"Normal"

“How do our earliest body images form in the first place” (24, Dueling Dualism)

Fausto-Sterling imposes this seemingly simple, yet mind blowing question in her book, Sexing the Body. I have never really thought about how my earliest body image of myself formed, but I would say that it was influenced from women in the media and TV shows—as I never had a woman in my house to influence my image. Another interesting and important concept Fausto-Sterling introduces, originally popularized by Ehrhardt, that “sex and gender are separate categories”. This is an important distinction to make because people do not always identify with their biological sex. Give for example, Maria Patiño, who as described in the book, was eliminated from competing in the 1988 Olympics because she had failed the sex test due to the fact she had neither ovaries nor a uterus, even though she looked and identified as a female. Intersex people, such as Patiño, face stigmatized gender identities because they do not “fit” into what our society deems as “normal” definitions and categorizations of sex and gender. Traditional distinctions and social constructs of gender and sex are to blame, because as Fausto-Sterling explains, sex is not either/or (3). Further, Intersex newborns are treated as either/or scenarios and viewed as resulting from “fundamentally abnormal processes”, according to psychologist John Money (46).

Fausto-Sterling’s point of view is very interesting because she discusses sex and gender as a biologist who uses her trade in hopes of re-constructing societies view of sex and gender. I found the figures she includes of the anatomies of females and males to be fascinating, mixed with her explanation of embryonic gonads, which ultimately decide the sex of the child (50).  When talking about the history of constructing sex and gender as depicted in figure 1.1, a scientist exclaims to his partner, “there are six categories, but why? There’s got to be a clue here!”, as he examines human brains. Fausto-Sterling points out the flaw behind this reasoning, the scientists are making categories first and then are searching for clues from there to support their claims. From a statistical point of view, this argument should be completely disregarded as correct because by categorizing first, then looking for clues, there is a lot of confirmation bias.

Fausto-Sterling’s argument that sex and gender are social constructions and the example of Patiño being eliminated from the Olympics reminds me of a similar argument Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist author and philosopher, makes in her controversial book, “The Second Sex”:  the allegation that women were inferior to men, hence labeled the “second sex.” Not only this, but Beauvoir also noticed the inequity between the gender roles and how men often referred to women as the "Other," suggesting that women were not considered men’s equals. Fausto-Sterling would argue that because of the categorization in today’s society based off of what is “normal”, then intersex people, would be considered as “Other”. Facing similar inequities that Beauvoir describes as being seen as unequal and lesser.

- Jane B