Intersexuality...

[fajrdrako]

Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes by Gerald N. Callahan. I read this because I heard an interview with Dr. Callahan on CBC Radio, and was impressed by his intelligence and sense of empathy. Being interested in the subject in any case, I thought it worth getting and reading his book.

And it was, but what I got from his book wasn't what I expected to get from his book.

Callahan talks about what determines gender, and tries to pin it down. Not so easy. Most people can determine whether they are physically male or female, but not everyone can. And some people seem to mysteriously and suddenly (in the space of a few weeks) change gender at puberty. He talked about how, when it became surgically possible to physical recreate a person's sex organs, surgery was commonly practised on infants who were born anomalous or indeterminate; gender being assigned by convenience or preference. It was then firmly believed then that someone raised as a girl would feel like a girl, and someone raised like a boy would feel like a boy. There's an interesting section about how the choices are culturally determined - the Chinese and Hindus wanting their children to be boys for economic reasons, while the Muslims and Christians had different criteria entirely.

He talks about some case histories where the gender assignment was 'wrong' in the cases of people who were not happy about which gender they became - never knowing they weren't born female or male. He gives several case histories of unhappy outcomes, and argues against the official surveys that implied a high success rate.

He then talks about the genetic accidents that can cause intersexuality, and the ways in which it can be done. This leads to paragraphs like this one on page 77:

The most common karyotype among true hermaphrodites is 46,XX (one of those X chromosomes usually has the SRY it collecte dfrom a Y chromosome) followed by 46,XX/46XY chimeras or mosaics, and only rarely 46,XY.

After a while my head was spinning with trying to keep the details straight.

I agree absolutely with Callahan that people should be able to choose their own gender, and that physicians should not determine an infant's fate arbitrarily. I liked Callahan's approach and his attitude. But... Some of the anecdotes didn't convince me as he intended. For instance, he tells the story of one intersexed person, who was raised as a male, became a Lesbian female, and who lived happily with her girlfriend until she was gang-raped. Traumatized and suffering from post-traumatic stress, she then rejected her girlfriend, who killed herself. That tragedy really wasn't directly tied to her intersexuality - it's a horror story the like of which could happen to anyone. The intersexuality was just another complication in her life.

His talk about people in other cultures of the past who have lived as neither female nor male, the berdache of Fist Nations people and American Indians, and the Hijras of India, led me to think not that those nations were more open and kind to the intersexed than ours, but that they forced them into yet another equally rigid gender role established more by tradition and public opinion than by any impulse to freedom of expression or choice. A different gender, just as circumscribed as our two-gender expectations, just involving a third category. What we need isn't that. We need more flexibility in roles for all genders.

I thought one of the most entertaining sections was the one that starts on page 18, entitled "Columbus Discovers the Clitoris: The New World of Sex". No, not Christopher, but Matteo Renaldus Columbus, a colleague of Vesalius and Falloppius, who in the mid-sixteenth century discovered the clitoris as an anatomical feature. He details the controversy and studies that followed, and adds:

Four hundred years after that, following a discussion of these issues in one of my classes, several of my female students stated very convincingly that they think it probable that the clitoris was discovered long before the second century, and most likely it was not a man who first found it. Furthermore, they've told me that this tale makes some of them feel as Native Americans must have felt when the other Columbus declared he had discovered a "new" world.

Though Callahan gives statistics for the number of children born with the various conditions that cause intersexuality (androgen insensitivity syndrome, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, 5-alpha reducase, and so on), I didn't see any statistic that told roughly what proportion of the total population is intersexed.

He never uses the word "transsexual" and I wondered what the relationship was between transsexuality and intersexuality. Nor does he mention people who are bigendered, which looks like a different situation entirely, but surely has similar implications. Sexual orientation issues become all the more complicated: if you don't fit standard definitions of male and female, the usual definitions don't apply.

It seems to me that we already have (in my part of the world, in any case) less rigidity than ever before with regard to gender roles, and much more tolerance in personal styles. But people are still regarded as 'male' or 'female', and I can't help thinking if that dichotomy were not taken as basic and definitive, life would be a little easier for everyone, regardless of their gender type.