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(from the statuesque frozen depths of the dreaded hormone-zone) January 2, 2001 A CONVERSATION WITH / Anne Fausto-Sterling Exploring What Makes Us Male or Female PROVIDENCE, R.I. — On a recent frozen winter evening, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, 56, a professor of biology and women's studies at Brown, sat in a restaurant here, nibbling on a light snack and talking about her favorite subject: the application of ideas about gender roles to the formal study of biology. In the academic world, Dr. Fausto-Sterling is known as a developmental biologist who offers interesting counterpoints to the view that the role division between men and women is largely predetermined by evolution. "When people say `it's nurture' or `it's nature' in making us male or female, I take the middle ground and say that it's a combination of both," she said. "That's not a popular position to take in today's academic environment, but it is the one that makes the most sense." Her 1985 book, "Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men," is used in women's studies courses throughout the country. Dr. Fausto-Sterling's newest work, "Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality," is a look at societal ideas about gender as seen through the eyes of human beings defined as neither male or female — hermaphrodites. Until 1980, she studied the role of genes in the embryological development of fruit flies. More recently, she has investigated the developmental ecology of flatworms. Q. What can we learn about gender from examining how the medical profession treats infants born with ambiguous genitalia? These are children who were once called "hermaphrodites," and whom you would prefer we term "intersexuals." A. From them, we can literally see how society's ideas about male and female are constructed. When infants with ambiguous genitalia are born, everyone — parents, doctors — are very upset and the physicians often suggest drastic surgeries to assign a specific gender to the child. The regimen usually involves the doctors' deciding what sex the child ought to be. Then, they surgically reconstruct the patient to conform to that diagnosis: body parts are taken out, others are added, hormones are given, or taken away. In the end, the doctors take a body that was clearly neither male or female and turn it into one they can represent to the world as "male" or "female." Q. How did the fate of intersexual children become your passion? A. In the early 1990's, I began looking into this because I was interested in a theoretical question that was circulating around feminist studies at that time; I wanted to know, What is meant when we say, "the body is a social construction"? At the time, social scientists were looking into how our ideas about the human body were shaped by politics and culture. That inquiry led me to a lot of the medical literature on intersexuality. Q. How many people do you estimate are born intersexuals? A. It depends on how you count. Working with Brown undergraduates, I did some research and we found that maybe 1 1/2 to 2 percent of all births do not fall strictly within the tight definition of all-male or all- female, even if the child looks that way. Beyond having a mixed set of genitals, you could have an individual with an extra Y chromosome. He'd still look like a standard male, but he'd have this extra chromosome. Or you could have someone who was XO, a female with underdeveloped ovaries, known medically as having Turner's syndrome. My point is that there's greater human variation than supposed. My political point is that we can afford to lighten up about what it means to be male or female. We should definitely lighten up on those who fall in between because there are a lot of them. Q. You want a halt to sexual assignment surgeries on infants. Why? A. People deserve to have a choice about something as important as that. Infants can't make choices. And the doctors often guess wrong. They might say, "We think this infant should be a female because the sexual organ it has is small." Then, they go and remove the penis and the testes. Years later, the kid says, "I'm a boy, and that's what I want to be, and I don't want to take estrogen, and by the way, give me back my penis." I feel we should let the kids tell us what they think is right once they are old enough to know. Till then, parents can talk to the kids in a way that gives them permission to be different, they can give the child a gender-neutral name, they can do a provisional gender assignment. Of course, there are some cases where infants are born with life-threatening malformations. In those rare situations, surgery is called for. Q. In "Sexing the Body," you suggest that estrogen and testosterone should not be termed sex hormones. You'd prefer we called them growth hormones. Why? A. The molecules we call sex hormones affect our liver, our muscles, our bones, virtually every tissue in the body. In addition to their roles in our reproductive system, they affect growth and development throughout life. So to think of them as growth hormones, which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen. Q. Among gay people, there is a tendency to embrace a genetic explanation of homosexuality. Why is that? A. It's a popular idea with gay men. Less so with gay women. That may be because the genesis of homosexuality appears to be different for men than women. I think gay men also face a particularly difficult psychological situation because they are seen as embracing something hated in our culture — the feminine — and so they'd better come up with a good reason for what they are doing. Gay women, on the other hand, are seen as, rightly or wrongly, embracing something our culture values highly — masculinity. Now that whole analysis that gay men are feminine and gay women are masculine is itself open to big question, but it provides a cop-out and an area of relief. You know, "It's not my fault, you have to love me anyway." It provides the disapproving relatives with an excuse: "It's not my fault, I didn't raise 'em wrong." It provides a legal argument that is, at the moment, actually having some sway in court. For me, it's a very shaky place. It's bad science and bad politics. It seems to me that the way we consider homosexuality in our culture is an ethical and a moral question. The biology here is poorly understood. The best controlled studies performed to measure genetic contributions to homosexuality say that 50 percent of what goes into making a person homosexual is genetic. That means 50 percent is not. And while everyone is very excited about genes, we are clueless about the equally important nongenetic contributions. Q. Why do you suppose lesbians have been less accepting than gay men about genetics as the explanation for homosexuality? A. I think most lesbians have more of a sense of the cultural component in making us who we are. If you look at many lesbians' life histories, you will often find extensive heterosexual experiences. They often feel they've made a choice. I also think lesbians face something that males don't: at the end of the day, they still have to be women in a world run by men. All of that makes them very conscious of complexity. Q. How much of your thinking about sexual plasticity comes from your own life? You've been married. You are now in a committed relationship with the playwright Paula Vogel. A. My interest in gender issues preceded my own life changes. When I first got involved in feminism, I was married. The gender issues did to me what they did to lots of women in the 1970's: they infuriated me. My poor husband, who was a very decent guy, tried as hard as he could to be sympathetic. But he was shut out of what I was doing. The women's movement opened up the feminine in a way that was new to me, and so my involvement made possible my becoming a lesbian. My ex and I are still friends. He's remarried. Q. So the antifeminists are right: women's liberation is the first step toward lesbianism? A. (Laughs) It's true. I call myself a lesbian now because that is the life I am living, and I think it is something you should own up to. At the moment, I am in a happy relationship and I don't ever imagine changing it. Still, I don't think loving a man is unimaginable. Q. What do you think nature is telling us by making intersexuals? A. That nature is not an ideal state. It is filled with imperfections and developmental variation. We have all these Aristotelian categories of male and female. Nature doesn't have them. Nature creates a whole lot of different forms. By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/02/science/02CONV.html?pagewanted=all janet paterson, an akinetic rigid subtype parkie 53 now /44 dx cd / 43 onset cd /41 dx pd / 37 onset pd TEL: 613 256 8340 SMAIL: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada EMAIL: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/