The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [61]
Four
MEN AND WOMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS
When I got to the carnival in Stroud, I walked around for a long while just looking at the exhibitions and trying to build up enough courage to ask someone for a job. Finally, I went to the freak sideshow and started a conversation with the barker. I told him that I was looking for a job and he said he’d see what he could do. He went inside the tent to talk with the show’s owner and, after about five minutes, came out. “We’ve got a spot for a half-man, half woman person, “ he said, with a laugh. “Do you think you can do it?”
Hedy Jo Star, My Unique Change, Baltimore, 1958
Two years after Christine Jorgensen became an international celebrity, a Johns Hopkins psychologist named John Money began publishing a series of papers that were to have large consequences for intersexual and transsexual people, and for American society in general. Early in his career, Money’s investigations into the psychology of intersexual patients convinced him that a person’s deeply rooted sense of self as either male or female was largely formed not before but after birth, by a combination of factors, the primary one being “the sex of assignment and rearing”—the way that one is raised. “To use the Pygmalion allegory, one may begin with the same clay and fashion a god or a goddess … if certain conditions are met,” he asserted. This theory was adopted not only by scientists and physicians, who used it to justify extensive surgical and hormonal manipulation of intersexual infants and children, but also by second-wave feminists who saw in Money’s theory proof that women were socialized to be a “second sex,” weaker, more dependent, more emotional. “Femininity” and “masculinity” were defined as roles adopted by essentially androgynous beings. Before we don the socially constructed personae of male and female, advocates of Money’s theory asserted, we are all the same. However, Money himself was no proponent of androgyny—quite the contrary. In Money’s view, psychological health was entirely dependent on the development of an unambiguous identity as either a man or a woman. Money’s research thus combined radicalism (the theory ofpsychosex-ual neutrality at birth) with a profound conservatism (emphasis on sexual dimorphism). We are still grappling with the effects of this paradoxical theory, which so deeply penetrated our culture, today.
The research question that Money began to explore as a graduate student appeared simple, and unlikely to initiate sweeping social changes. What could or should be done to help those individuals born in bodies that defied traditional definitions of sex, such as the long-deceased and forgotten Herculine Barbin? Children born with genital anomalies presented a clinical riddle. To the eighteenth-century doctors who examined Barbin, the presence of undescended testicles was proof that the girl was really a boy. But by the middle of the twentieth century, the medical determination of sex had become decidedly more complex, no longer visible to the eye or the palpating hand of the physician.
In 1948, Murray Llewellyn Barr, a Canadian geneticist, made the discovery for which he would later be nominated for a Nobel Prize. While carrying out experiments on nervous system cells of various mammals, Barr and a graduate student named Ewart George Bertram noticed that some of the cells contained small dark masses. Attempting to identify the masses, Barr discovered that they were present only in the cells of female animals. Later investigators would discover that these “Barr bodies” were in fact inactivated X chromosomes, switched off to prevent an overload of genetic information in the cell. Initially, Barr bodies were identified in biopsies