• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

- “If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.” (p.g. 10) 

• Justin Clark, “Understanding Gender”  (2015) 

- “Western culture has come to view gender as a binary concept, with two rigidly fixed options: male or female, both grounded in a person’s physical anatomy. When a child is born, a quick glance between the legs determines the gender label that the child will carry for life. But even if gender is to be restricted to basic biology, a binary concept still fails to capture the rich variation that exists. Rather than just two distinct boxes, biological gender occurs across a continuum of possibilities. This spectrum of anatomical variations by itself should be enough to disregard the simplistic notions of a binary gender system. But beyond anatomy, there are multiple domains defining gender. In turn, these domains can be independently characterized across a range of possibilities. Instead of the static, binary model produced through a solely physical understanding of gender, a far richer tapestry of biology, gender expression, and gender identity intersect in a multidimensional array of possibilities. Quite simply, the gender spectrum represents a more nuanced, and ultimately truly authentic model of human gender. (p.g. 1) 

- “Like other social constructs, gender is closely monitored and reinforced by society. Practically everything in society is assigned a gender—toys, colors, clothes and behaviors are just some of the more obvious examples. Through a combination of social conditioning and personal preference, by age three most children prefer activities and exhibit behaviors typically associated with their sex. Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.” (p.g. 1)

• Gerald N. Callahan, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes (2009)

- “We understand that gender—the ways that society molds us into proper girls or boys, men or women—is complicated. Gender depends on lots of things—upbringing, culture,the stories fed to us by television and movies, hormones, and power struggles.” (p.g. x-xi)

- “…there is a naivete about the way we ignore the fact that some people don’t fit neatly into the either-or of gender. I believe that gender is rather a continuum than an either-or proposition.” (p.g. 108)

1. chromosomes (male:  XY, female: XX) 2. genitalia (male: penis, female: vulva and vagina) 3. gonads (male: testes, female: ovaries) 4. hormones (male: high testosterone, low estrogen, low progesterone; female: high estrogen, high progesterone, low testosterone) 5. secondary sex characteristics (male: large amounts of dark, thick, coarse body hair, noticeable facial hair, low waist to hip ratio, no noticeable breast development; female: fine, light colored body hair, no noticeable facial hair, high waist to hip ratio, noticeable breast development)

• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)

- “We stand now at a fork in the road. To the right we can walk toward reaffirmation of the naturalness of the number 2 and continue to develop new medical technology, including gene ‘therapy’ and new prenatal interventions to ensure the birth of only two sexes. To the left, we can hike up the hill of natural and cultural variability. Traditionally, in European and American culture we have defined two genders, each with a range of permissible behaviors; but things have begun to change. There are househusbands and women fighter pilots. There are feminine lesbians and gay men both buff and butch. [Transgender people] render the sex/gender divide virtually unintelligible.” (p.g. 101)

-  “Because of their loyalty to a two-gender system, some scientists resisted the implications of new experiments that produced increasingly contradictory evidence about the uniqueness of male and female hormones. Frank, for example, puzzling at his ability to isolate female hormone from ‘the bodies of males whose masculine characteristics and ability to impregnate females is unquestioned,’ finally decided that the answer lay in contrary hormones found in the bile.” (p.g. 191)

- “…not everyone responded to the new results by trying to fit them into the dominant gender system. Parkes, for example, acknowledged the finding of androgen and estrogen production by the adrenal glands as ‘a final blow to any clear-cut idea of sexuality.’ Others wondered about the very concept of sex. In a review of the 1932 edition of Sex and Internal Secretions, the British endocrinologist F. A. E. Crew went even further, asking ‘Is sex imaginary?… It is the case,’ he wrote, ‘that the philosophical basis of modern sex research has always been extraordinarily poor, and it can be said that the American workers have done more than the rest of us in destroying the faith in the existence of the very thing that we attempt to analyze.’” (p.g. 191-192) 

• Penelope Eckert  and Sally McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender (Second Edition) (2013) 

- “People tend to think of gender as the result of nurture—as social and hence fluid—while sex is the result of nature, simply given by biology. However, nature and nurture intertwine, and there is no obvious point at which sex leaves off and gender begins. But the sharp demarcation fails because there is no single objective biological criterion for male or female sex. Sex is based in a combination of anatomical, endocrinal and chromosomal features, and the selection among these criteria for sex assignment is based very much on cultural beliefs about what actually makes someone male or female. Thus the very definition of the biological categories male and female, and people’s understanding of themselves and others as male or female, is ultimately social. Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) sums up the situation as follows:  

labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender – not science – can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place. (p. 3)  

Biology offers up dichotomous male and female prototypes, but it also offers us many individuals who do not fit those prototypes in a variety of ways. Blackless et al. (2000) estimate that 1 in 100 babies are born with bodies that differ in some way from standard male or female. These bodies may have such conditions as unusual chromosomal makeup (e.g., 1 in 1,000 male babies are born with two X chromosomes as well as a Y, hormonal differences such as insensitivity to androgens (1 in 13,000 births), or a range of configurations and combinations of genitals and reproductive organs. The attribution of intersex does not end at birth–for example, 1 in 66 girls experience growth of the clitoris in childhood or adolescence (known as late onset adrenal hyperplasia).” (p.g. 2) 

• Sarah Richardson, “Sexing the X: How the X Became the ‘Female Chromosome’” (2012)

- “…the human X chromosome carries a large collection of male sperm genes.” (p.g. 909)

- “Currently, there is a broad popular, scientific, and medical conception of the X chromosome as the mediator of the differences between males and females, as the carrier of female-specific traits, or otherwise as a substrate of femaleness… associations between the X and femaleness are the accumulated product of contingent historical and material processes and events, and they are inflected by beliefs rooted in gender ideology.” (p.g. 927) 

• Gerald N. Callahan, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes (2009)

- “In truth, humans come in an amazing number of forms, because human development, including human sexual development, is not an either/or proposition. Instead, between “either” and “or” there is an entire spectrum of possibilities. Some people come into this world with a vagina and testes. Others begin their lives as girls but at puberty become boys. Though we’ve been told that Y chromosomes make boys, there are women in this world with Y chromosomes, and there are men without Y chromosomes. Beyond that, there are people who have only a single unpaired X chromosome. There are also people who are XXY, XXXY, or XXXXY…There are babies born with XYY, XXX, or any of a dozen or more other known variations involving X or Y chromosomes. We humans are a diverse lot.” (p.g. xi-xii)

- “Nondisjunction can happen with any chromosome, including the sex chromosomes X and Y. A single sperm or egg may end up with two, three, or more X chromosomes, and a single sperm may hold more than one Y chromosome. In truth, sperm and eggs come in variety packs. If that alone isn’t enough to derail the simple XX/XY, female/male idea, a mystery known as anaphase lag can also cause developing sperm or ova to lose an X or a Y chromosome along the way. And even after fertilization, sex chromosomes can be lost or gained. And even among men with the normal 46,XY karyotype, the size of the Y chromosome can vary. That means that my Y chromosome might be three times the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Y chromosome. Here certainly, quantity matters; perhaps size does as well. The end product is a panoply of possible sexes by any definition, an array of human beings as grand and as varietal as the fragrances of flowers: 45,X; 47,XXX; 48,XXXX; 49,XXXXX; 47,XYY; 47,XXY; 48,XXXY; 49,XXXXY; and 49,XXXYY.” (p.g. 62)

- “Intersex people are not a few freakish, unfortunate outliers. They are instead the most complete demonstration of our humanity… We, as a society, are very hard on people who don’t fit out preconceptions, especially our preconceptions about sex. What intersex people have shown us is the truth about all of us. There are infinite chemical and cellular pathways to becoming human. […] Sex isn’t a switch we can easily flip between two poles. Between those two imaginary poles lies an infinite number of possibilities.” (p.g. 163)

• Anonymous Author, “The Problematic Ideology of Natural Sex” (2016)

- “Around the world, over the past four or five hundred years, people have been cajoled, threatened, beaten, imprisoned, locked in mental hospitals, put in the stocks, publicly humiliated, mutilated, and burnt at the stake for violating one or more of the precepts of ‘[Biological] Sex.’ That’s the sure sign of enforced ideology, not a true natural law.” 

• Courtney Adison, “Human Sex is Not Simply Male or Female. So What?” (2016) 

- “While these gendered binaries play out in social life in reasonably clear ways, they also seep into places conventionally seen as immune to bias. For example, they permeate sex science. In her paper ‘The Egg and the Sperm’ (1991), the anthropologist Emily Martin reported on the ‘scientific fairy tale’ of reproductive biology. Searching textbooks and journal articles, she found countless descriptions of sperm as active, independent, strong and powerful, produced by the male body in troves; eggs, in contrast, were framed as large and receptive, their actions reported in the passive voice, and their fate left to the sperm they might or might not encounter. Representations in this vein persisted even after the discovery that sperm produce very little forward thrust, and in fact attach to eggs through a mutual process of molecular binding. Martin’s point? That scientific knowledge is produced in culturally patterned ways and, for Euro-American scientists, gendered assumptions make up a large part of this patterning.”

- “In Gender Trouble (1990), the feminist theorist Judith Butler argues that the insistence on sex as a natural category is itself evidence of its very unnaturalness. While the notion of gender as constructed (through interaction, socialisation and so on) was gaining some acceptance at this time, Butler’s point was that sex as well as gender was being culturally produced all along. It comes as no surprise to those familiar with Butler, Martin and the likes, that recent scientific findings suggest that sex is in fact non-binary. Attempts to cling to the binary view of sex now look like stubborn resistance to a changing paradigm. In her survey paper ‘Sex Redefined’ (2015) in Nature, Claire Ainsworth identified numerous cases supporting the biological claim that sex is far from binary, and is best seen as a spectrum. The most remarkable example was that of a 70-year-old father of four who went into the operating room for routine surgery only for his surgeon to discover that he had a womb.”

- “Looking to other times and to other cultures, we are reminded that sex is to some degree produced through the assumptions we make about each other and our bodies. Modern science is moving towards consensus on sex as a spectrum rather than a simple male/female binary, and it is time to start casting around for new ways of thinking about this fundamental aspect of what we are. Historical and anthropological studies provide a rich resource for re-imagining sex, reminding us that the sex spectrum itself is rooted in Euro-Western views of the person and body, and inviting critical engagement with our most basic biological assumptions.”

• Asia Friedman, Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (2013)

- “Thomas Laqueur argues that in the past, specifically prior to the 19th Century, male and female bodies were seen very differently than they are today. They were perceived as more similar than different, and instead of two sexes, there were just two variations of one sex. Laqueur further demonstrates that the shift in perception to seeing the sexes as two categorically different things was not the result of gaining more scientific knowledge, since many of the relevant discoveries were actually made after the fact… So the question for Laqueur is, if it was not due to advances in specific scientific knowledge of sex differences, what was responsible for that shift from seeing one to seeing two sexes? And his answer is essentially cultural change. He argues that sex or the body is the epiphenomenon, while gender, what we would normally take to be the cultural category, is what is primary. Marian Lowe makes a similar point when she argues that ‘if race, sex, and class were not politically and economically significant categories it is likely that no one would care very much about biological differences between members of these groups. To pay attention to the study of sex differences would be rather peculiar in a society where their political importance was small.’” (p.g. 45-46) 

- “Further, regarding chromosomes, keep in mind that XX and XY are 50% the same, and the egg and the sperm actually have the same sex chromosomes every time both contribute an “X” to make a female. Sarah Richardson offers a much more scientifically precise version of the same fundamental argument in her critique of recent accounts claiming significant genetic variation between males and females. 

Sex differences in the genome are very, very small: of 20,000 to 30,000 genes, marked sex differences are evident in perhaps half a dozen genes on the X and Y chromosome, and, it is hypothesized, a smattering of differently expressed genes across the autosomes… In DNA sequence and structure, sex differences are localized to the X and Y chromosomes. Males and females share 99.9 percent sequence identity on the 22 autosome pairs and the X, and the handful of genes on the Y are highly specific to male testes development. Thinking of males and females as having different genomes exaggerates the amount of difference between them, giving the impression that there are systematic and even law-like differences distributed across the genomes of males and females, and playing into a traditional gender-ideological view of sex differences. (Richardson, Forthcoming: 8-9) 

The essential point is this: Males and females are much more genetically similar than different.” (p.g. 206)

§ 2000 BCE: in mesopotamian mythology, among the earliest written records, there are references to types of people who are neither men nor women. in a sumerian creation myth found on a stone tablet from the 2000 bce, the goddess ninmah fashions a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king".

§ 1800 BCE: inscribed pottery shards from the middle kingdom of egypt, found near ancient thebes, list three human genders: tai (male), sḫt (“sekhet”) and hmt (female).

§ 385-380 BCE: aristophanes, a comic playwright, tells a story of creation in which “original human nature” includes a third sex. this sex “was a distinct kind, with a bodily shape and a name of its own, constituted by the union of the male and the female: but now only the word ‘androgynous’ is preserved.”

§ 77 BCE: genucius, a roman slave is denied inheritance on the grounds, according to art historian lynn roller, of being “neither a man nor a woman.” he is “not even allowed to plead his own case, lest the court be polluted by his obscene presence and corrupt voice.”

§ 1871: british administrators pass the criminal tribes act in india, effectively outlawing the country’s hijras—a community that includes intersex people, trans people, and even cross-dressers. celebrated in sacred indian texts, hijras had long been part of south asian cultures, but colonial authorities viewed them as violating the social order.

§ 1970: mexians in oaxaca state establish vela de las intrepidas (vigil of the intrepids), a festival celebrating ambiguous gender identities. the zapotec culture embraces a third-gender population called muxes. muxes trace back to pre-columbian times, when there were “cross-dressing aztec priests and mayan gods who were male and female at the same time”.

§ 2014: india’s supreme court recognizes the right of people, including hijras, to identify as third-gender. the court states, “it is the right of every human being to choose their gender.”

• Maria Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial /Modern Gender System” (2007)

- “…gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peopks, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the ‘civilized’ West.” (p.g. 186)

- “As global, Eurocentered capitalism was constituted through colonization, gender differentials were introduced where there were none. Oyeronkk Oyewhmi has shown us that the oppressive gender system that was imposed on Yoruba society did a lot more than transform the organization of reproduction… many Native American tribes were matriarchal, recognized more than two genders, recognized ‘third’ gendering and homosexuality positively, and understood gender in egalitarian terms rather than in the terms of subordination that Eurocentered capitalism imposed on them. Gunn’s work has enabled us to see that the scope of the gender differentials was much more encompassing and it did not rest on biology.” (p.g. 196)

• Gerald N. Callahan, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes (2009) 

- “ Like Hinduism, many other religious traditions speak of deities and humans who are neither men nor women, including the androgyny of the Judeo-Christian Adam. But those are very old stories that have passed through many hands. Much may have changed or been lost in translation. A better way to test the foundations of the two-sex mythology would be to look at the peoples of our modern world and see if such beliefs are universal among human societies. Do people raised with different worldviews see the sexes differently? The answer is an emphatic yes.” (p.g. 144)

• Justin Clark, “Understanding Gender” (2015) 

- “This diversity of gender is a normal part of the human experience, across cultures and throughout history. Non-binary gender diversity exists all overthe world, documented by countless historians and anthropologists. Examples of individuals living comfortably outside of typical male/female expectations and/or identities are found in every region of the globe. The calabai, and calalaiof Indonesia, two-­spirit Native Americans, and the hijra of India all represent more complex understandings of gender than allowed for by a simplistic binary model.” (p.g. 2) 

• Phoenix Singer, “Colonialism, Two-Spirit Identity, and the Logics of White Supremacy” 

- “Colonialism as practiced by Western culture is used to erase traditional non-binary roles of gender orientation and systems of sexuality, i.e. the Two-Spirit. Identifying as Two-Spirit becomes not just a traditional way of expressing Indigenous beliefs of gender orientation and sexuality but a political identity in resistance of colonialism. Through the use of inherently violent, assimilative measures, these traditions of the Two-Spirit in Indigenous societies are lost in many of our communities and are replaced by the Western gender binary and spectrum of sexual orientation. As this paper will show, this plays into the colonialist logic of white supremacy and how it relates to the Indigenous body, colonizing Two-Spirit identity.” (p.g. 1)

- “When Europeans came to Turtle Island, much of their culture, their ideals, their beliefs and institutions came with them through the continued centuries of settler-colonialism. Building their own nation upon this land, they were able to more permanently construct and impose their culture upon others. The Western colonization of the Americas brought forth many institutions which sought to erase and displace Indigenous cultural traditions and beliefs. Through the use of violence, forced assimilation, demonization of Indigenous beliefs and then appropriation of Indigenous culture, the subjugation of Native sexuality and gender roles have continued unquestioned in the minds of the settler and of our own people. It can be said and will be shown, that the Western binary is a system of oppression and repression and is actively a form of institutional violence against the Two-Spirit. This is all connected to the idea of white supremacy and domination over Indigenous bodies and beliefs, of colonization of our very selves. Thus an analysis of colonization and white supremacy is not complete without an approach towards Two-Spirit identity in our own communities.” (p.g. 1-2)

- “Before the colonization of this land, there were as many as six traditional gender orientation roles among numerous tribes. However, due to boarding schools erasing these traditions […] the Christianized related the existence of the Two-Spirit as sin… The Western Gender Binary is thus superimposed upon all cultures and their histories seen through the gaze of not only male dominance but a male/female paradigm that does not account for the existence of third, fourth, fifth and even more varieties of non-male/female expressions and identities. The Western Gender Binary does not see the Two-Spirit, the Western Gender Binary only sees a Man acting in ‘Unmanly’ ways or a Woman acting in ‘Unwomanly’ ways… As part of the settler mentality, we can see these actions as colonial violence against the Two-Spirit and are also the results of genocide. To reiterate previous statements, the Western gender binary is a form of superimposed and universalized colonialism upon Indigenous bodies and minds.” (p.g. 5-6)

• Anonymous Author, “The Problematic Ideology of Natural Sex” (2016)

- “…we have ignorance of the long and violent history of the imposition of the Ideology of Natural Sex under European colonialism. The genius behind framing an ideology as ‘natural’ is that its history erases itself. Why would anyone study the history of something natural and eternal? We don’t study the history of covalent bonds in chemistry or cumulus clouds in meteorology.  And so we don’t study the spread of European binary sex ideology under colonialism. If you do, you’ll find that all over the world before European colonialism there were societies recognizing three, four, or more sexes and allowing people to move between them—but that’s a subject for another post. Suffice it to say that societies were violently restructured under European colonialism in many ways, and one of those was the stamping out of nonbinary gender categories and stigmatization of those occupying them as perverts.” 

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