Anyone who has been following the new brain science in the popular press--and even those whose casual reading includes journals along the lines of Psychoneuroendocrinology--will be fascinated by the puckish observations of Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, whose provocative and erudite essays easily establish the cultural biases underlying current scientific thought on gender. She goes on to critique the science itself, exposing inconsistencies in the literature and weaknesses in the rhetorical and theoretical structures that support new research. "One of the major claims I make in this book," she explains, "is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender--not science--can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." Whether discussing genital surgery on intersex infants or the amorous lives of lab rats, the author is unfailingly clear and convincing, and manages to impart humor to subjects as seemingly unpromising as neuroanatomy and the structure of proteins. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
As the old complaint that men's long hairstyles make it impossible to tell "if it's a boy or a girl" reveals, gender ambiguity is socially unsettling to many people. Boldly stepping into the breach, Fausto-Sterling contends that the fear of gender confusion has pushed science and medicine to go to extreme lengths in constructing solid concepts of sex (i.e., an individual's anatomical attributes) and gender (i.e., the internal conviction of one's maleness or femaleness). As in her now classic book, Myths of Gender, Fausto-Sterling draws on a wealth of scientific and medical information, along with social, anthropological and feminist theory, to make the case that "choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines." Further, she adds, "our beliefs about gender affect what kind of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." While the book encompasses a wide range of topics--including a cultural history of hermaphroditism (now more properly termed "intersexuality") and the recent medical interventions used to "cure" it, an account of the emergence of sex hormone research and its use to create changes in sexual orientation, and the history of how science has (mis)understood the brain in terms of gender--Fausto-Sterling's cogent use of concrete historical examples, her simple language and personal anecdotes keep this complex synthesis accessible. Her insightful work offers profound challenges toscientific research, the creation of social policy and the future of feminist and gender theory. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Village Voice
"Filled with an enormous amount of fresh ideas and evidence, ...bound to become a high-traffic feminist classic.


From The New England Journal of Medicine, August 31, 2000
Poised to cast the deciding vote in a Salisbury, Connecticut, election in 1843, "Levi S." was charged with being a woman and therefore ineligible. A doctor found that Levi had a penis and therefore a vote. But later it was revealed that Levi also had a vagina and menstruated regularly. What to do? Today we may be amused at 19th century conundrums concerning an intersexual person in a society in which only men held the right to vote. But modern America still requires citizens to be either male or female, and the institution that enforces this dichotomy with respect to babies is medicine, with the use of scalpels, sutures, and until very recently, sublime confidence. Physicians measure the intersexual newborn's phallus, and unless it is longer than 3 cm, shorten it to a more demure, clitoral length and perform whatever additional surgeries are needed to declare "it's a girl." The primary attack on these decisions has come from intersexual adults who express dissatisfaction with the surgeries that were performed on them as children and who ask whether children's welfare is truly the goal of this sex policing. Physicians, on the other hand, may well feel that society demands that children be either boys or girls and that the schoolyard will brutally punish any deviance from these categories. In this fascinating new book, Anne Fausto-Sterling describes these and many other troublesome issues that face our society when people refuse to fit the category of heterosexual man or heterosexual woman. A scholarly book with more than 120 pages of notes, its 255 pages of text nevertheless read like a bestseller. Fausto-Sterling reviews the history of ideas about sex and sex roles in the 20th century with authority and balance. She relates Johns Hopkins urologist Hugh Young's 1937 descriptions of intersexual people who grew up before the advent of corrective surgery. Young found these people, even the person working as a sideshow freak ("male and female in one"), to be well-adjusted and reasonably happy adults, many with active sex lives. Fausto-Sterling also reviews the case of John/Joan, a child who gravitated later to Johns Hopkins with widely reported, disastrous results. She points out that intersexual newborns are not rare (they may account for 1.7 percent of live births), so a review of our attitudes about these children is overdue, and her book provides an excellent framework for the ongoing debates. Fausto-Sterling digs deeper than current medical practice to investigate the basic sciences that guide and inform medicine. The scientists searching for steroid hormones had such abiding faith that male and female are antithetical conditions that they stumbled repeatedly. First, they refused to see that each steroid hormone naturally occurs and functions in both sexes. Next, they insisted that "male" hormones (androgens) must act antagonistically to "female" hormones (estrogens), when in fact they often work in a coordinated fashion. The author also scrutinizes the work of early behavioral endocrinologists. How much of the famous 1959 report from William C. Young's laboratory, declaring that androgens "organize" the developing brain into a masculine configuration, was shaped by prevailing attitudes that men and women have fundamentally different roles in society? Even if the report itself was untainted by such attitudes, what about the audience that accepted this idea so enthusiastically? Why did the founder of behavioral endocrinology, Frank Beach, who performed many similar experiments before the 1959 report appeared, never formulate this principle explicitly, despite its apparently tremendous explanatory power? For Fausto-Sterling, Beach was a hero, untempted by the simple formulation because he was so familiar with the data, which were replete with the exceptions that investigators still grapple with today. She sees Beach as open to the idea of sexual behavior as a continuum in which normal males might occasionally behave like females, and vice versa. For her, Beach had the independent, clear vision to see diversity when society sought dichotomy. Fausto-Sterling is not a radical social constructionist. She repeatedly insists that nature has a say in the outcome of experiments -- as one might expect of a geneticist and professor of biology. But she is persuasive in showing how scientists' social background often affects their conceptualization of results, their naming of discoveries, and their decisions about which experiments to perform. Fausto-Sterling is not above rhetoric. It is plain that she disagrees with certain writers, and she unabashedly declares her hopes for our political future. In discussing sex differences in relation to the human brain, she picks on the bedraggled corpus callosum. In 1982, the corpus callosum was reported to differ between men and women, but a flurry of subsequent studies convinced investigators in the field that there is either no sex-based difference in this brain structure or only a very subtle, hard-to-pinpoint difference. What for Fausto-Sterling is matter for condemnation of research in human sex differences could as easily be seen as a validation of the scientific process. However, Fausto-Sterling also takes pains to present at least two sides of every story, and she never fails to credit the intelligence and good intentions of others, even if, in hindsight, they have made dreadful mistakes. As physicians, scientists, and other citizens continue to take stock of ideas about men and women, and boys and girls, in this new century, Fausto-Sterling's careful and insightful book offers us the chance to question past assumptions and to dream of new formulations nearly as radical as allowing women to vote. S. Marc Breedlove, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.


Book Description
This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.


About the Author
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ph.D., biologist, feminist, and historian of science, is professor of biology and women's studies at Brown University. She is the author of Myths of Gender and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

FROM THE CRITICS

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