Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Although the pool that Page and his researchers used to come up with this finding was limited, the speculation on which they base their research, in part, is that a good ten percent of the population has chromosomal variations that do not fit neatly into the XX-female and XY-male set of categories. Hence, the discovery of the master- gene is considered to be a more certain basis for understanding sex- determination and, hence, sex-difference, than previous chromosomal criteria could provide.
Unfortunately for Page, there was one persistent problem that haunted the claims made on behalf of the discovery of the DNA
sequence. Exactly the same stretch of DNA said to determine maleness was, in fact, found to be present on the X chromosomes of females. Page first responded to this curious discovery by claiming that perhaps it was not the presence of the gene sequence in males versus its
absence in females that was determining, but that it was active in males and passive in females (Aristotle lives. But this suggestion remains hypothetical and, according to Anne Fausto-Sterling, Page and his coworkers failed to mention in that Cell article that the individuals from whom the gene samples were taken were far from unambiguous in their anatomical and reproductive constitutions. I quote from her article, Life in the XY Corral”:
the four XX males whom they studied were all sterile (no sperm production, had small testes which totally lacked germ cells, i.e.,
precursor cells for sperms. They also had high hormone levels and low testosterone levels. Presumably they were classified as males because of their external genitalia and the presence of testes. . . Similarly . . . both of the XY females external genitalia were normal,
[but] their ovaries lacked germ cells. (Clearly these are cases in which the component parts of sex do not add up to the recognizable coherence or unity that is usually designated by the category of sex. This incoherence troubles Page’s argument as well, for it is unclear why we should agree at the outset that these are
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XX-males and XY-females, when it is precisely the designation of male and female that is under question and that is implicitly already decided by the recourse to external genitalia. Indeed, if external genitalia were sufficient as a criterion by which to determine or assign sex, then the experimental research into the master gene would hardly be necessary at all.
But consider a different kind of problem with the way in which that particular hypothesis is formulated, tested, and validated. Notice that Page and his coworkers conflate sex-determination with male- determination, and with testis-determination. Geneticists Eva Eicher and Linda L. Washburn in the Annual Review of Genetics suggest that ovary-determination is never considered in the literature on sex- determination and that femaleness is always conceptualized in terms of the absence of the male-determining factor or of the passive presence of that factor. As absent or passive, it is definitionally disqualified as an object of study. Eicher and Washburn suggest, however, that it is active and that a cultural prejudice, indeed, a set of gendered assumptions about sex, and about what might make such an inquiry valuable, skew and limit the research into sex-determination. Fausto-Sterling quotes
Eicher and Washburn:
Some investigators have overemphasized the hypothesis that the Y
chromosome is involved in testis-determination by presenting the induction of testicular tissue as an active, (gene-directed, dominant)
event while presenting the induction of ovarian tissue as a passive
(automatic) event. Certainly, the induction of ovarian tissue is as much an active, genetically directed developmental process as the induction of testicular tissue, or for that matter, the induction of any cellular differentiation process. Almost nothing has been written about genes involved in the induction of ovarian tissue from the undifferentiated gonad. (In related fashion, the entire field of embryology has come under criticism for its focus on the central role of the nucleus in cell differen-

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