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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Body of proof-Nivedita Menon
-The Indian Express
 
Pinki Pramanik’s ordeal must force us to rethink the notion that gender is rigidly bipolar

The story of Pinki Pramanik and her partner can be pieced together like any other story of intimacy gone bad. After all, human beings invariably encounter pain and betrayal in intimate relationships, just as they encounter joy and desire. No relationship is free of power, whether produced by individual personalities or by social structures — patriarchy, the assumption of heterosexuality as natural, caste, class, race. Why then has Pinki’s story become about something else altogether? Because we assume that our bodies are “naturally” male or female.

But would anyone pass a gender test? Three sets of characteristics are said to determine sexual identity: genetic — the XX female and XY male chromosomal pattern, hormonal — estrogen (female), androgen/testosterone (male), and genital. However, sex chromosomes have been known to exhibit other patterns, such as X0 (females with only one X chromosome), XXY, XYY, XXX, or a “mosaic condition” in which different cells in the same individual’s body have different sex chromosomes. This is why the Olympic games suspended gender verification tests in 2000, after enough evidence had emerged that “atypical chromosomal variations” are far too common.

Scientists are also coming to the conclusion that the three characteristics of sexual identity are not necessarily linked. Thus, if a body has female genitals, it would not necessarily have preponderantly female chromosomes and female hormones. Most bodies marked male and female would not pass “gender tests” if the perfect congruence of these three factors is being examined. But we are not routinely tested for gender once our sex has been assigned at birth. The question arises only in sex-segregated activities like competitive sports, and only for women, because it is assumed that male characteristics offer an advantage. Of course, women athletes disqualified for chromosomal, hormonal or physical variations that cast doubt on their “femaleness” do not get categorised as “men”. They are still excluded from men’s sports events and professions reserved for men.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, it continues to be assumed that every human being can be assigned to one of two sex categories. Thus the Olympic Committee retained a policy of “suspicion based testing” on a case by case basis, as did other sports bodies. This policy resulted in two women athletes — South African Caster Semenya and Indian Santhi Soundarajan — being disqualified after winning their events. They had failed their “gender tests”.

But are all natural advantages considered illegitimate in sports? Height in basketball is an accepted natural advantage, and different ethnic groups have different physical characteristics, like height and build. Competitive sport does not sort out competitors on the basis of comparable physical features and athletic ability — there is no level playing field. Men of different physical attributes, levels of training, and differential natural advantages such as height and strength, compete against one another, as do women. Why is the only standard of difference applied that of an assumed gender bipolarity?

All men do not run faster than all women, all men are not stronger than all women, all men do not jump higher than all women. Why should athletes not be categorised on the basis of physical characteristics relevant to the sport, rather than on the basis of sex?

We are not clearly bounded male and female bodies with definite male and female characteristics, from which only a few abnormal people differ. Maleness and femaleness are not only culturally different, they are not even biologically stable features over a lifetime.

The rigid division of bodies into “male only” and “female only” occurred at a particular moment and place in human history — at the inception of the constellation of features that we term “modernity”, inaugurated in Europe around the 16th century and universalised through colonialism. Even in Europe, it was only from the 17th century that hermaphrodites were forced to choose one established gender and stay with it, the punishment for failing to do so being death.

Since the dominant understanding now is that a body must be unambiguously male or female, large numbers of bodies that do not fit this description are designated as diseased. For instance, intersex infants born with no clear determining sexual characteristics, eunuchs, men and women who have some characteristics that are “non-masculine” and “non-feminine” respectively. All these are disciplined into normalcy through medical and surgical intervention, or declared abnormal or illegal. Our very language, held implacably in the bipolarity of gender, falters in attempting to refer to such bodies. Is an intersex child he or she, avan or aval, voh karega ya karegi?

If the experience of Pinki forces us to rethink the notion that sexual identity is rigidly bipolar, then the humiliation she is undergoing may not have been in vain.

The writer teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the author of ‘Recovering subversion: Feminist politics beyond the law’