Aurora Arboralis

Printed off the Blackless article on Intersex to send to a friend who was unfamiliar with the term and what it means, and decided to quickly read it before sending it off. [Blackless, Melanie, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne and Ellen Lee (2000) ‘How Sexually Dimorphic Are We? Review and Synthesis’.  American Journal of Human Biology 12:151-166.]

Personally I’m much more into Qual than Quant.  But I like this article as an overview of Intersex differences in general, and even more for its critique of sexual dimorphism – which I think can be applied just as helpfully to gender as to sex.

The idea that dimorphism is a Platonic ideal struck me for the first time.  Plato’s theory of Forms involves the idea that non-material, abstract, but substantial Forms or Ideas, and not the material world of changes known to us through the senses, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.  I guess I’ve never really come to grips with how this concept has underpinned Western thinking about everything, from religion to ethics to science to medicine etc ad infinitum.  It really does pathologise change, mutability, variation – in other words, the messiness of real life!

I suspect it has been such an attractive idea because of its seductive simplicity – as H L Mencken said, “To every complex question there’s a simple answer – and it’s wrong”.  It offers the enticing prospect of being able to Know, and thus to Predict, and finally Control, every aspect of existence.  It is fundamentally both deistic (of the god-is-by-definition-the-only-perfect-entity persuasion) and mechanistic – a god who is by definition perfect must have designed a universe that is likewise perfect.  Its manifest ‘imperfections’ are seen as corruptions, contaminations, of that original perfection.  Newton thought the deity had to continually intervene to keep the system ticking over nicely; some modern humans think that is our job.  But the underlying assumption is the same – that Reality is fundamentally a perfectly balanced System made up of perfectly functioning Units, and that anything that is not functioning in this way needs to be ‘fixed’.  If we truly believed in Evolution we could never hold these beliefs!  Mind you, one of the sad facts of Evolution is that the ‘System’ is continually getting out of balance with consequent catastrophic events (think ice ages etc) accompanied by species extinctions (think dinosaurs etc) and very long periods when Earth has not been a particularly pleasant or hospitable place for most living organisms.  Sad – but true.  If I’m to be consistent here, I would be forced to admit that the evolution of consciousness accompanied by sophisticated intellectual capacity (think humans) has been a particularly unfortunate development that looks set to trigger one or more of the above-mentioned catastrophic events accompanied by species extinctions likely (and, in my more pessimistic moments I would say, hopefully) including our own.

But I digress.  Back to the Ideal Female and Male, as opposed to the ‘typical’.  (I find myself often saying LGBTI people are ‘normal’ but not ‘typical’, much as I personally detest the idea of being ‘normal’ in any way!).  In their discussion, the authors suggest that:

“Our culture acknowledges the wide variety of body shapes and sizes characteristic of males and females.  Most sexual dimorphisms involve quantitative traits, such as height, build, and voice timbre, for which considerable overlap exists between males and females.  Many cultures use dress code, hair style, and cultural conventions, eg the view that in couples the male should be taller than the female, to accentuate awareness of such difference”  (pp. 162-163; emphasis added).

It seems to me that as the actual differences between females and males are diminishing (think ability to do math, participate in the labour market, take the primary parenting role, etc) ‘our culture’ is policing sex and gender dimorphism as enthusiastically as ever – try buying anything for girls that isn’t pink; witness the hysterical condemnation of women who don’t remove hair from upper lip or ‘pits, or men with ‘moobs’; behold the absurd diatribes against equal marriage in countries like Australia and the US.  That bloody Plato has a lot to answer for!