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Empirically
Deconstructing the Sex/Gender Binary
Kand
S McQueen
School
Of Education
Indiana
University, Bloomigton
(Estados
Unidos)
An Empirical Deconstruction
of the Two-Sex/Two Gender Paradigm There are presumably
two and only two kinds of people in the world: men and
women. This work posits that the mutually exclusive and
collectively exhaustive categories of male and female fail
to adequately describe that part of human experience
referred to as sex and gender, and that ultimately
biological sex is a social construction. To the authors’
knowledge, this is the first attempt to make this argument
by means of quantitative data.
The rationale of this study
has its roots in Sir Karl Popper’s notion of
falsifiability. According to Popper, affirmative
statements such as “All swans are white” are not
verifiable. Even if all observed swans to date have been
white the possible existence of an as yet unobserved black
swan cannot be discounted. Consequently, the previous
statement can be falsified with the discovery of one black
swan. Analogously, if the dichotomous notion of sex is
correct, then all people should be able to be classified
as either male or female. If, on the other hand, it
becomes impossible to categorize all people, then the
dichotomous paradigm will have been falsified.
There exist at least two
groups of people who defy simple classification in the
binary categories of male and female: the intersexed and
the transgendered. Intersexuality, describes individuals
born anatomically somewhere in between male and female,
while transgenderism refers to those who do not identify
with the sex they were assigned at birth who often
describe themselves as “…a man trapped inside the body
of a woman…” or “…a woman trapped inside the body
of a man.” While intersexed people provide a physical,
anatomical challenge to the gender binary, transgender
people provide a psychological challenge. In the current
study, a group of subjects was provided with a list of
scenarios, each of which described actual people.
One-third of the questions
described a person who was unambiguously male, one-third
unambiguously female, while one-third described cases of
intersexuality. Multivariate clustering procedures were
used to analyze the data by clustering the variables. The
hypothesis was that if three clusters better represented
the data than two, the falsification of the two-sex
paradigm could be argued.
All in all, the results
support the hypothesis that two categories of sex are not
adequate to account for all people (see Figure 1).
Children who fall outside the binary expectation of sex
and gender face a number of developmental issues.
Transgendered children are currently labeled as mentally
disturbed while intersexed children are often forced to
endure multiple invasive medical procedures in an attempt
to force them into an appropriate binary category. There
are people in the world who do not fit the two-sex/two-gender
paradigm. Ignoring their existence only serves to
perpetuate a sex/gender ideology of questionable adequacy.
Embracing an alternative notion that would allow us to
celebrate the diversity of the human experience
collectively known as sex and gender could instead help us
to recognize a broader and richer conception of humanity.
About Kand S McQueen
Kand S McQueen is a
Doctoral Candidate in Educational Psychology with an
emphasis in Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University
whose research interests include the constructs of sex and
gender as well as developmental issues of the atypically
gendered.
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