Is intersexuality real?

Textual Practice

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 527-547

  Morland, Iain ^a  

^a CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Gender; Genitalia; Hermaphroditism; Intersexuality; Medicine; Performativity

Indexed keywords

EID: 3843064237     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360110070439     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Meira Weiss, 'Fence sitters: parents' reactions to sexual ambiguities in their newborn children', Semiotica, 107 (1995), pp. 33-50, at pp. 39-40, emphasis added.
2. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 33-6.
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990);
4. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
5. Suzanne J. Kessler, Lessons from the Intersexed (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 166.
6. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 236 n. 15.
7. Kessler, Lessons from the Intersexed, p. 135 n. 4.
8. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 62;
9. Patricia K. Donahoe, 'Clinical management of intersex abnormalities', Current Problems in Surgery, 28 (1991), pp. 519-79, at p. 549.
10. D.T. Wilcox and P.G. Ransley, 'Medicolegal aspects of hypospadias', British Journal of Urology International, 86 (2000), pp. 327-31, at p. 327.
11. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, p. 51.
12. Donahoe, 'Clinical management', p. 519.
13. Cheryl Chase, 'Affronting reason', in Dawn Atkins (ed.) Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities (Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1998), pp. 205-20;
14. John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl (London: Quartet Books, 2000);
15. Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson, 'Management of intersexuality: guidelines for dealing with persons with ambiguous genitalia', Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 151 (1997), pp. 1046-50;
16. Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998);
17. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, esp. pp. 45-114;
18. Morgan Holmes, Queer Cut Bodies: Intersexuality & Homophobia in Medical Practice. Paper presented at the 1995 Learned Societies CSAA meetings, Montreal. Also online: ;
19. Kessler, Lessons from the Intersexed;
20. David Valentine and Riki Anne Wilchins, 'One percent on the burn chart: gender, genitals, and hermaphrodites with attitude', Social Text, 15 (1997), pp. 215-22.
21. See also Alice Dreger's pathbreaking anthology Intersex in the Age of Ethics (Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 1999) which contains work by intersexuals, scientists and critics.
22. This is necessarily simplistic. For a fuller discussion, see pp. 120-1 of Bruce E. Wilson and William G. Reiner, 'Management of intersex: a shifting paradigm', in Dreger, Intersex in the Age of Ethics, pp. 119-35.
23. Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender, pp. 29-30.
24. Anne Moir and Bill Moir, Why Men Don't Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences (London: HarperCollins, 1998); emphases added. Elizabeth Jones kindly brought this book to my attention.
25. For example, John Money, Sex Errors of the Body: Dilemmas, Education, Counseling (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 16.
26. I am alluding to Louis Althusser's 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)', in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 121-73.
27. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 10-11.
28. Quoted in Holmes, Queer Cut Bodies, n.p.
29. Weiss, 'Fence sitters', p. 40.
30. K.L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th edn (Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders, 1998), p. 335.
31. Money, Sex Errors of the Body, p. 46.
32. Anita Natarajan, 'Medical ethics and truth-telling in the case of androgen insensitivity syndrome', Canadian Medical Association Journal, 154 (1996), pp. 568-70. Also online:
33. Natarajan, 'Medical ethics', n.p.
34. For a further discussion, see Alice Dreger, 'Jarring bodies: thoughts on the display of unusual anatomies', Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43 (2000), pp. 161-72.
35. Moore and Persaud, The Developing Human, p. 335.
36. Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, pp. 139-66.
37. Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 150.
38. A recent example is Wilcox and Ransley, 'Medicolegal aspects of hypospadias', p. 327.
39. Anne Fausto-Sterling has made a corresponding point concerning the medical account of sex differentiation in non-hermaphroditic bodies. See pp. 244-7 of her essay, 'Life in the XY corral', in Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch (eds) The Gender and Science Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 234-51.