Three eT Is Gender Essential? Anne Fausto-Sterling Gender Webster’s dictionary offers three definitions. (1) “Gender, race, kind or kin’ offers us a system of classification. Many people think of gender as a kind of fication that divides thi 0 binary cate- gories, although binarism is certainly not inherent in this use of the word. So when we ask, “Is gender essential?” we might be asking whether we think binary gender classifications are essential. (2) A second dictionary definition equates “gender” with “sex.” “Sex” in turn has multiple meanings. One thesaurus list I perused for syno- nyms for sex included, sexuality, male, masculinity, maleness, female, femininity, as well as activities such as sexual intercourse, copulation, and the like. (3) A third dictionary definition of gender refers to the grammar of languages that divide words into masculine, feminine, or neuter, and finally, an inflectional form, again grammatically showing, membership in such a subclass Most dictionary definitions of gender ignore a totally different use of the word, one which came into being twice—from apparently in- dependent sources. In the 1950s some sexologists—John Money fore- most among them—developed a scheme to describe the development of “normal” adult males and females. In this scheme he separated elements of development into two major categories: one essentially physical (involving anatomy and hormones), and the other essentially psychological (involving acculturation and the psychological fixation of a gendered self-identity). He referred to the physical, as “sex,” and the mental as “gender.” In the 1970s, apparently with little knowledgeIs Gender Essential? 53 of Money’s earlier work, feminists reinvented “gender” in a way that differed to some degree from both Money (and subsequent use in the field of sexology) and the standard dictionary definition. It interests me that neither Money’s definition nor the feminist reinventions of this word have made it into the dictionary. The feminist and the sexological reinventions of gender have been both enormously helpful and deeply problematic. Early feminists dis- tinguished the physical body, which they called “sex,” from culturally constructed ideology, which they called “gender.” They defined gen- der as a collection of attributes that a particular culture found appro- priate for individuals who inhabited a particular body (or sex). This definitional move had a very specific set of political objectives—to make more flexible those behavioral traits and social roles that had traditionally been tied to the body. This move to separate culture from body created room for cultural change with regard to sex roles. While there were positive political results from the separation of sex and gender, this rhetorical move was also, deeply prot roblematic, physical sex) locates us in our ee culture. The separation of sex from gender is never clean, which means that there is always messi- ness and difficulty around deciding what we mean by “gender.” More recently gay men and lesbians, people in the transgender movement, transvestites and intersexuals have formed political movements which continue to push up against sexual boundaries in ways that build upon, but differ from, the original feminist-inspired sex/gender di- vide. They have waged active warfare against a binary definition of gender. Somewhat tongue in cheek, in an article on intersexuality 1 came up with the idea that there are five physical sexes and by impli- cation at least that many genders. Some people have taken my focus on the number five a little too seriously. Rhetorically, I used it to push on the number two. But in context, my own view is that a discrete (as opposed to a continuous) classification system is completely unsatis- factory. Within the gay /transsexual/transgender movements there are dif- ferent understandings and belief systems about the relationship be- tween sex and gender (or the body and culture). Some want to com- pletely sever the tie between the body and some definition of gender, while others wish to say that their version of gender, that is, what has happened to them personally and other people like them, must in54 ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING some way be caused by their body. So the problem remains: trying to separate sex and gender in order to take a look at these two compo- nents, but never quite being able to uncouple gender from the body. Essential The word essential turns out to be even more complicated than gen- der. Perusing Webster's and the thesaurus, we find that among other things “essential” might mean “inherent,” or “relating to or constitut- ing essence,” or “containing or constituting a volatile essence that imparts a characteristic odor, as in of a plant or oil.” It might be something that is important or indispensable, or “something that is fundamental or applies to something that is a foundation without which an entire system or complex whole would collapse.” It might be something that is vital, as necessary to a thing’s continued existence or operation as air, food, and water are to living things. Clearly, in order to profitably answer the question, “Is gender essential?” we need to articulate which definition of essential we intend. By combining different definitions of “gender” and “essential,” we come up with several questions. If we take gender to mean “classifi- cation in binary categories,” we can then ask: Must they be in the body? Is it some sort of human requirement that we classify? Is clas- sification important or intrinsic to the way the human brain works? These are questions, I think, of speculation. There are theories of grammar, for example, that talk about the need for the human mind to classify. All sorts of cross-cultural data can be brought in to talk about how the mind classifies or whether the mind must classify into twos, fours, or fives. But I think we are more interested in the questions of gender as “sex” meaning “biology” and “sex” meaning “culture.” If by “essen- tial’ we mean that it is part of the body and has materiality, then is “gender” meaning “sex” (or the biological body) essential? The an- swer to this question seems to me to be “yes,” in the sense that we are all sexual beings, or at least we are all born with the potential to be sexual beings. Is sex a requirement of the biological body? Well, in an evolutionary sense, the answer is yes. That is, if there were no reproductive sex from time to time, the human race couldn’t continue,Is Gender Essential? 55 and obviously the human race is doing just fine in that regard. But the answer wouldn’t be yes if we asked whether it is a requirement or a necessity in any one individual human's life. Is gender/sex biologically important or intrinsic? Again, my an- swer to that is probably yes, especially if one takes an evolutionary point of view. But if one asks, does “gender”—meaning “sex” or “biology” —define the whole human organism? My answer is cer- tainly no. If we move on to “gender” as sex in terms of culture, I have a number of question marks. Do the various kinds of genders that we define in our culture necessarily emanate from our bodies? I don’t know. Is it a requirement of all cultures that there be genders at the cultural level? The answer to that too is, I don’t know. Some cultures seem to have very little sex differentiation, gender differentiation, but the vast majority certainly differentiate at least between male and female. The specifics of such differentiations, however, vary from cul- ture to culture. Is sex/gender differentiation important? In our culture, clearly yes. It obsesses us, and we bring out huge audiences to discuss the matter. Culturally, in the United States in 1995, gender is clearly important. Is it the sole organizing principle of our culture? The answer to that is obviously no. In short, only by asking these kinds of questions can we carefully define what it is we want to argue about. We cannot have a fruitful discussion until we clarify the terms of the debate. Permeability/Interpenetrations: How Bodies Work One difficulty inherent in the rhetorical move to separate the concept of an embodied sex from that of a culturally constructed gender is that it forces us to think of the body as something that is fixed, a vehicle that changes very little, at least after puberty. We all recognize that the body grows and changes shape until sometime after puberty. We are born with bodies that are, in one sense of the word (ie., a groundwork, framework, a structure on which other things are built or layered), essential. But as a biologist I don’t find this to be a very accurate account of what bodies are and how they work. And al- though I'm not fond of giving examples from rodents and then saying, “Well, this should apply to humans” (in fact I spent a lot of time56 ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING saying that that was a silly thing to do), in this case rodents might shed light on how bodies and environments interact and change one another, often mutually. Ina recent study, researchers looked at a particular set of neurons in the brains of female rats who were lactating and behaving mater- nally. (These could either have been rats who actually gave birth, or rats who were induced to lactate by hormonal injection.) They found that the actual structure of the brain changed when animals were exhibiting maternal behavior. Suckling not only nourished baby rats, but also provided feedback to the lactating rat’s brain that changed the brain’s structure. In this case something that we usually think of as essential, the brain, is not essential in the sense that it is a perma- nent, unchangeable framework; the same can be said for genes or various other physical attributes which we envision as foundational or unalterably structural It’s becoming clear that structures like the brain, down to their very anatomy, change throughout one’s lifetime. And here I am talking about humans as well as rodents. So we have to stop thinking of the body as something prior that is unchanging and that becomes the base on which some sort of cultural framework is built. We can’t begin to develop decent theories about the appearance of gendered behaviors and gendered belief systems about our own individual bodies without understanding that our bodies are part of the process, that our bodies change in very profound ways in response to our behaviors. Not only do they generate behaviors, but they in turn are generated by behav- iors, If we now again ask, “Is gender essential?” and if by this question we mean to ask, “Does the body precede or form the basis for gen- der?” we find that we have framed a nonsensical question. The same conclusion emerges from variations on the theme, questions such as, “Are there genes for homosexuality?” or “Are people born gay or transgendered?” The body is not merely born and then enlarged as a framework upon which culture hangs a few signifying baubles. Rather, the body is continuously being born and remodeled in an environment that starts before birth and continues until death In the end, then, I have rejected the original question with which I began. Instead, I would like to pose some different queries. Why, for example, in our culture right now, are we witnessing a proliferation of genders? Can we sensibly define the terms “heterosexual,” “homo-Is Gender Essential? 57 sexual,” “masculine,” “feminine,” “male,” and “female”? If we can’t sensibly define them, why not? Are these unitary categories? IF not, how can we discuss their embodied nature? Can we find ways to talk about all the elements of the body, from genes to anatomy, the brain and the psyche, as inherently or essentially malleable or permeable? Only when we begin to address these questions will we have devel- oped a theory of gender and sexuality that adequately takes into account both the body and culture.