Sex Chart- critique please

[Ryles]

Hey, I put together this chart trying to include the range of reproductive organs, hormone levels, and chromosomes. Can someone let me know if it worked out, what I forgot, etc? Is there a better way to word them?

The genitalia was difficult because I've found the Prader scale, but don't know if there's anything similar to it on the male side (it seems like it goes from "typical" female to female internal organs but externally appears male. Is there anything similar to that for a range from "typical" male?)


http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn111/ryandglenn/genderstuff1.jpg

[Peter]

Hi Ryles,

I have seen several charts of a similar nature, and I think that for all their considerations of intersex issues, they often miss how I see being intersex. Such exercises usually assume, to make up a quick informal example, that female is like being the color red, and male is like being the color yellow, and being intersex is some shade of orange, being a mixture of red and yellow. But behind the shade of orange, there is still the assumption that sex can be read like a color scale. If you put all the colors of the spectrum through a prism, you get white light out the other side, which itself is not another color.

Peter

[Ryles]

This isn't a color scale... It's a work in progress trying to split it into 2 2-dimensional things (maybe 2 circles would've worked better... Either way, it needs more things) and a list of sex chromosomes that exist in nature.

[Peter]

Hi Ryles,

I suggest that you read Alice Dreger's book "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex". In the early twentieth century, there was something that Alice refers to as the "Age of Gonads". Like your chart, the "Age of Gonads" believed that they could develop a complete catalog of bodies and genitals. They had terms such as "true hermaphrodite" and "pseudo-hermaphrodite" based up various combinations of genital ambiguity and male and female gonadal tissue. This model of sex broke down in the 1920's. For example, the term "male pseudo-hermaphrodite" was increasingly seen as extremely problematic for describing the lives of AIS women.

Your intentions are probably good. Perhaps you are developing this chart as an educational tool. I will be honest, it upsets me when I see intersex lives charted in terms of our ambiguous genitals. It upsets me when I see people come up with charts with "normal" female physiology on one end, "normal" male physiology on the other end, and "interex" in between. (I wonder what you mean by "half a penis"). Or charts which are basically based on the Prader scale. An interesting question is: "Why in the last two hundred years, did people increasingly see a need to make charts like the one you make?" My answer is that it is part of the project to discipline bodies under modern institutions, and often that this discipline has taken a medical turn.

Peter

[louisev]

Another enormous drawback to this 'empirical-type' approach is that it presupposes that criteria such as hormone levels somehow matter in terms of self-concept and can be pegged along any kind of spectrum. They can't. There are a whole lot more hormones than the 'men' hormones and the 'women' hormones, and it should be manifestly obvious to scientists by now that what makes us human is a lot more than 46 chromosomes - there are innumerable traits that the physical structures, chemicals, genes, etc only suggest. Is aldosterone 'male' or 'female' ? It's a precursor hormone that regulates far more than sex steroids. We aren't constructed on these easy spectra, and plotting them is truly less than useless.