Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

8 Amanda du Preez
categories almost beyond recognition. Answering questions such as
‘what is a woman?’ and ‘what is a man?’ has become exceedingly
complex; no definite answer is possible without building in the
nuances of embodied realities as well. The position I take is to
acknowledge the constructed nature of both sex and gender, without
disregarding the situated specificity of embodiment. Accordingly,
becoming a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is a never-ending process that is also
always already embodied.
It has to be reiterated that the short history of transsexualism is
intimately entangled with technological and medical advancements
such as hormonal therapy or endocrinology and reassignment surgery
technologies, including vaginoplasty 25 and phalloplasty. 26 The
techno-medical history of sex reassignment procedures and the
growth of the transsexual category are intertwined to such a degree
that it is difficult to separate the two meaningfully. It was also in the
mid-twentieth century that the term ‘gender’ was created to
‘manage’ the occurrence of both intersexuality 27 and transsexuality
within medical discourses. Obviously these discourses struggled to
cope with the constructedness of sex and required another level of
interpretation to unravel the mystery of transsexuality; hence, the
category of gender 28 was created. Gender emerges, thus, as byproduct
of deviant sexual categories.
Although the so-called inevitability of medical intervention and the
pathological status of transsexuality are substantially challenged in
current debates on transsexuality, such as Sandy Stone’s
‘Posttranssexual manifesto’, 29 most discourses on the topic do call on
technology uncritically to construct agency.
25 Vaginoplasty is the surgical procedure of constructing a vagina. The most common
procedure utilises the skin of the penis for the lining of the new vagina and
retains a portion of the erogenous tissue from the base of the penis for the
clitoris. See Hausman (n 1 above) 68.
26
Phalloplasty involves the surgical construction of a penis by means of the tubed
pedicle flap; Hausman (n 1 above) 67.
27 Intersexuality refers to persons born with genitals that are neither clearly male
nor clearly female and is the term that is now preferred to ‘hermaphrodite’.
‘True’ intersexed individuals, where both ovarian and testicular tissue are present
in either the same gonad or in opposite gonads, accounts for less than 5 percent
of all cases of ambiguous genitals (SJ Kessler ‘The medical construction of gender.
Case management of intersexed infants’ in PD Hopkins (ed) Sex/machine.
Readings in culture, gender, and technology (1998) 241 242). For the specific role
played by the medical profession and the creation and maintenance of these
categories, see AD Dreger Hermaphrodites and the medical invention of sex
(1998); Kessler (above).
28
In this regard Bernice Hausman makes a convincing argument against Butler’s use
of gender as the creator of sex, by showing that gender is not a transhistorical
concept, but, indeed, a term with a very specific history and context for its
creation. See Hausman (n 1 above) 180-182.
29 Stone (n 11 above).