Issues of Gender in the World of Science

The issue of gender and sexuality arose in one of my other classes I am taking right now, Biology of Sex. While working within the scientific paradigm that we have marked out as a distinct way of viewing the world, I have realized how bat shit insane biology really is. We can literally give every persons particular genes a name and number, and say that these genes cause X and do not cause Y. We had a question in one of my labs about a child who was born with an XX genotype (female), and yet had ambiguous genitalia. The lab asks you to do some science stuff with the question, and then leaves a very small portion to answer the question, "What are the ethical issues with which the family is being faced? Why is there a controversy over defining gender?" Being a Cultural Studies major, I was pissed! Only a couple lines about this crazy, complex issue of gender? I took a whole course on it! This rant is quite related to the Cartesian view of mind and body, and one being separate from the other.

The question posed by my biology lab was one that had to do with reason but also with cultural influences. The parents were supposed to decide, in the most rational way possible, how they would raise their child in a society with such a strong gender binary. This is where the insanely complex issues of gender, sexuality, and identity come up. Most of the time, we have a strong association of our gender with our conceptions of ourselves. Gendering is a practice that creates a strong connection with parts of our body that are used to distinguish between sexes. This child from the question was inherently not going to be a boy or a girl, we know that because biological science couldn't place her into a neat little category. The question of how to raise the child is a difficult one for science. Science can separate the mind from the body. This is Descartes' lasting effect. We can analyze the child in question down to each particular gene, but it gets more tricky when making decisions about how they be raised in their PARTICULAR body, one that doesn't fall into predetermined categories.

The controversy over defining gender, especially at birth for ambiguous children, is extremely complicated. It is also right at the heart of the mind-body distinction Descartes gave us. Given the situation of ambiguous genitalia, what is the thing a mind guided by reason would do? Change the body to fit in with society? Let the child grow without a strong connection to gender? There is not an easy answer to any of these questions, as everything is happening within a certain cultural context. Gender is strongly connected to the body, but our identities as people are strongly connected to our conceptions of ourselves (the mind). These issues are incredibly intricate, and I thought it would be helpful to see how different disciplines raise the question of gender (biology vs. cultural studies)