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80 contexts.org

intersex and the social construction of sex by georgiann davis and sharon preves

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Contexts, Vol. 16, No. 1, p. 80. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2017 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504217696082.

“What is it?” It’s the first question most new parents field, and

it’s safe to assume no one wonders if the child is human. Instead,

the question usually refers to the child’s sex, and it reveals the

fundamental social importance of anatomical sex. Its bluntness

also indicates that, without a neatly assigned sex, a child might

not fully be a person. Granted a physical sex label—female or

male—the newborn is immediately and forever “gendered”

through social interactions. Sociocultural scholars have explored

the social construction of gender as a performative, fluid, and

non-universal category for decades, but the notion that physical

sex is also socially constructed has acquired far less exploration.

Some babies are born intersex. Their bodies aren’t clearly

female or male. While there is no reliable estimate of intersex

people in the population, a commonly reported statistic is that

intersex genital variation occurs about once in every 1,500 to

2,000 American births.

While we tend to rely on genital appearance at birth (more

directly, the presence or absence of a phallus) as the basis of

our sex assignment, what constitutes the essential sign of sex

has varied over the years. Genital appearance, sex hormones,

sex chromosomes, and the brain have each been used to sex

categorize bodies at different points in time. Sex hasn’t always

been a simple binary divide, either: pathologist Theodore Klebs,

for instance, first classified anatomical sex into five categories

in 1876, using the presence of gonads (ovaries, testes, or a mix

of ovarian and testicular tissue) as his guide, and biologist and

gender scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling further described these divi-

sions in her influential 1993 piece, “The Five Sexes.”

More recently, hormonal levels have been used to categorize

sex, as is the case in sex testing conducted by the International

Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Association

of Athletics Federations (IAAF). In 2009, South African runner

Caster Semenya won the 800-meter race at the Berlin World

Championships in Athletics. The media and several of Seme-

nya’s competitors seized on her appearance and performance

to pose stigmatizing questions about whether she was eligible

to compete as a female. Semenya was temporarily banned from

competition. In a purported effort to prevent another such fiasco,

in 2012, the IOC and IAAF issued sex-testing policies centered

on hyperandrogenism (a medical term describing ,in females,

higher than “normal” levels of androgen, including testosterone,

and often associated with intersex traits). The groups claimed

the guidelines were not about sex testing women athletes, but

about ensuring fairness in elite athletic competitions. After years

of scrutiny, Semenya (who has never self-identified as hyperan-

drogenic or intersex) was reinstated. She won silver at the 2012

Olympic Games. In the summer of 2015, the sex-testing policies

were suspended after Dutee Chand, an Indian 100-meter sprinter,

successfully appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Chand

didn’t advance to the semi-finals in the 2016 Olympic Games, but

Semenya won gold in the 800-meter race. Immediately following

her win, the IAAF made a statement that they would consider

the possibility of reinstating hyperadrogenism testing.

That one’s eligibility to compete as a female athlete is debat-

able and that the physical criteria used to judge femaleness have

changed over time are evidence that the categorization of sex is

a social, variable process.

Sex is far more diverse than we acknowledge when we ask

whether a baby is male or female. It cannot be neatly defined by

our genitalia, hormone levels, reproductive structures, or brain

structure. And as people with intersex traits make exceptionally

clear, even chromosomes are a poor guide. People with complete

androgen insensitivity syndrome, for instance, have XY chromo-

somes (typically associated with males) but an outward female

appearance, including breasts and a vagina and minimal, if any,

ability to develop male secondary sex characteristics, such as

prominent facial hair.

Perhaps, then, we ought to ask parents “Who is it?” rather

than “What is it?” when we meet a child. That way, the focus

might rest more holistically on the newborn as a human being,

rather than the predetermined product of a historically variable

and socially constructed sex and gender system. Maybe then we

can get to the root of why, as a society, we are so quick to cat-

egorize babies as “females” or “males” ascribed with “feminine”

or “masculine” personalities. Doing so would require wrestling

with, and perhaps unraveling, our widely held beliefs that both

sex and gender are binary, neatly correlated phenomena. Simply

changing the focus of the conversation seems a good place to

start acknowledging the diversity of sex development.

Georgiann Davis is in the sociology department at the University of Nevada, Las

Vegas. She is the author of Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis. Sharon

Preves is in the sociology department at Hamline University. She is the author of

Intersex and Identity: the Contested Self.