The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough

“The Five Sexes” explained hermaphrodites and pseudohermaphrodites, fernms and merms. It then went on to talk about how pre-Victorian era, more culture may have recognized a third gender, but since then Western society has forced everyone into a binary system based on gender roles, either male or female. There was one part on this article that I did not agree with. When the author was speaking of how the world would be if there were a lot of varying degrees of gender and the binary system was disbanded he says, “Patient and physician, parent and child, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual-- all those oppositions and others would have to be dissolved as sources of division.” That is taking it a little too far. Sources of division would still come about as it is human nature, they would just base themselves on something other than sex, such as wealth. She also brought up how parents of intersexed children were forcing them at birth into one gender through surgery. To me, picking someone’s sex for them after they have been born seems like the wrong thing to do, especially because you do not know how they are going to feel or how they will indentify at least until they start developing hormonally during puberty, if not later, if ever. However, I also could not imagine the difficulties of a child growing up as a hermaphrodite. Right at the end of the article the author states that a study was done of “substantial body of case histories” of adults who had grown up a hermaphrodite, and claims that there “is not a psychotic or a suicide in the lot.” The author does not site the study, and it would be interesting to see some actual figures from a study of that type.