SOCI 365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Caster Semenya, Intersex, Autism Spectrum
5 May 2018
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Lecture 4 – January 15th
Constructing Sex and Gender in Biomedicine
Intersexuality
• Used to describe people who exhibit sex characteristics that somehow fall outside the range of
what is considered normal male or normal female
• Catch-all term
• Primarily physiological or anatomical
• Most often with infants, ambiguous genitalia
• What is normal?
o Concept of normal relies on variation, but then we forget the variation in subscribing to the
idea that there is a normal way to be
▪ We dichotomize this with normal and abnormal, and forget a range of variation
o There are variations to what is considered the normal path to becoming a sexed human
▪ At any fork in the road, ambiguity can emerge
o AFS - all kinds of things go into making a body sexed: genitalia, hormones, gametes,
secondary traits and there are lots of ways that this can be varies
• Examples in estimated frequencies of various disorders (see image on slide)
o XY chromosomes but appear female because body has not become masculinized
o Hypospadias: intersex development because it’s medically fixed at birth
o About 1 in 100 people whose bodies differ from standard male/female
o 1-/ births: total number of people receiving surgery to normalize genital
appearance
• Caster Semenya: accused of being intersexed – case in the readings, what are the politics in
considering this
• Should any be done in this case?
o What should the policy be?
o Does the case of sexism apply?
Medicalization
• The process by which aspects of life previously outside of the realm of medicine come to be seen
as medical problems
o Something that we already thought of as deviant in some way, but now we’ll use medicine
to explain it
▪ Childbirth: use to think of as normal, but not a medical concern
▪ Pathological before but now we think of as medical: homosexuality was thought of
as deviant (religious or criminal institutions to deal with it) and then it became
medical with biological basis of this and how can we fix it
• Now we see a de-medicalization
▪ Alcoholism: drunks were just put in jail
• Now a form of addiction
▪ ADHD, some autism spectrum disorders etc.
o Is there something happening to make this (like ADHD) more prevalent, or is it just
medicalized? We can’t tell.
• John Money
o Popularized idea that it is essential to medically fix into one specific sex a body born
ambiguous as soon as possible
▪ He thought gender identity was entirely socially constructed (nurture) kids are
gender malleable—body just has to match assigned gender
o If bodies matched gender assignments, socialization into gender identity would ensue
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