Sex Diversity in Human Animals

Abstract

Human animals, like other animals, actualize a vast range of kinship practices, sexual practices, sexually reproductive practices, and so on. Cultural mores may prohibit the frank discussion of these practices, but they take place nonetheless. Many books, articles, television, and radio programs are devoted to detailing this diversity of sexual, kinship, and reproductive practices of human animals. But one aspect of human animal diversity that has only recently caught the attention of the public is the diversity of sex “differences.” Recognition of this diversity means, at the very least, understanding that there are more categories than simply “female” and “male.” The term “intersex” (which, before 1920, used to be referred to as “hermaphroditism”) refers to human and nonhuman animals who are born with physical characteristics that have been taxonomically defined as either female or male.

Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a “true sex” in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures.

(Foucault, 1980: vii)

We have the power to shake people’s foundations. You can’t touch one of us and come away unchanged. At least you’ll come away questioning things. We infect people, just by being. We are walking carriers of the gender questioning disease.

(Julian in Preves, 2003: 125)