the Female Body GOVERNING

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ingrid holme
p. 106), This chapter explores three institutional structures that allow
medical and juridical bodies to constitute authority with regard to the
sexing of the human body.
The fi rst of the institutions is that of birth registration. From the
moment a person is born he or she encounters the governance of
sex-gender through the registration of his or her sex. While the infant’s
self-awareness of their sex is debatable, the subsequent actions of
parents, from naming the child to choosing clothes and toys become
institutionally sexed and gendered. As Dreger (1998) has detailed,
the registration of sex at birth indicates the medical community’s
establishing authority in “fi nding” and “revealing” the person’s true
sex. Throughout its history, the Western medical institution has been
compelled to establish reliable indicators of sex, which has led to various
approaches and debates. During what Dreger terms the “Age of the
Gonads,” a person’s true sex was determined by the gonads, and this
lead to the difference between female and male becoming located
within reproductive differences (Hird, 2002). Currently an infant’s sex
is assigned based on the visual appearance of the genitals. However,
in cases of “ambiguous genitalia” a number of “signs,” such as genital,
chromosomes, reproductive capacity, and sexual function are taken into
consideration. In these cases establishing the genetic sex through the
technology of karyotyping is also routinely done. 1 However, assigning
sex to an infant with ambiguous genital is not clear-cut, and Dreger
has observed that the need to label “hermaphrodites” as either female
or male stems from the medical and social requirement for one body
to have a single sex. The idea of a person’s body having only one fi xed
and static sex has become institutionalized within the birth certifi cate,
which can be altered only if the doctor, that is the medical institution,
has made a “mistake.” Intersex activists are challenging this structure,
which has the potential to label them transsexual if they do not agree
with the sex assigned to them as babies. Clearly, the idea of sex as
a biologically fi xed category is critical to the stability of the current
institutional procedure that governs the fi rst stages of a person’s life
and marks them as belonging to the biological realm of either female
or male, and the social realm of women or men.
The second institutional structure, which acts in the governance of
sex-gender, is the marriage tradition and the integration of heterosexuality
as a norm of “real” women and men within the legal system. Dreger
(1998) has noted that, historically, the main motivation of doctors in
hermaphrodite cases was a fear of homosexual practices. This fear of
homosexuality is apparent in the case of marriage, which is regulated
by law so that marriage is restricted to the union of a female woman