Nature's Bias: Sex Testing

In the bewildering and wonderful scene in Twelfth Night where Viola (dressed as Cesario) and her twin brother Sebastian appear on stage together for the first time, Orsino and Olivia see the object of their desire mirrored, like “an apple cleft in two.” Sebastian blithely attempts to reassure Olivia that her attraction to Cesario was not misdirected, but that “nature to her bias” drew her desire to its proper object, that out of ambiguity Nature drew a man who was, technically, both “maid and man.”

Sebastian’s breezy explanation comes to mind in the current media frenzy surrounding the 18-year-old South African runner, Caster Semenya, who won the women’s 800 meter at the world track and field championships in Berlin, only to have her gender immediately questioned and put to the test. The headlines cannot decide whether the issue is her sex or gender. The whole sad situation--with a young woman’s identity and talent exposed to lurid scrutiny--has fortunately prompted some well-meaning writers to tackle the topic again and educate the public about her case, with some frank opinion on what is really at stake with sex testing.



One thing is clear–sex testing is a cultural and scientific trap. In his Microcosmographia (1615), Helkia Crooke (much like Vesalius in 1543) takes a long, at times reverent, but often skeptical look at Galen. In book 4, from which the illustration above is taken, Crooke follows Vesalius in illustrating a central paradox in Galen’s views on sex and gender. Illustrated are the female reproductive organs, but one could be forgiven (and this is Crooke’s point) for thinking that fig. IV is a penis and not the neck of the womb. Take away the Fallopian tubes and ovaries in fig. III and you are left with the same impression: that male and female reproductive organs are analogous in their shape and function. After restating (with some skepticism) Galen’s theory of sexual inversion by innate heat, Crooke takes a more progressive view: “Both these sexes of male and female do not differ in the kind as we call it or species, that is, essential form and perfection, but only in some accidents, to wit, in temper and in the structure of the parts of Generation. For the female sex as well as the male is a perfection of mankind.”

The dramatic uneasiness in Twelfth Night persists over whether Viola can emerge from Cesario’s entanglements to reclaim her gender and feelings. The erasure of her identity, of course, serves to expose Olivia and Orsino, for they see in her not only what they desire, but alternate visions of who they are. Yet, unable to secure her “maiden weeds” to convince Orsino to stop calling her “Boy,” Viola remains trapped within a dramatic illusion. Yet perhaps the dramatic option was worse, for Shakespeare eliminates the “drop trousers” scene in Barnabe Riche’s “Of Apollonius and Silla” (his source for the twin plot) in which Silla (passing as “Silvio”) is forced to undress before Julina to prove she could not have fathered her child.

Caster Semenya’s options seem equally bleak: Riche’s more prosaic, empirical test, or perpetual (and alien) ambiguity. Sadly, the awful, tragic theater she finds herself in fears ambiguity as much as it desires bland assurances, and there will be no happy ending, either way.

Update: Tenured Radical has caught up to this story. Essential reading.