the Female Body GOVERNING

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ingrid holme
Genetic sex determination in sports builds on the view of sex taken
in endocrinology, where the female body is the default and inactive
morphology, and the male body is actively responding to the action
of the SRY gene. The concept of the male being the result of an active
development away from the default female has a long history that has
been explored within a historical context by Schiebinger (1987) and
Laqueur (1990) and within a social context by Fausto-Sterling (2000).
The idea that all vertebrates are inherently female can be seen popular
science. One of the most interesting being the fi rst Jurassic Park fi lm, in
which Ian Malcolm asks, “But again, how do you know they’re all female?
Does someone go into the park and, uh . . . lift up the dinosaurs’ skirts?”
Dr. Henry Wu gives the answer, “We control their chromosomes. It’s
not that diffi cult. All vertebrate embryos are inherently female anyway.
It takes an extra hormone at the right developmental stage to create
a male, and we simply deny them that” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg,
& Crichton, 1993). Through studying Intersex conditions researchers
found that only a single gene from the Y chromosome was required to
produce a male morphology in an individual with X-X karyotype. The
DNA sequence of this gene has since identifi ed and labeled as the SRY
(Sinclair et al., 1990). Thus, a confl ict exists between the view held in
endocrinology and in genetics. In endocrinology sex is seen as a process
that requires testosterone and other hormones to continually act as
chemical messengers to maintain the active process of sex difference,
while, the view within genetics that the SRY acts as a “master switch,”
set to an on or off position by its presence or absence.
The binary sex model is integral to the identity of the SRY gene. Its
existence was fi rst suggested in 1927 by Danish geneticist Øjvind Winge
(1927). He hypothesized that those genes that were benefi cial to the
male sex and disadvantageous to the female sex tended to accumulate
near a testis-determining factor (TDF) on the Y chromosome. Winge
proposed the existence of TDF as a hypothetical Mendelian gene with a
set of expected characteristics based on the view of female and male as
two distinct genetic entities. Through Y chromosome mapping studies
the sequence was narrowed, and in the early 1990s a DNA sequence
was identifi ed that fi t the characteristics of the hypothesized TDF. The
history of the TDF/SRY gene shows how established paradigms not only
pose a certain set of questions but also frame new scientifi c knowledge
in line with the existing model. Thus, one of the main feminist critiques
of research into sex determination problematizes the focused on the
male as the active, and thus more interesting (Butler, 1990).
Detailing the extent to which research questions and fi ndings have
been hampered by the view of sex taken with genetics is outside the scope