1 in 100 Births is Intersex
That’s how we know sex isn’t a strict binary
It’s kind of strange to me that there is any discussion at all still about whether or not sex is a binary, because from a scientific perspective, it’s clearly not. There are intersex births all the time, both ones that are readily apparent as such and ones that take time to manifest because they have to do with hormones or chromosomal differences. “If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.”
According to the Intersex Society of North America, “Total number of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female (is) one in 100 births.” That ought to be enough right there to dispel the notion that sex can only be binary, because it clearly isn’t on a rather regular basis. These differences may appear in the physiology, such as vaginal agenesis, where the vagina and possibly the uterus never form. They may be hormonal, such as with classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia where a lack of the proper enzymes interrupts the production of hormones, including testosterone. They may be chromosomal — Not XX and not XY, or a variety of other conditions that do not conform to the notion that sex is an either/or prospect.
It’s reductive to say that men have testosterone so it makes them be like XYZ, in part because it doesn’t do that in a uniform way. After all, Donald Trump, Ru Paul, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Pee Wee Herman are all men. Testosterone is a hormone that impacts a wide variety of things other than just aggression or strength, and women have testosterone too, and in some cases fairly high levels of it. Men also produce estrogen and progesterone and deficiencies of these hormones can cause issues.
“A testosterone level for one male may be too much or too little for another. In addition, studies have found that testosterone works closely with estrogen, and some effects of testosterone deficiency may actually be attributed to an estrogen deficiency. Additional clinical trials are underway to study this issue.”
“Testosterone is the most significant hormone to male sexual development and function. But estrogen needs to stay in balance with testosterone to help control sex drive, the ability to have an erection, and the production of sperm.”
As Jordon Shapiro notes in Everything We Think We Know About Testosterone Is (Mostly) Wrong, “Almost all the most common beliefs about testosterone are either outright wrong or, at best, greatly exaggerated. Certainly, some of the rhetoric around hormones is inspired by facts, but mostly it’s a bunch of misguided attempts to drape the mythology of sexist cultural assumptions atop an endocrinological scaffold.”
“It has consistently shown that testosterone cannot predict competitive aggression unless the levels are extremely high or low. As Brown University anthropologist Matthew Gutmann puts it, one would have to be either castrated or “a gym rat on steroids” before testosterone levels began to correlate with the inclination to pick a fight (Gutmann).”
Shapiro goes on to say, “We didn’t really need endocrine experiments to know that young people’s gender specific behaviors have nothing to do with hormones. After all, testosterone levels in boys and girls are similar from just after infancy until puberty. Nevertheless, we constantly hear people pontificate about biologically determined differences already apparent in prepubescent kids.” (Read the rest of this highly informative article for more.)
Gender is a continuum as well, and not a binary. We know this because in other cultures and at different times in history, what is expected of men and women is very different than what we expect in the modern West.
As Elle Beau ❇︎ says in Men and Women Are More Alike Than They Are Different, “In a 2005 meta-analysis of 46 studies conducted over the past 20 years, Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD concluded that males and females are more alike than different. Furthermore, Hyde found that gender differences seem to depend on the context in which they were measured. In studies designed to eliminate gender norms, researchers demonstrated that gender roles and social context strongly determined a person’s actions. For example, after participants in one experiment were told that they would not be identified as male or female, nor did they wear any identification, none conformed to stereotypes about their sex when given the chance to be aggressive. In fact, they did the opposite of what would be expected — women were more aggressive and men were more passive.”
Beau goes on to say, “The other day I wrote a story about the Na of China who have about as fundamentally different a culture from the West as is possible. It’s a society where family is centered around a matriarch, and everyone lives in the house of their mother or grandmother along with their brothers and sisters, as well as the children of the women. There is functionally no such thing as a father or a husband. Men and women have love relationships but never live together as spouses. Any children belong to the family of the woman and her matrilineal clan.”
“In this culture, women do the farming and a lot of the heavy physical work. Men build houses and tend to livestock. They are quite involved with childcare, although men help to raise their siblings, and the children of their sisters and cousins, rather than the ones they have a biological connection to.” All of this calls into question studies that have drawn the conclusion that men are interested in things and women are interested in people and animals.”
She goes on to point out that “As late as the 4th c BC many women in Egypt were the heads of their households, took part in business transactions, including contracts and litigation (sometimes against their own fathers or husbands). Men were reported to have stayed home to do the weaving. One of the earliest archeologists of the pyramids of Egypt, Sir William Flinders Petrie, wrote in 1925 that, ‘In Egypt, all property went in the female line, the woman was the mistress of the house; and in early tales she is represented as having entire control over herself and the place.’”
So how do we know what is really innate when it’s so varied from individual to individual, from culture to culture, and from era in time to era in time? I’m not saying there is no such thing as sex or gender, but I do think there’s ample evidence that it’s a huge continuum and not a binary. If you remove sex and gender from the equation and instead look at what the Taoists call yin and yang, you see that nearly everyone is a blend of those. Some lean more naturally to one end of the continuum than the other, but that isn’t necessarily predicated on their plumbing or even on who they’ve been assigned to be by society.
Traditional societies have always known this and many of them made allowance for more than two genders. Native Americans have “two spirits” and the Native Hawaiians have māhū, by way of just two examples.
“As an umbrella term it (two spirits) may encompass same-sex attraction and a wide variety of gender variance, including people who might be described in Western culture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, gender queer, cross-dressers or who have multiple gender identities.”
“In Native Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures (māhū) are third gender people with traditional spiritual and social roles within the culture. Māhū were particularly respected as teachers, usually of hula dance and chant. In pre-contact times māhū performed the roles of goddesses in hula dances that took place in temples which were off-limits to women. Māhū were also valued as the keepers of cultural traditions, such as the passing down of genealogies. Traditionally parents would ask māhū to name their children.”
It is only within the confines of patriarchal cultures that sex and gender are imagined as a binary, when they very clearly aren’t. I don’t know why we feel the need to shoe-horn people into these restrictive boxes that don’t feel comfortable or natural to a significant number of people. Why can’t we just allow folks to be who they are and to express their sex and/or their gender in whatever ways feel the most natural to them?
Thanks to Elle Beau for inspiring and informing so much of this story.
