Intersexuality and Our Notions of Gender

Our discussion in class on Thursday on the South African athlete Caster Semenya, an intersexed person (although her subjective identity is that of a woman) really hammered home for me how everything we think about gender is binary.  Man and woman are all that there is for most of us; group a or group b.  The existence of intersexed people kind of blows that out of the water.  The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) says that an estimated 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 children are born intersexed in some way.  That means that there are millions of intersexed people in the world.  Millions of people who are biologically distinct from out notions of male and female are out there living their lives.  Our thinking about gender, at least in the U.S., can’t encompass the existence of such folks.  I guess that’s why so many children are surgically assigned gender shortly after being born.   And the ISNA supports assigning gender early on, although not surgically, “depending on which of those genders the child is more likely to feel as she or he grows up”.  For me this recalls the Argentinian film XXY, about an intersexed young person living in Uruguay.  The mother of this person invites her friend and her friend’s plastic surgeon husband (and their son) to visit, secretly hoping to persuade her husband and her child to consider surgical gender assignment (previously the child had been taking hormones to retard male characteristics from manifesting).  This backfires, with the child (called Alex, a gender neutral name) refusing to identify as either gender.  The father of this child tells the plastic surgeon that he knew his child was perfect the way it was from the moment it was born (he uses “perfecta” the feminine adjective though. he mixes genders throughout the film when speaking about his child).  Throughout the entire film I kept asking myself why the person would ever be made to choose.  Why can’t someone deviate from that particular norm without some throwing a fit?  What does an openly intersexed person threaten?  What comes to mind is that it threatens the gender binary.  Why preserve an artificial binary, one that so clearly doesn’t reflect humanity?  I can’t see any good reason to preserve it.  The human race won’t die out, cities won’t crumble.  Is it so wrong to have to rethink about gender and about how gender is used in society based on this new understanding that our notions of gender are outmoded and outdated?  When I think about the kind of society I’d like to see, it is one that is free of gender.  If gender is something artificial, that in the case of intersexed people has meant that hundreds of thousands have their genitals mutilated, that has meant queer people have been persecuted, isn’t that something that needs to go? I, for one, could do without it.