Ruth Hubbard on Power & the Meaning of Differences

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Wed Dec 1 15:09:18 PST 1999


Margaret,

This is an educating post you send.

Is it relevant to ask which unions are fertile ?

Charles


>>> Margaret <mairead at mindspring.com> 11/28/99 11:25AM >>>
Rakesh wrote:


> Now would you kindly give me a evolutionary explanation for why except
>for at best 4% of the human population people do have one of only two
>biological sexual identities in which the chromosomal, genetic and hormonal
>aspects are perfectly consonant?
>...
>On the face of it, politics has nothing to do with human's *general* sexual
>dimorphism.

Ack! Gaack! I don't have time to do more than just read, these days, so I've been personfully resisting the urge to jump in. But the conventionalist 'whatever is, is right' thinking showing up in this discussion is making me just as crazy as it's making Kelley.

For openers, Rakesh, the '4%' you quote was put forward originally with the unspoken qualifier universal in experimental science: 'as well as we can measure today'. I presume you didn't hear the qualifier because you yourself are not a scientist. But it was there.

Years ago, that 4% was less, because fewer factors could be measured well. I'll give you 2 examples:

The condition known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) in its complete form (CAIS) produces women with a 46XY pattern. Their gonads are testes, not ovaries, but they lack the cellular receptor to make use of the androgens those gonads produce, and so they develop as female, albeit without cervix or uterus. Quite often their situation doesn't come to light until they fail to develop pubic and axillary hair as expected.

The condition known as Turner's Syndrome produces people with a 45X0 pattern and no gonads at all. Lacking any endogenous hormone source, they develop as female, usually with minor stigmata such as quite small stature.

A hundred years ago, a victim of CAIS could not have been distinguished from a victim of Rokitansky's Syndrome, in which a person with a 46XX pattern is born without uterus or, in many instances, vagina. Now the 2 cases can be distinguished.

AIS, whether complete or partial, and Turner's are considered intersexed conditions; Rokitansky's is not. Why?

Membership in the Turner's Syndrome Society is open to people with 45X0 and 45X0/46XX mosaicism. It is not open to people with 45X0/46XY mosaicism even though they might be otherwise indistinguishable. Why?

It's been an article of faith that Turner's Syndrome girls would be 46XX if they had a sex chromosome. But now more sophisticated assay techniques are revealing XY structures in some tissue, in some girls. What will that mean for Turner's Society membership?

Charmian Quigley, a physician and molecular biologist, is perhaps the world's leading expert on AIS. In responding to an ugly and mindless criticsm of CAIS women by Germaine Greer ('failed males'), Dr Quigley pointed out that it is scientifically unsound to imagine that Nature follows human social convention; that molecular biology techniques now reveal the existence of XX males and XY females. These people can only be identified by means of a searching assay, because they are otherwise entirely indistinguishable from XY males and XX females. Which means that, short of subjecting everyone to such an assay, we really don't know how many intersexed people there are in the world.

Side note: she reckons that many cases of low male fertility may be subclinical cases of AIS. Do you know whether you have normal fertility, Rakesh? :-)

The point here being that our 'general sexual dimorphism' an artifact of our inability to measure with sufficient accuracy, and a political desire for a certain power gradient.

That political desire manifests in other ways. For example: why was a person with only 1 Black great-grandparent considered Black? Logically, it makes no possible sense. Yet it was (and still is, in places) political reality, and many people will say it's 'natural'. Why? What's 'natural' about it?

Making reproductive role more figural than other characteristics is, as Carrol illuminated so beautifully, a political decision. It supports Capitalism, just as claims do that greed is more natural than sharing. We could divide people in any number of other ways --greedy vs sharing, for example-- and simply presume that reproduction will happen. But reproduction is important to people interested in power, so a lot of energy is directed at making it figural and unavoidable.

Now, to return to an important point made by Kelley and Yoshi (I think; I've lost track) earlier: why should we not say that there is only 1 sex? There is very good evidence for considering XY people a variant species of female. Certainly if you remove the gonads in utero early enough, the foetus will develop as a female, and the XY pattern won't matter. Moreover, it is well understood that XY people are much more fragile than XX people. Almost all serious sex deviance is associated with XY people, for one thing. So since 'female' is the default development pattern anyway, and there is good evidence that 'male' development is shaky and fraught with opportunities for error, why don't we just acknowledge that 'male' is only a convenient identifier for 'sperm-producing, limited-capacity females'?


> At least in Yoshie's case, I understand that she is defending Gould's and
>Hubbard's deflationary critiques of sociobiological explanation
>(naturalisation) of men's and women's behavior as rooted in the general
>sexual dimorphism that we inherit as our evolutionary heritage. Yoshie
>argues that the ideological use to which this general dimorphism has been
>put is undercut by recognition of Fausto Sterling's two or three extra
>genders under which less than 4% of the population falls (and I have not
>been convinced that 'correction' through surgery or hormonal therapy is
>always cruel normalisation; nor does Fausto Sterling herself really make
>this argument). At any rate, I don't follow Yoshie here at all: from Fauto
>Sterling on five genders to the end of the ideological 'opposite sex'
>model, though there seems to be a plausible argument here.

Fausto Sterling did little more than put old wine into new bottles, re-labeling the canonical 'pseudo-hermaphrodite' categories. Her notion of multiple genders seems intuitively correct, but the way she packaged it is ...inadequate. Not many intersexed people support her terminology.

What _is_ gender, exactly? Until you come up with a useful definition at that level, it hardly makes sense to go further.

As to the value of 'correction', which would you rather have: funny-looking but sensitive genitals, or 'corrected' genitals that neither look fully normal nor retain neurological integrity?


>
>At any rate, I have been persuaded that her and Hubbard and Gould's
>cautions regarding sociobiology are worth heeding (see the post I just
>reposted). I don't read either however as denying that our sexual identity
>is given biologically,

They may not be perceptive enough to deny it, but it is denied all the same by the very existance of transsexual people, whether or not of the canonically intersexed kind.

smooches [being a virtual Kelley for the moment :-)], Margaret



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