Finding Out, Ch5: Nature, Nurture, and Identity

      I love Kinsey’s statement that “only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes” (quoted on 123). We categorize everything--bodies, clothing, gender, occupations, sexual desire. Whenever something comes up that blurs the categories or fits into none of the established categories, people tend to ignore them instead of changing or adding or eliminating categories. Most institutions only recognize male and female bodies, despite the fact that a large portion of the population possesses characteristics that fit into neither or both categories. According to the Intersex Society of North America, 1 in 100 individuals are born intersex--the same frequency as that of individuals born with red hair. Many people feel the need to surgically alter intersex bodies to conform to the binary of sex, even at the risk of drastic or complete loss of sexual sensation in addition to normal risks of surgery. In many cases, ambiguous genitalia are assigned female because the procedure is easier to accomplish; but when asked, every person I spoke with said that they would prefer to have a small penis than a vulva with no sexual sensation. The gender binary and the idea that gender is sex-linked can also cause individuals physical, as well as emotional, pain as they try to conform to set categories (not to mention financial costs). Even the work that people do is linked to beliefs about sex and gender, from unpaid domestic work to paid professions. 

     Where something comes from only matters when people want to cause it, cure it, or justify action for or against it. Kinsey’s focus on sexuality as it is practiced rather than its cause (or morality) was a step in a positive direction that allowed people to reconsider their ideas about it. While Hirschfield’s concept of bisexuality disrupts the rigid binary of sexuality, it leaves little room for people to find a place that accurately describes them. When there are rigid categories, the categories often come to define individuals because the system is set up so that no one can cross categories--one category is defined against the others. Unlike Hirschfield, “Kinsey saw homosexuality as a fluid position on a continuum of possible sexual experiences” (124). Sexuality as a continuum provides more leniency for people to find a place that is descriptive of their sexual feelings and behaviors than the binary or even Hirschfield’s version of sexuality. 

      Interestingly, the Benjamin standards, though just as varied as the Kinsey scale, are just as confining as the heteronormative structure of the gender/sex/sexuality binaries. By linking sexual desire and gender roles (and, therefore, sex), Benjamin plays into compulsory heterosexuality in several ways:

1. it allows individuals to define themselves only within the already-existing binaries, acknowledging only an unfortunate disconnect between gender and sex, 
2. it was a way to measure the need for “curing” cross-gender identity, thereby ignoring the legitimacy of identities beyond the heterosexual matrix and forcing them to conform,
3. it assumes that all relationships must be defined by a superior and an inferior subject,  eliminating the possibility of an egalitarian relationship,
4. while supposedly acknowledging the Kinsey scale, it actually disregards the continuum that Kinsey describes--by defining individuals with the binaries again.

These problems persist today; even with the acknowledgement of same-sex couples without thinking that they need to be cured, the prominence of these ideas can be seen in such questions as, “Who wears the pants in the relationship?” Clearly, people still assume that there are only two roles for subjects to play in a relationship, that those roles are unequal and opposite, that both roles must be filled at all times, and that nether the roles nor the individual playing the roles are fluid.