Sex, Ethics, and Method

Abstract

I thank Cressida Heyes and Lisa Kall for their careful and generous readings, and especially for questions they pose. Even as Heyes and Kall raise very different kinds of concerns, each fundamentally requires that I reflect more carefully upon issues of philosophical method that took me on improbable path that resulted Making Sense of Intersex. I am grateful for opportunity to respond to their criticisms among philosophers at Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Though I cannot respond detail to all of questions raised by Heyes or Kall, I will try to address what I see as those which most directly challenge my arguments.RESPONSE TO HEYES: BACK TO NIETZSCHEHeyes is skeptical of my invocation of Nietzsche and value of my proposal that ressentiment is a motivating force surgical and hormonal normalization of bodies of children with atypical sex anatomies. Heyes contrasts my identification of ressentiment response of medical specialists who promote unnecessary medical interventions for intersex anatomies with Wendy Brown's identification of ressentiment her critique of identity politics Wounded Attachments (Brown 1993): Is ressentiment a generalizable attitude Heyes asks, in which those who deviate from norm are punished for their jouissance through moralizing revenge, or is it (as for Brown) moralizing revenge of disempowered? (Heyes 2016: 795). In other words, it doesn't seem to follow that physicians, who occupy positions of power and authority, can be understood to express ressentiment their treatment of obviously powerless children.To Heyes it might appear that an obvious extension of a Nietzschean analysis context of thinking about intersex would focus, as Brown vividly puts it, on the wounded character of politicized identity's (Brown 1993: 391). Brown casts a harsh light on contemporary claims to politicized identity, what 1990s was often expressed with respect to subjugated racial and sexual categories. Brown sees desire for recognition marked by politicized identity claims, a reiteration of regulatory, disciplinary society (398). Following Foucault-yet critical of what she sees as Foucault's curious optimism his confidence concerning possibilities of resistance (397)-Brown cautions that rather than emancipation, these claims to identity, expressed, as they must be, within terms ofdiscourses of liberal essentialism and disciplinary normalization, effectively replicate or reinforce mechanisms of power that produced subjugated positions from which activists now claim authority (398). In elaborating this claim, Brown brings Nietzsche into analysis, identifying proponents of identity politics and their claims to civic membership and political rights with those slaves Nietzsche's genealogy whose revolt resulted transvaluation of values.Reading Brown today, I might see claims by some intersex activists, including those wholly focused on demedicalizing intersex, an illuminating comparison. The skepticism Brown expresses with respect to prospects for resistance grounded identity claims is a prudent reminder of skepticism we should exercise with respect to promise of legal and political fixes focused on problem of assigning gender to newborns with what is still called ambiguous sex.Take for example acclaim that greeted 2012 German law mandating a sex assignment of X to intersex infants instead of M or F Hailed as an important advance, German law has been repeatedly misrepresented news media throughout Europe and US as offering parents a choice sex assignment of their children (see, e.g., Bendavid 2013; Heine 2013). As Swiss activist group Zwischengeschlecht (Between Genders) explained when law went into effect, this legislation does not fact provide parents with increased options, but formally prohibits registration of children with intersex as M or F Physicians, not parents, are vested with authority to register children's sex assignment. …