Gender concepts and applications

Biology, Culture, And Gender

The Conceptual Inadequacy of the Binary Gender System:

In Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) Anne Fausto-Sterling explains that the binary concept of human sexuality is inadequate to account for the true range of variation of human gender. According to Fausto-Sterling, human social beliefs and culture have arbitrarily assigned all human beings to one or the other of only two opposite genders despite the fact that human gender orientation actually occurs along a much broader spectrum than can be accounted for by the two polar opposite gender assignments of "male" and "female" (p52).

Fausto-Sterling suggests that the existence of homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender phenomena are evidence that human sexual identity is much more complex than is capable of binary categorization (p53). Whereas traditional cultural views of gender and sexual identity regard gender as strictly a function of biological structure, the author explains that many other genetic variables and external influences actually make gender a product of nature and nurture elements that operate together as an "indivisible, dynamic system (p228).

Intersex Ambiguity and Cultural Biases Based on the Binary Gender Concept:

The author explains that as many as two percent of all human beings are born as intersexuals, including those born with mixed sets of genitals, and chromosomal abnormalities in which internal genetic makeup do not correspond to external appearance.

Fausto-Sterling suggests that where an infant is born with any kind of ambiguous genital appearance, standard medical practice has been for the physician to assign a gender artificially and solely based on the physical appearance despite the fact that genital configuration is only one very narrow component of human gender.

Unfortunately, when infants receive corrective surgery, physicians typically make the arbitrary choice of gender assignment based on the single criterion of whether the genitals "look" more male of female. This may be responsible for gender identity misidentification when factors other than apparent external genital structure conflict with other elements. For this reason, Fausto-Sterling argues that infants born with ambiguous genitalia should not receive surgery until later in life when they begin to express their natural gender identity.

Sex Hormones vs. Steroid Hormones:

Faustino-Sterling also objects to the very definition of human steroid hormones as "sex hormones" because they exert many more effects on the developing human body than merely those related to determining gender and sexuality. The author traces the history of traditional views about the role of human hormones and gender back to experiments on rodents before World War II through the Organizational/Activational Model of hormone activity (p214) based on the effects of exposure to specific types (and levels) of hormones during human gestation that dictate gender-specific behaviors in puberty.