TWO weeks ago in these pages Stephanie Pain told the extraordinary story of James Barry, the 19th-century 鈥減int-sized, squeaky-voiced鈥� British army surgeon who was discovered after death to be a woman 鈥� or so the charwoman who prepared the doctor鈥檚 body for burial claimed (8 March, p 46). If the claim is true, Barry鈥檚 story represents one triumphant response to the sexism that kept women out of a profession which had once been exclusively theirs. Women were the chief deliverers of care in illness, injury and childbirth in Europe up to the 17th century and have been in most societies for most of history.
Quite a few women have dressed as men to escape the social disabilities of their sex at the time. Some enlisted as soldiers 鈥� Ann Mills was a dragoon and a Royal Marine, both in the 18th century 鈥� and journalist joined up in men鈥檚 clothes to fight in the first world war. Others did it for reasons unknown: a career in jazz was not closed to women on the grounds of their sex, yet 1930s , who married five times, was only discovered to be a woman after his death, as was also the case with .
Some of these cross-dressers might also have felt themselves to be male in gender, although anatomically female, just as some individuals who are anatomically male feel themselves to be female. The distinction now made between sex and gender is a helpful one, because it allows us to accommodate the fact that humankind does not divide neatly into male and female, but in its protean diversity admits of a spectrum between.
Advertisement
Only recently has the fact become well enough understood to challenge the often harmful medicalisation of sex ambiguity and gradation which began in earnest in the 19th century and culminated in the 1950s with the 鈥渙ptimum gender of rearing鈥� system developed at Johns Hopkins University. This system encouraged 鈥済ender assignment鈥� of those with ambiguous genitals, including surgical intervention, at the earliest possible stage in life to encourage the effective socialisation of the resulting individual into their assigned gender.
The sheer complexity of sex and gender is now well enough understood for the Johns Hopkins optimum gender system to be no longer acceptable. Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University studied the literature on sex variations (, Basic Books, 2000) and found that as many as 1 in 100 people have bodies that differ from the male and female standards, if one includes XX and XY chromosomal abnormalities such as chromosomal mosaicism and the Klinefelter and Turner syndromes; conditions in which the gonads or genitals fail to develop properly (including those caused by the abnormal production of, or response to, the hormones that direct sexual development); and problems caused by medical treatment (including mistakes during pregnancy).
The fact that there is a spectrum of sex identities was brought home to me by a brilliant pupil I had at Oxford, who after studying philosophy there as a Dominican monk in the 1980s came to realise that she was not male but intersexed (in other words, neither male nor female but a third gender which she and others in the intersex community wish to have recognised). Not only could she not achieve recognition as such, she even . On being informally advised to undergo 鈥済enital disambiguation鈥� surgery to solve the problem, she realised that she had in effect ceased to exist in law as a person. She resolved to fight for the rights of intersexed persons to be recognised as such. Her brave endeavour 鈥� she is Sally Gross, founder of the Intersex Society of South Africa 鈥� like that of the members of the , promises to change the simplistic stereotyping that hides from view the realities of life for one whole tranche of humanity.
鈥淎 brilliant pupil I had realised she had ceased to exist in law as a person鈥�
