Anne Fausto-Sterling: How Many Sexes Are There?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Roger:
>> I have already offered, as evidence for my argument, research findings by
>> Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biologist) & Thomas Laqueur (historian of
>> science).  Now I am going to provide an article by Anne Fausto-Sterling
>> (geneticist & professor of medical science).  Those who believe in the
>> eternal necessity of the two-sex model are arguing against three
>> scientists.  What evidence do they have?  None.
>
>Yoshie,
>
>Your post of Fausto-Sterling is a critique of Carrol, not me.  That is, it's a
>rebuttal of his contention that it was equally possible to make a biological
>argument that there is is only one sex, as that there is two.  The idea that
>there is only one sex was all I was criticizing.  That's why I called this
>thread "only one sex?".

You are entirely missing the point here.  Neither Carrol nor Kelley nor I
argued that the one-sex model is better than or should replace the two-sex
model.  Our argument is that biological differences do *not* have to
resolve themselves into two "opposite" sexes.  Sex is a political
interpretation of biological facts; gender is an ideological expression of
oppression.

According to Stephen Jay Gould, we might as well argue for one sex (in
which "man" is a minor modification of the universal "woman"), since we
have a "single ground plan," as he puts it.  According to Thomas Laqueur,
pre-modern Europeans in fact saw the world through the one-sex model (in
which "woman" was a lesser form of "man").  According to Will Roscoe, the
Zuni had three genders.  And according to Anne Fausto-Sterling, our current
two-sex model does a great harm to at least 4 % of the population, so why
not have a five-sex model?

The point is to argue *against biological determinism & the naturalization
of gender*, to which the naturalization of the two-sex model has lent
itself.

Yoshie