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Philosophy Talk. San Francisco's KALW Public Radio.
Topic: Gender
Jan. 4, 2005.
Listen to the show.
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Introduction:
Are gender roles and differences fixed, once and for, all by biology? Or is gender socially constructed and culturally variable? How does gender differ from sex? Join Stanford Professors John Perry and Ken Taylor as they explore with Dr. Fausto-Sterling whether men and women are really from different planets after all.
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"A
Conversation with Anne Fausto-Sterling: Exploring what
makes us male or female" by Claudia Dreifus, New
York Times, January 2, 2001
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Excerpts
from Q&A:
In the academic world, Dr. Fausto-Sterling is known
as a developmental biologist who offers interesting
counterpoints to the view that the role division between
men and women is largely predetermined by evolution.
"When people say 'it's nurture' or 'it's nature'
in making us male or female, I take the middle ground
and say that it's a combination of both," she
said. "That's not a popular position to take
in today's academic environment, but it is the one
that makes the most sense."
Q. What can we learn about gender from examining
how the medical profession treats infants born with
ambiguous genitalia? These are children who were once
called "hermaphrodites," and whom you would
prefer we term "intersexuals."
A. From them, we can literally see how society's
ideas about male and female are constructed. When
infants with ambiguous genitalia are born, everyone
-- parents, doctors -- are very upset and the physicians
often suggest drastic surgeries to assign a specific
gender to the child. The regimen usually involves
the doctors' deciding what sex the child ought to
be. Then, they surgically reconstruct the patient
to conform to that diagnosis: body parts are taken
out, others are added, hormones are given, or taken
away.
In the end, the doctors take a body that was clearly
neither male or female and turn it into one they can
represent to the world as "male" or "female."...My
point is that there's greater human variation than
supposed. My political point is that we can afford
to lighten up about what it means to be male or female.
We should definitely lighten up on those who fall
in between because there are a lot of them.
Q. What do you think nature is telling
us by making intersexuals?
A. That nature is not an ideal state. It is
filled with imperfections and developmental variation.
We have all these Aristotelian categories of male
and female. Nature doesn't have them. Nature creates
a whole lot of different forms.
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