Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

Rating:
Summary: Bridging Essentialism and Constructivism
Review: This book is wonderful. Fausto-Sterling does not take sides on the essentialism and constructivism. She argues that biology does matter in determining one's sexual orientation, but at the same time, culture plays a central role as well. In other words, culture and biology interact with one another, in a complicated fashion. It 's an interaction that is dialectical, rather than linear. The author skillfully weaves scientific knowledge with politics and history in a accessable language. Unlike many scientists,whose arguements tend to be ahistorical, she takes into account of history in building her arguements. This work will be interesting for both the scientifically inclined and the theoretically inclined.

Rating:
Summary: Dismal arguments by a Biology prof. who should know better
Review: This book would deserve 3 stars, perhaps even 4 stars, had it been written by a layperson, but Dr. Fausto-Sterling is a professor of biology, and developmental biology at that, and her major arguments are horrible. This book and a corresponding literature review of intersex conditions in a journal [Am J Human Biol 12, 151; Mar, 2000] represent the culmination of 6 years of research on the part of Dr. Fausto-Sterling. To start with, intersex conditions are medically defined as conditions where the sex of the person cannot be inferred based on external appearance (including genitals) or where the external appearance of the person is inconsistent with the genetics of the person. Dr. Fausto-Sterling defines an intersex individual as any "individual who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels," which is a remarkably broad definition; the majority of individuals who would satisfy this definition are unambiguously either male or female. In her journal review, Dr. Fausto-Sterling arrives at a 1.7% figure for the prevalence of intersex conditions. 99% of these cases are not considered intersex in the medical literature and comprise of non-intersex anomalies such as late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia, sex chromosome aneuploidies (abnormal number of chromosomes), and vaginal agenesis (absence or failure to form vagina). If one removes the non-intersex cases from the 1.7% figure, the prevalence of intersex conditions turns out to be a mere 0.018%. Worse, the 1.7% figure is the product of shoddy research on the part of one who is too keen on showing a high prevalence of intersex conditions; the actual figure of intersex conditions using Dr. Fausto-Sterling's definition is about 0.37% [Am J Human Biol 15, 112; Jan-Feb, 2003], and if one removes the non-intersex conditions from the latter figure, then the prevalence of intersex conditions turns out to be 0.015%.

All case studies of intersex conditions presented by Dr. Fausto-Sterling in her book are genuine examples of intersex, but she doesn't present a single case study of any of the non-intersex conditions that constitute the 99% of the conditions that she classifies as intersex. Much as homosexual activists have attempted to exaggerate the prevalence of homosexuality to suggest that homosexuality is normal since abnormal conditions supposedly cannot characterize a substantial minority, a high prevalence of intersex is central to the main argument of Dr. Fausto-Sterling's book, which disputes the idea of there being only two sexes among humans and implies that the notion of only two human sexes and especially what it means to belong to one of these two sexes is socially constructed. Of course, Dr. Fausto-Sterling doesn't provide a shred of evidence that any intersex condition results from normal development.

Furthermore, she harps on corpus callosum research, but doesn't document the unambiguous and extensive human neuroanatomical sexual dimorphism well-documented in the literature, including differential genetic expression in the brain.

I do not advocate any kind of discrimination against intersex individuals, but nothing is gained from exaggerating their prevalence by a 100-fold. By attempting to adapt biology to social constructionism, Dr. Fausto-Sterling has made a mockery of the scientific aspects of human sexual dimorphism.