Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender

Abstract

Ruth Hubbard Of late, conservatives in science have been railing against social constructionism because it runs counter to the credo that, by its rigorous objectivity, science reveals the Truth about Nature. Fortunately, at the same time, other, more progressive natural and social scientists are deepening the analysis of biases that enter into the ways scientists conceptualize nature and that therefore shape the questions we ask about it and the answers we accept as plausible or true. Built-in biases are usually most blatant (though unfortunately not most obvious) in relation to questions that involve the interplay of biology and society, hence in relation to most questions having to do with human biology and medicine. They are especially prevalent, but also especially well concealed, when it comes to our understandings of sex and gender, since in Western societies sex and sex differences are linchpins of the way we conceptualize ourselves and our culture. Rather than bewail the conservative backlash against modern science studies, I would like to take the opportunity offered by this issue of Social Text to discuss some recent insights into the way the social and biological sciences have constructed sex and gender. In so doing, I accept the usual distinction between these concepts by which sex-whether we are male or female, men or women-is defined in terms of chromosomes (XX or XY), gonads (ovaries or testes), and genitals (the presence of a vagina or a penis-or, more usually, merely the presence or absence of a penis). Gender, specified as masculine or feminine, denotes the psychosocial attributes and behaviors people develop as a result of what society expects of them, depending on whether they were born female or male. However, as Kessler and McKenna and Barbara Fried have pointed out, the concepts of sex and are often overlapping and blurred, not only in ordinary speech but also in the scientific literature.1 Thus, note that Money and Ehrhardt's classic, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, which popularized the distinction between the terms sex and gender, confuses them in the subtitle-Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity-since, surely, conception is too early to speak of gender identity.2 Not all languages have two different words comparable to sex and gender. The fact that both terms are in common use in English may have encouraged American scientists to try to disentangle the biological aspects