Gender's Nature: Intersexuality, Transsexualism and the 'Sex'/'Gender' Binary

Myra J. Hird’s “Gender’s Nature: Intersexuality, Transsexualism and the ‘Sex’/‘Gender’ Binary” represents a crucial intervention in feminist theory’s understanding of the relationship between sex and gender. Published in December 2000 in Feminist Theory, this article uses the embodied experiences of intersex and transsexual individuals to demonstrate that not only gender but also sex itself is a social construction, fundamentally challenging the binary system that structures Western thought about bodies and identities.

The Collapse of the Sex/Gender Distinction

Hird begins by interrogating one of feminism’s foundational distinctions: the separation between ‘sex’ (understood as biological, natural, and given) and ‘gender’ (understood as social, cultural, and constructed). This distinction, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, allowed feminists to argue that women’s social subordination was not natural or inevitable but culturally imposed. However, Hird argues this distinction, while politically useful, ultimately reinforces the very binary thinking it seeks to challenge.

The article demonstrates that maintaining ‘sex’ as a natural, pre-social category creates a backdoor through which biological determinism can re-enter feminist discourse. If sex is natural and binary, then gender, no matter how socially constructed, remains tethered to a supposedly immutable biological foundation. This tethering limits the radical potential of feminist critique and maintains the legitimacy of binary categorization.

Intersexuality: Nature’s Challenge to Binary Sex

Hird’s examination of intersexuality provides compelling evidence that sex itself is socially constructed. Intersex conditions—estimated to occur in approximately 1-2% of births—reveal the impossibility of maintaining a clear, natural binary between male and female bodies. These conditions include a wide range of variations in chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive structures, and external genitalia that do not fit neatly into standard male or female categories.

Medical Management of Ambiguity

The article extensively analyzes how medical institutions respond to intersex bodies, revealing the social rather than natural basis of sex categorization. When infants are born with ambiguous genitalia or other intersex conditions, medical professionals typically intervene surgically and hormonally to create bodies that conform to binary sex categories. These interventions are justified as necessary for the child’s psychological well-being and social integration, but Hird argues they actually reveal the fragility of the sex binary itself.

The medical protocols for managing intersexuality expose several crucial points:

1. The Arbitrariness of Sex Criteria: Decisions about whether to assign an intersex infant as male or female often depend on genital measurements (such as phallus size) that have no inherent biological significance but reflect cultural anxieties about proper masculine and feminine embodiment.

2. The Primacy of Social Over Biological Concerns: Medical decisions prioritize creating bodies that can perform expected social and sexual roles rather than maintaining biological function. For instance, the ability to penetrate during heterosexual intercourse often takes precedence over fertility or sexual sensation.

3. The Violence of Normalization: The surgical and hormonal interventions performed on intersex individuals, often in infancy and childhood, constitute a form of violence aimed at maintaining the appearance of natural binary sex. This violence is justified through discourses of normality, health, and kindness.

The Social Construction of Biological Sex

Through her analysis of intersexuality, Hird demonstrates that what counts as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not determined by nature but by social decisions about which biological markers matter and how to interpret them. Chromosomes, hormones, internal structures, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics can all vary independently, creating a multiplicity of bodily configurations that belie simple binary classification.

The medical management of intersexuality reveals that ‘sex’ requires constant social work to maintain its appearance as natural and binary. This work includes not only medical interventions but also legal frameworks, bureaucratic procedures, and everyday practices that continually reproduce the fiction of natural binary sex.

Transsexualism: Performing Sex/Gender

While intersexuality challenges the notion of naturally binary sex from the perspective of bodily variation, transsexualism challenges it from the perspective of identity and experience. Hird’s analysis of transsexualism reveals how sex/gender categories are actively produced through performance, narrative, and medical intervention.

From Authenticity to Performativity

Hird traces a shift in how transsexualism has been understood, from earlier models focused on authenticity (the transsexual as a “real” woman or man trapped in the wrong body) to newer models focused on performativity (the transsexual as revealing gender’s constructed nature through hyperbolic enactment). This shift, she argues, represents a move from psychological to sociological frameworks for understanding gender variance.

The authenticity model, dominant in medical and psychological discourse through much of the twentieth century, posited that transsexuals possessed an inner gender identity that conflicted with their bodily sex. Medical transition was understood as aligning the body with this authentic inner self. This model, while validating transsexual experience, reinforced binary thinking by maintaining that everyone has a true gender that is either male or female.

The performativity model, influenced by theorists like Judith Butler, understands gender as produced through repeated acts rather than expressing an inner essence. From this perspective, transsexual transitions reveal not the existence of true gender but the constructed nature of all gender performances. Transsexuals become, in Hird’s analysis, “gender performers par excellence” who expose the artificiality of the sex/gender system through their explicit engagement with its construction.

The Limits of Transgression

However, Hird cautions against assuming that all forms of transsexualism necessarily transgress or challenge the binary sex/gender system. Many transsexuals seek not to challenge binary categories but to move from one category to another, often embracing conventional gender expressions more fully than non-transsexual individuals. This “passing” strategy, while understandable given social pressures and violence faced by gender non-conforming individuals, may reinforce rather than challenge binary thinking.

Furthermore, medical and legal frameworks for managing transsexualism often require individuals to conform to narrow definitions of proper masculinity or femininity to access transition-related care. These gatekeeping practices reveal how institutions work to contain the potentially radical implications of transsexual experience within existing binary frameworks.

The Problem of Multiple Genders

Hird critically examines proposals for recognizing “multiple genders” as a solution to the limitations of binary thinking. While such proposals appear progressive, she argues they often remain dependent on morphological notions of sex and thus fail to fundamentally challenge the sex/gender system.

Morphological Dependence

Many multiple gender frameworks simply add additional categories based on bodily configurations—creating spaces for intersex individuals or transsexuals without questioning the fundamental link between body morphology and social categorization. These frameworks might recognize three, five, or even more genders, but they maintain the assumption that social categories should be based on bodily differences.

This morphological dependence limits the radical potential of multiple gender frameworks. As long as social categorization remains tied to bodies, the system continues to naturalize social divisions and legitimate differential treatment based on physical characteristics. The multiplication of categories may reduce the violence done to those who don’t fit the standard binary, but it doesn’t challenge the fundamental logic of categorization itself.

The Persistence of Hierarchy

Hird also notes that multiplying gender categories doesn’t necessarily eliminate hierarchy. Historical and cross-cultural examples of societies with more than two gender categories often maintain hierarchical relationships between these categories. The mere existence of additional categories doesn’t guarantee equality or eliminate oppression.

Furthermore, proliferating categories can create new forms of boundary policing and exclusion. Each new category requires definition and delimitation, creating new possibilities for individuals to be deemed not quite fitting, not authentic enough, or improperly categorized.

Feminist Theory at a Crossroads

The article presents feminist theory as standing at a crucial crossroads regarding how to approach sex and gender. Hird identifies two primary strategies, each with distinct political implications:

Strategy 1: Emphasizing Sexual Difference

Some feminist approaches emphasize sexual difference as fundamental and seek to revalue the feminine within this difference. This strategy, associated with certain strands of radical and cultural feminism, argues that recognizing and celebrating women’s distinctiveness is necessary for challenging male dominance.

Proponents of this approach worry that denying sexual difference erases women’s specific experiences and struggles. They argue that women’s bodies—particularly their capacity for pregnancy and childbirth—create distinctive experiences that should be acknowledged and valued rather than denied or minimized.

However, Hird argues this strategy risks reinforcing the very binary thinking that underlies women’s oppression. By treating sexual difference as fundamental, even while revaluing the feminine, this approach maintains the legitimacy of categorizing and differently treating people based on bodily characteristics.

Strategy 2: Exposing Sex as Construction

The alternative strategy involves exposing both sex and gender as social constructions designed to create and maintain hierarchical divisions. This approach, which Hird advocates, seeks to denaturalize sex categories entirely, revealing them as social achievements rather than biological givens.

This strategy aligns with poststructuralist and queer theoretical approaches that see all categories as provisional and politically motivated. Rather than celebrating difference, this approach questions why certain differences are made socially significant while others are ignored.

The political advantage of this strategy, according to Hird, lies in its ability to fundamentally challenge the logic of categorization that underlies multiple forms of oppression. By revealing sex as constructed, feminism can challenge not just the devaluation of the feminine but the very system that creates and maintains gender categories.

Medical Regulation and Social Control

A significant portion of Hird’s analysis focuses on how medical institutions regulate intersex and transsexual bodies to maintain the sex/gender binary. This regulation reveals the extensive social apparatus required to maintain what is supposedly natural.

The Power of Medical Discourse

Medical professionals hold enormous power in defining and managing sex/gender categories. They determine what counts as normal or abnormal, healthy or pathological, male or female. This power extends from delivery room decisions about intersex infants to psychiatric evaluations of transsexual adults seeking transition-related care.

Hird shows how medical discourse naturalizes social categories by translating them into biological and psychological terms. Social discomfort with ambiguity becomes reframed as medical concern for patient well-being. Cultural assumptions about proper gender expression become diagnostic criteria for mental health conditions.

Technologies of Normalization

The article examines various technologies—surgical, hormonal, psychological—used to normalize non-conforming bodies and identities. These technologies reveal the extensive work required to maintain binary sex/gender categories:

• Surgical interventions reshape intersex and transsexual bodies to conform to binary ideals
• Hormonal treatments modify secondary sex characteristics to align with assigned categories
• Psychological therapies aim to reconcile individuals with their assigned sex or regulate access to transition
• Documentary practices create official records that inscribe binary sex as legal and bureaucratic reality

Each technology contributes to what Hird calls the “fiction of natural dimorphism”—the appearance that binary sex categories simply reflect natural reality rather than being actively produced through social practices.

Theoretical Implications

Hird’s analysis has profound implications for feminist and queer theory:

Beyond the Sex/Gender Distinction

By demonstrating that sex is as socially constructed as gender, Hird’s work suggests that feminism needs to move beyond the sex/gender distinction entirely. Rather than maintaining sex as a natural foundation for social gender, feminist theory should recognize both as interrelated aspects of a single system of social categorization and hierarchy.

This move doesn’t deny the reality of bodily differences or lived experiences but rather questions why certain differences are made socially significant and how these differences are interpreted and managed.

Intersectionality and Embodiment

The article contributes to intersectional feminist analysis by showing how sex/gender categories intersect with other systems of categorization and oppression. Medical management of intersex and transsexual bodies often reflects and reinforces racial, class, and heteronormative assumptions about proper embodiment.

For instance, decisions about sex assignment for intersex infants often consider factors like anticipated adult height (influenced by racial stereotypes) and potential for heterosexual marriage (assuming heteronormativity). These considerations reveal how sex/gender cannot be separated from other axes of social differentiation.

The Politics of Recognition

Hird’s work raises important questions about the politics of recognition in feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. Should political strategies focus on gaining recognition for excluded identities within existing frameworks, or should they challenge the frameworks themselves?

While recognition can provide important protections and resources for marginalized individuals, Hird suggests it may also reinforce the very systems of categorization that create marginalization. This tension remains central to contemporary debates about gender identity, rights, and social transformation.

Contemporary Resonance

Writing in 2000, Hird anticipated many debates that would become central to feminism and gender politics in subsequent decades:

Trans Rights and Feminist Politics

The article’s nuanced analysis of transsexualism provides resources for thinking through contemporary debates about trans inclusion in feminism. By showing how both intersex and transsexual experiences reveal sex as constructed, Hird challenges trans-exclusionary feminist positions that maintain binary sex as natural and fundamental.

Non-Binary and Genderqueer Identities

Hird’s critique of multiple gender frameworks presages contemporary discussions about non-binary and genderqueer identities. Her analysis helps explain both the liberatory potential and limitations of proliferating gender categories.

Medical Authority and Bodily Autonomy

The article’s examination of medical regulation remains highly relevant to contemporary struggles over bodily autonomy. From intersex rights activism opposing non-consensual infant surgeries to debates over trans healthcare access, Hird’s analysis illuminates ongoing contestations over who controls sex/gender categories and bodily modifications.

Critical Engagements

Hird’s work has generated significant scholarly discussion:

Materialist Critiques

Some materialist feminists argue that Hird’s social constructionist approach insufficiently addresses the material reality of sexed bodies and their role in reproduction. They worry that treating sex as purely constructed erases important aspects of women’s oppression related to reproductive capacity.

Trans Studies Perspectives

Trans studies scholars have both drawn on and critiqued Hird’s work. While appreciating her challenge to binary thinking, some argue she insufficiently centers trans people’s own understandings of their experiences and inadvertently reinforces medicalized narratives of transsexuality.

Intersex Activism

Intersex activists and scholars have found Hird’s work valuable for challenging medical authority and exposing the violence of normalization. However, some critique academic discussions of intersexuality that don’t adequately engage with intersex people’s own political movements and demands.

Methodological Contributions

Beyond its theoretical arguments, the article makes important methodological contributions:

Interdisciplinary Analysis

Hird effectively combines insights from sociology, feminist theory, queer theory, science studies, and medical anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach reveals connections between different domains of knowledge and practice that maintain sex/gender categories.

Critical Reading of Medical Literature

The article demonstrates how to critically read medical and scientific literature, revealing the social assumptions embedded in supposedly objective biological discourse. This methodology remains valuable for feminist science studies.

Centering Marginalized Bodies

By focusing on intersex and transsexual bodies, Hird shows how marginalized experiences can illuminate the workings of dominant systems. This methodological choice aligns with feminist standpoint theory while avoiding essentialist claims about privileged perspectives.

Conclusion: Toward New Possibilities

“Gender’s Nature” concludes not with definitive answers but with urgent questions for feminist theory and politics. If both sex and gender are social constructions, how should feminism proceed? What new forms of embodiment, identity, and politics become possible when we abandon the fiction of natural binary sex?

Hird suggests that recognizing sex as constructed opens radical possibilities for reimagining bodies, identities, and social relations. Rather than seeking inclusion within existing categories or simply multiplying categories, we might question the very imperative to categorize bodies and assign social meanings to bodily differences.

This vision doesn’t deny bodily differences or their significance but rather asks why certain differences matter socially and how they come to matter. It invites us to imagine forms of embodiment and identification not constrained by binary logic or morphological determinism.

Twenty years after its publication, Hird’s article remains vital for anyone seeking to understand and challenge the sex/gender system. By revealing both sex and gender as social achievements rather than natural facts, it opens space for new forms of feminist politics that don’t simply seek equality within existing categories but dare to imagine fundamentally different ways of organizing bodies, identities, and societies.

The article stands as a crucial contribution to feminist theory’s ongoing project of denaturalizing oppression and expanding possibilities for human flourishing. Its insights continue to inform struggles for bodily autonomy, gender self-determination, and social transformation, making it essential reading for contemporary feminism.