{"id":2777,"date":"2014-05-16T08:46:58","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T07:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2014-05-16T09:35:16","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T08:35:16","slug":"while-were-talking-about-ambiguous-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2014\/05\/16\/while-were-talking-about-ambiguous-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"While We’re Talking about Ambiguous Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

So: what is one to make of Conchita Wurst? \u00a0I’ve not\u00a0heard the song that won Eurovision this year, but I’m willing to bet that the world would be a better place if every entrant had been thrown into the K\u00f8ge Bay\u00a0before a single note was struck. \u00a0But that might just be me.<\/p>\n

\"Conchita-wurst-sausage0\"<\/a>
Conchita Wurst. Wurst. Geddit? Wur… Oh, suit yourself<\/small><\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Writing in the\u00a0Telegraph<\/em>,\u00a0Brendan O’Neill has other concerns<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>. \u00a0Why, oh why, oh why can’t people just use the pronoun “he” when referring to Wurst? \u00a0Wurst was born a man; therefore the male pronoun is more appropriate. \u00a0(He’s never one to duck the important issues of the day, is Bren.) \u00a0“Did everyone overnight transmogrify into a Gender Studies student and imbibe the unhinged idea that gender is nothing more than a ‘playful’ identity?” he asks. \u00a0More: the fact that people refer to Wurst with the feminine pronoun is a symptom of what he calls “today’s speedily spreading cult of relativism”, and allowing people to choose their identity is “narcissistic”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, let’s just ignore for the moment that Conchita Wurst is a character, and so it makes perfect sense to call her “her” in just the same way that one might use “her” to refer to Dame Edna Everage. \u00a0(Thanks to someone I don’t know on Facebook for making that analogy – it’s a good ‘un.) \u00a0O’Neill sort-of-acknowledges that, but he doesn’t let that minor point get in the way of a more general rant against people preferring to be referred to by one pronoun rather than another. \u00a0For example, he takes this swipe at Chelsea Manning:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Heaven help anyone who doesn\u2019t play along with gender game. \u00a0When Bradley Manning decided from his prison cell that\u00a0<\/span>he wanted to be called Chelsea, and referred to by the female pronoun only, vast swathes of the media instantaneously fell into line and anyone who refused to, anyone who dared to write “Mr Manning”, was pretty much accused of committing a hate crime. \u00a0But isn\u2019t it the job of journalism to report on objective reality rather than to cave to an individual\u2019s subjective feelings? \u00a0And the objective reality is that Bradley Manning is still a bloke. \u00a0To refer to him as \u201cshe\u201d is to deny reality itself, to present a wish that exists in someone’s mind as a tangible, objective fact.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this makes his point rather more important than a mere trivial gripe about a trivial competition. \u00a0It’s also about transgender\/ transsexual people, and how they’re to be talked about and thought about; and as such, it’s potentially serious, even if only because there is a group of people for whom the conventional gender identity doesn’t fit, and who are made deeply unhappy by this, and who suffer as a result, but for whom treatment – be it surgical, psychological, or social – could be available. \u00a0Working out how to think about sex and gender has a real impact on people’s lives.<\/p>\n

Let’s be generous to O’Neill for a moment:\u00a0it’s true that while some people may identify themselves as female despite being phenotypically and genotypically male, and\u00a0vice versa<\/em>, there isn’t anything we can do about chromosomes. \u00a0If your genes say you’re male, then you are, biologically speaking, male; and if they say you’re female, then you’re female. \u00a0Should Manning’s mortal remains be discovered by archaeologists in 5000 years, they would find an X and a Y chromosome, and deduce that this was once a male. \u00a0Fair enough. \u00a0But we should be wary of running together sex and gender on this front: “he” and “she” aren’t biological categories, so much as linguistic and cultural categories that biology might coopt for the sake of a shorthand. \u00a0Hence calling Manning “she” is not to deny reality, because reality is not exhausted by your genes – it’d be nuts to think that it was. \u00a0Manning is not a bloke. \u00a0Manning is, and always will be, biologically male; but biological maleness does not a bloke make.<\/p>\n

And, of course, cases like Manning’s are comparatively easy. \u00a0There’s also a small but significant number of people whose genotype and phenotype are abnormally aligned without any surgical intervention. \u00a0Thus there are people who have a Y\u00a0chromosome but who, thanks to androgen insentitivity, present as female. \u00a0Conceivably, they might go a large chunk of their lives without ever being discovered to be genetically male. \u00a0I\u00a0wonder what pronoun O’Neill would apply to them. \u00a0And I’d love to see how he struggles with people with androgynous sexual development and weird chromosome combinations like XXY. \u00a0After all, if the words we use for people depends on the biological facts, what on Earth are we supposed to do when biology outwits language?<\/p>\n

For O’Neill,<\/p>\n

[t]o accept the idea that a man can become a \u201cshe\u201d overnight, simply through demanding it, does more than flatter the pretensions of one individual \u2013 it also undermines the ability of all of us to approach the world objectively, to use a common language to describe people and objects that have particular attributes. It obliterates the very Enlightenment ideal of using reason and measurement to describe the physical world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is one of O’Neill’s favourite games – casting himself as a beleaguered defender of the Enlightenment against… well, everything. \u00a0What this means in practice is that he’s\u00a0decided that he can ignore anything since Burke, with the possible exception of Mill, whom he reads selectively and inattentively. \u00a0It’s one thing to use “reason and measurement” to describe the physical world… but this does assume that the language we’ve inherited has the conceptual wherewithal to compass reality. \u00a0Sometimes it doesn’t. \u00a0The conventional male\/ female binary is a lovely example of this: science tells us that it’s not a perfect fit for biological reality, and anthropology tells us that it’s not a perfect fit for social reality. \u00a0If the common language doesn’t do the job, it’s very strange to start huffing and puffing about it. \u00a0Sometimes the language is tricky. \u00a0Meh. \u00a0So it goes. \u00a0(I had a conversation with a philosopher not so long ago about how one should refer to the earlier works of someone who has had a sex-change mid-career; do you use “He argued…” when we’re talking about Joe, and “She later elaborated” when we’re talking about Joanne? \u00a0“She” for the whole time? \u00a0It’s a strange situation – but I think admitting that it’s strange is fine, because the world is often strange. \u00a0If the language doesn’t quite work, then the language doesn’t quite work. \u00a0You don’t get to insist that the world is different in order to make the language work, though.)<\/p>\n

Now, O’Neill does have a superficially stronger string to his bow, with this:<\/p>\n

Does objective reality \u2013 the fact that there are biological differences between men and women, and that the vast majority of humankind decides whether someone is a man or woman by those biological attributes \u2013 count for nothing in the face of one person’s wish to be known as something he is not? \u00a0By the same token, can I now request that people refer to me as black even though I’m white? \u00a0Who are you to say I am not black? \u00a0I might\u00a0<\/span>feel<\/em>\u00a0black.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But note that it is only superficially stronger; and the danger with rhetorical questions is that someone’ll answer them, and not in the way you’re expecting. \u00a0So here’s an answer: if a person is seriously uncomfortable in their body – perhaps to the point of suicidality – and self-identifying as black would help… well, fine. \u00a0Let them be black! \u00a0Should some surgical intervention be available that brings physical appearance into line with self-image, then go for it. \u00a0They might not persuade anyone else – but if that person’s genuine preference is to be referred to as black, then why not? \u00a0At the very least, you shouldn’t follow them down the street yelling “You’re white really!”, because, when it comes to the crunch, that’s just lazy journalism<\/del> boorish. \u00a0(“Black” might actually turn out to be as ambiguous as “female” or “male” anyway – after all, there are cases of albinism, and depigmentation is sometimes used by people with vitiligo<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>; so, again, the biological and the cultural meanings of the term won’t always be mutually substitutable unless we think – implausibly – that an albino child of black parents, and brought up entirely within – say – Zulu\u00a0cultural norms\u00a0shouldn’t think of herself as black.*\u00a0 Along these lines, the South African model Refilwe Modiselle<\/span>\u00a0describes herself as “a black girl who lives in the skin of a white person<\/span><\/a><\/span>“; would O’Neill write a column insisting that she’s white because and should call herself that because, well, her skin is similar to that of Northern Europeans? \u00a0If not – if it’s possible to be culturally-black-with-biologically-white-skin\u00a0–\u00a0why is it so wildly impossible to be culturally-female-in-a-biologically-male-body?)<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t know if that possible answer would convince everyone (I’m sure that there’s a load of literature on this – if anyone’d care to make suggestions in the comments, please do!) – but the point would stand that O’Neill’s claim isn’t convincing, either – at least, not without a lot more argument, which I suspect he doesn’t have. \u00a0So it’s easy enough to pick up the gauntlet in one of a range of ways. \u00a0And the “something he is not” aspect of the claim is question-begging anyway, since what Wurst, or Manning, is or is not is precisely what’s at issue.<\/p>\n

When O’Neill insists that<\/p>\n

gender is not entirely a social construct. We can surely agree that it has a pretty big basis in biology, in facts, appendages, things[,]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

he’s simply wrong. \u00a0Gender isn’t a biological phenomenon. \u00a0Sex is. \u00a0Sex and gender overwhelmingly map on to each other pretty well, and sex often informs gender. \u00a0But they don’t always amount to the same thing, and they don’t have to, and there’s no obvious reason why people who want to queer the distinction, or who end up queering it whether they much want to or not, shouldn’t. \u00a0And “surely”, as in “We can surely agree”, as I keep telling my students, is a giveaway for “I haven’t really thought about this, but it’s a really powerful intuition, so please\u00a0stop asking me questions<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/strong> This is brilliant!<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So: what is one to make of Conchita Wurst? \u00a0I’ve not\u00a0heard the song that won Eurovision this year, but I’m willing to bet that the world would be a better place if every entrant had been thrown into the K\u00f8ge Bay\u00a0before a single note was struck. \u00a0But that might just be me. Writing in the\u00a0Telegraph,\u00a0Brendan […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[963,511,563,328,475],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curios","category-in-the-news","category-language","category-philosophy","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nWhile We're Talking about Ambiguous Sex - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2014\/05\/16\/while-were-talking-about-ambiguous-sex\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"While We're Talking about Ambiguous Sex - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So: what is one to make of Conchita Wurst? \u00a0I’ve not\u00a0heard the song that won Eurovision this year, but I’m willing to bet that the world would be a better place if every entrant had been thrown into the K\u00f8ge Bay\u00a0before a single note was struck. \u00a0But that might just be me. 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