Fausto Sterling The Five Sexes Summary

Anne Fausto Sterling is a professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the department of Molecular, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. In Frausto Sterling essay “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” she argues for redefinition and sought to reshape the way we envision binary system on a scale of male to female. Anne Fausto Sterling states, “ But if the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two part sexual system, they are in a defiance of nature” (63). Fausto Sterling insist that that if the state and the legal system, want to maintain the binary system, then they are going aginst nature. She argued that two sexes, male and female should no longer be accepted. Instead, Fausto Sterling suggest that the subgroup such as herms, merms and ferms should be accepted into the gender scale of
That mean biologically there more than two sexes and 240 out of 6,000 child born is intersexual. Both sterling and Nutt explanation on the study of intersexual case has deepen my understanding of the devlopinment of intersexual gender. And has made me come to a conclusion that maybe gender is biological construct. Because of the fact that Gender is determined by two biological factors: hormones and chromosomes.There will be only female (XX) and male (XY) chromosomes. As for my view of gender on social construct, I think gender can be socially constructed because even if we are born as female we can still define ourselves as male if we feel like we are born in a wrong body by going through transition. An example of how gender is socially constructed would the way people choose to wear clothing to identify who they are or the legal way of changing their sex on document as they completed their transition. In my opinion I think both biologic and social construct of gender are working working out fine. Except for few conflict of here and there, but as I can see we become more accepted of LGBT communities everything will settle