women with low voices. There are men with no facial
hair, women who have beards and mustaches.
12. Height and weight differences between men and
women are not discrete. Muscle structures are not discrete. We know the despair of the tall, muscular woman who does not fit the female stereotype; we know also
the despair of the small, delicate man who does not
fit the male stereotype.
13. There is compelling cross-cultural evidence that
muscle strength and development are culturally deter-
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mined. T here are cultures in which there are no great
differences in somatotype o f men and women:
In one small-scale (“primitive”) society for which there
are good photographic records —the Manus of the
Admiralty Islands — there is apparently no difference at
all in somatotype between males and females as children, and as adults both men and women tend to the same high degree of mesomorphy (broad shoulders
and chest, heavily muscled limbs, little subcutaneous
fat).. . . In Bali, too, males and females lack the sort
of differentiation of the physique that is a visible difference in our culture. Geoffrey Gorer once described them as a “hermaphroditic” people; they have little
sex differential in height and both sexes have broad
shoulders and narrow hips. They do not run to curves
and muscles, to body hair or to breasts of any size.
(Gorer once remarked that you could not tell male and
female apart, even from the front. ) Another source
informs us that babies suck their fathers' breasts as
well as their mothers'. 4
14.
There are hermaphrodites in nature. Robert T.
Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human
Reproduction, admits:
The medical profession and experimental biologists
have always been very skeptical about the existence of
functional hermaphrodites among the higher animals
and man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, and
other lower animals do combine both sexes in the same
individual. 5
We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexual discreteness and polarity goes —that commitment
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makes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptually intolerable. It is interesting here to speculate on the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger ( Men in
Groups) who in effect project human cultural patterns
of dominance and submission on the animal world. For
instance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primate
species, the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites if
they were human” (Italics hers. ) 6 Most probably, we often
simply project our own culturally determined modes of
acting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectively screen information that would challenge the notions of male and female which are holy to us. In
that case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the current bias toward polarity) would give us significantly different scenarios of animal behavior.
Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenital disorder in which both male and female generative organs exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”
hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and the
secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. But
this is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:
The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girl
who was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. As
is the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed is
carefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,
signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in different
regions o f the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situated right next to each other in the same organ, Dr.
Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that they
would combine and make a human being. ”. . . The
unique feature. . . would be that the same person
contributed both germ cells. 8
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181
Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Fran-
coeur refers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettles
who
in examining human eggs just after they were removed
from their ovarian follicles. . . found that three out
of four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavage in vivo within the intact follicle, without any possible contact with spermatozoa. ” 9
On the basis o f Shettles’ work, Francoeur estimates
that virgin births are a rather common occurrence,
in about the same frequency as fraternal twins and
twice as often as identical twins occur among white
Americans. 10
Seemingly a conservative, Dr. Sherwood Taylor, a
British scientist, “has suggested a much lower frequency
for human parthenogenesis, estimating one case in ten
thousand births. ” 11 However much, however little, it
does occur.
We can presume then that there is a great deal about
human sexuality to be discovered, and that our notion
o f two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. We
can presume then that we will discover cross-sexed
phenomena in proportion to our ability to see them. In
addition, we can account for the relative rarity o f hermaphrodites in the general population, for the consistency o f male-female somatotypes that we do find, and for the relative rarity o f cross-sexed characteristics in the general population (though they occur with more frequency than we are now willing to imagine)
by recognizing that there is a process o f cultural selec
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tion which, for people, supersedes natural selection in
importance. Cultural selection, as opposed to natural
selection, does not necessarily serve to improve the
species or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serve
to uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviant
somatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematically bred out of the population.
However we look at it, whatever we choose to make
out of the data of what is frequently called Intersex, it
is clear that sex determination is not always clearcut
and simple. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University has basically isolated these six aspects of sex identity:
1. Genetic or nuclear sexuality as revealed by indicators
like the sex-chromatin or Barr-body, a full chromosomal count and the leucocytic drumstick; *
2. Hormonal sexuality which results from a balance that