood, and for vaginal penetration during adulthood.55

Having what is known as a “micro-penis” is considered by physicians56 to be psychologically

scarring, and much worse than living as a female with no sexual or reproductive function.57

“Surgeons consider the condition of a micro-penis so detrimental to a male’s morale that

reassignment as female is justified on this basis alone.”58 So when an infant has a phallus that

will prove insufficient for heterosexual intercourse, s/he is automatically assigned as female.

52
Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” The
Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 64.
53
Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” 33.
54
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 130.
55
Fausto-Sterling, 57.
56
No psychologists or psychiatrists were interviewed in any of the medical or feminist literature I reviewed in
researching this essay.
57
Chase, “Cultural Practice,” 145.
58
Germon and Hird, 170.
 Harrison 22

Femininity is defined as literal, bodily lack.

Deciding whether and how to assign sexes to intersexed infants is clearly a matter of

prioritizing the various functions of genitalia, and the prioritization that takes place in the

medical institution overwhelmingly privileges masculinity and heterosexuality. When the

phallus is insufficiently masculine, it becomes a clitoris to be whittled down or excised

completely. While requirements for penises are strict and demanding, the minimum size for a

clitoris is nonexistent. Vulvas missing labia and clitorises are considered by surgeons to be

“satisfactory” and sufficiently feminine.59 “Success” in female gender assignment surgeries is

purely defined as cosmetic.60 “As recently as 1993, no one publicly disputed surgeon Milton

Edgerton when he wrote that in forty years of clitoral surgery on intersexuals, ‘not one has

complained of loss of sensation, even when the entire clitoris was removed.’”61 As it turns

out, patients such as Edgerton’s often not only lose sensation, but they are frequently entirely

unable to orgasm, and may even experience pain during and after sexual activity.62 Whereas

many strict guidelines must be met in order to be assigned a male at birth, anything falling

short of those requirements is assigned female.

In addition to its misogynistic overtones, medical discourse surrounding intersex

gender assignment surgeries is also deeply homophobic. Intersexed individuals are not only

necessarily transvestites, they are also necessarily queer. That is, because they have no

“proper” binary sex or gender to correlate to their bodies, intersexed people cannot properly

fit into a rubric of sexual object choice, in which sexual identity is determined in relation to

one’s own sex/gender and that of the object of one’s desire. As Hird and Germon argue,

59
Kessler, 55.
60
ibid, 54.
61
Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” 33.
62
Kessler, 57.
 Harrison 23

“[t]he medical obsession with constructing pseudo-male and female bodies from intersexed

bodies is driven by a heterosexual imperative.”63 Or, as Suzanne Kessler puts it, “[a] specific

sexual act serves to create and maintain a particular anatomy, rather than the anatomy being

created and maintained so that the activity can take place.”64 Meanwhile, many intersexual

individuals, in conceptualizing their bodies, develop sexual identities that are deeply queered.

Take, for instance, that of Morgan Holmes:

My point here is that although I find myself in a committed

relationship with a man, and have produced a child in that
relationship, I am not just another happy het. This is not just
because I’m pro-queer but because I am queer. I refuse to allow
my mutilation to mature in a body that quite feasibly could have
penetrated another with its phalloclit. I should have been allowed
to grow up to blur the physical markers of sexuality, but I wasn’t
given that freedom. So I want to take it back by force. I do so by
insisting that people think about my marriage as that between a
man and an intersexual.65

Despite complex identifications such as Holmes’, which emphatically reject heteronormative

models of sexuality, medical interventions into intersexed bodies remain staunchly

heterosexist and deeply misogynist. Once again, the experiences and manifestos of intersexed

individuals are disregarded, if not altogether silenced.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the two primary discourses that engage intersexuality and express an

interest in maximizing the agency and subjectivity of intersexed individuals end up restricting

it. Rather than grappling with the questions that the intersexed body poses—those of sex,
63
Germon and Hird, 172.
64
Kessler, 108.
65
Holmes, Morgan. “In(to)Visibility: Intersexuality in the Field of Queer.” Looking Queer: Body Image and
Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities. New York: Haworth, 1998. 225.
 Harrison 24

gender, sexuality, imperialism, attitudes toward science, and perhaps even more—feminism

and medicine use that self same body as a site of reinscription of hegemonic systems of

knowledge, normativizing the body and silencing the subject.

And these are not idle questions. The body appropriated by these discourses is not

only a site of intellectual appropriation and (mis)interpretation, it is also one of physical

violence. Children undergo surgeries as infants to establish their normative genitalia, and

many must endure follow up procedures throughout adolescence in order to maintain the

assignment. Despite their medicalization, these bodily interventions can be experienced as

violent and violating. As if that weren’t enough, doctors dealing with intersexed infants offer

horror stories of parents’ reactions. “One intersex specialist described the case of a girl who

was brought to the hospital because her father had attempted to rip off with his fingers the

girl’s enlarged clitoris. The family of another intersexed child reportedly was so distraught

about the infant’s condition that the grandmother ‘considered committing suicide with the

baby.’”66 The information and attitudes offered by physicians can influence parents’

understandings of sex, gender, and their child; and the activist and theorizing work done by

feminists can support or deny the subjectivity of adult intersexuals.

In addition to limiting the violence enacted on individuals, aligning feminism with

intersexual activism can also be a part of a larger political project. Resisting normativization

of intersexed bodies also resists masculinist systems of knowledge, hegemonic values, and

sex/gender-based oppression. Supporting intersexed individuals is in the best interest of

medicine, of intersexed individuals, and certainly of feminists interested in altering the

contemporary sociopolitical landscape.

66
Kessler, 91.
 Harrison 25

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