Sexing the Body: Science, Intersex, and Gender Politics
This paper engages with Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body to examine the medical, scientific, and social stakes of classifying human bodies as strictly male or female. Drawing on Fausto-Sterling's critique of intersex surgeries, Ian Hacking's concept of "making up people," and recent neurological and behavioral research on sex differences, the paper argues that mainstream medicine's enforcement of binary sex norms imposes harmful consequences on intersexual individuals. It also considers how acknowledging intersexed bodies challenges long-held scientific assumptions and expands our understanding of nature, gender, and biological diversity.
- Introduction: What Is at Stake in Sex Classification: Medical sex assignment and intersex surgery harms
- Scientific Research on Sex Differences: Brain structure and navigational sex difference studies
- Hacking's Concept Applied to Sexed Bodies: How medicine categorizes and constructs gendered patients
- The Role of Scientific and Medical Expertise in Intersex Births: Hormone research failures and endocrinology history
- Acknowledging Intersexed Bodies: Destabilizing and Expanding Ideas of Nature: Intersex recognition challenges scientific and social norms
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper integrates multiple scholarly frameworks — Fausto-Sterling's feminist biology critique, Hacking's philosophical concept of "making up people," and empirical neuroscience research — to build a multidisciplinary argument.
- It grounds abstract theoretical claims in concrete examples, such as the surgical "correction" of intersex newborns and specific findings about amygdala and hippocampus size differences, giving the argument both conceptual and empirical weight.
- The paper moves logically from personal stakes (intersex individuals' lives) to scientific evidence, then to philosophical critique, and finally to broader epistemological implications, creating a coherent argumentative arc.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective critical synthesis: it presents empirical research on sex differences without accepting it uncritically, using Fausto-Sterling and Hacking to interrogate the social and institutional frameworks that shape how such research is interpreted and applied. This positions science itself as a cultural practice subject to scrutiny.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing human stakes through the example of intersex surgery, then surveys recent studies on navigational ability and brain structure to represent the mainstream scientific view. It pivots to Hacking's theoretical lens on medical categorization, then examines Fausto-Sterling's history of endocrinology and hormone research. It closes with a reflective section on how recognizing intersex bodies both unsettles and enriches our understanding of nature. Approximately five sections of moderate length, each building on the last.
Introduction: What Is at Stake in Sex Classification
What is immediately at stake is the entire life of an intersexual person — meddled into and muddled by mainstream medicine's gender biases (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, pp. 8, 16). Not only modern America but also the world at large demands that a person be either male or female, in unquestioning obedience to, or "sublime" conformity with, medical norms. A mainstream physician who comes across the male sex organ of a newly born hermaphrodite and finds that it measures less than 3 cm, for instance, decides that it should be "repaired" to conform to genital standards. He shortens the small phallus to make it resemble a clitoris through surgical procedures and ultimately declares the newborn to be a girl. A hermaphrodite — also called an intersexual — is a person who possesses both male and female external genitalia (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
Opposition to the continuing scientific research and medical position on genital difference between males and females comes mainly from intersexual adults who were subjected to these surgeries as children and therefore could not oppose the decision (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, pp. 30, 123). Their overall welfare is at stake in that decision, and they doubt that the physicians who perform the surgeries genuinely consider it. These advocates call this assault on their right to remain intersexual "sex policing." Physicians, on the other hand, uphold society's insistence that children be declared and formed as either boys or girls, and schools are severely penalized for deviating from these determined categories (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
Scientific Research on Sex Differences
Findings from two recent studies bolster the apparent differences between the sexes in capabilities and physiological characteristics. The first suggests that males have stronger navigational skills and higher reproductive success than females (Cooper-White, 2014). The study was conducted by Dr. Layne Vashro, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology, who traveled with more than 120 male and female volunteers to northwest Namibia. The volunteers belonged to the Twe and Tjimba tribes. Through navigational tasks and measures of the number of children each volunteer had, the male participants fared much better in both the distance and range of travel and number of offspring than the female volunteers. The findings also emphasized that having multiple mates is more beneficial to males than to females, which may help explain the observed gap between the sexes (Cooper-White, 2014).
Males and females also differ in brain size, function, and features according to other studies. Recent MRI studies found that some regions in women's brains are larger than men's relative to total cerebral volume (Curley, 2014). Neuroscientist Larry Cahill investigated sex differences in the brains of both animal and human subjects and challenged the traditional assumption that males make better research subjects because females' fluctuating hormones render them unstable. His findings provided evidence of meaningful gender differences in the brain and concluded that sex differences begin as early as in the womb. Early exposure of guinea pig fetuses to the sex hormone testosterone was found to trigger male development and to direct the development of the brain toward typical male behavior, while female fetuses developed mating behavior later in life. Animal research also identified structural differences between the sexes, specifically in the hypothalamus, the anteroventral periventricular nucleus, and the dendrites, suggesting that males and females differ in brain circuitry (Curley, 2014).
Other MRI studies showed that the hippocampus in women is larger than in men, while the amygdala is larger in men than in women (Curley, 2014). The amygdala is the area of the brain where emotionally charged memories form. Studies revealed that women's amygdala is more strongly activated in the left hemisphere, while men's amygdala is more strongly engaged in the right hemisphere, when subjects were asked to watch a violent film. Men also showed greater difficulty recalling specific details of an emotional story, while women showed difficulty recalling peripheral details a week later. This finding suggests that men are more capable of recalling the main idea of an emotional event while women tend to recall specific details. Gender also appears to influence vulnerability to disease. Boys, for example, are more prone to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than girls early in life, while women and girls are twice as prone to depression as men and boys. Women are also more vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease than men.
Margaret McCarthy of a university school of medicine, who studies the effects of hormones on brain development, proposed that differences in sex make one gender more vulnerable at certain times than the other. Her 2012 article published in The Journal of Neuroscience contended that one sex may be vulnerable to a particular disease while being protected against another, and she concluded that there is a need to develop sex-specific preventive medicines for better treatment and to identify new drug targets (Curley, 2014).
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.