Eleventy Billion Sexes

I imagine that a lot of people in America would take objection to the statement “there exist six biological sexes.” Many, including the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, would insist there are two—male and female—along with some chromosomal oddities that don’t deserve their own categories due to deformation and low numbers (Fausto-Sterling p. 78).

In 1993, Fausto-Sterling asserted there were five sexes—males, females, herms, merms, ferms (p. 78). These categories take into account chromosomes and genitalia only, not sexual preference like the scientists who see differences for each category in the brain do (p. 11).

If not five, is six enough? If so-called “sexual preference” creates neurologically evident new sexes, shouldn’t there be at least eight sexes to include asexual (or, I suppose, sexually indifferent) males and females?

If we take biology and sexual preference (or lack thereof) in all possible combinations—including desire for merms, herms, ferms, asexuals, minors, animals, balloons, what have you in the mix, what number are we at? I don’t want to draw the chart or do the math. And what about tables 4.3 and 4.4 in “Sexing the Body” comparing psychological outcomes of intersex children as (un)altered by surgery and raised as male/female/merm/herm/ferm by their parents—can each of those be sex categories? And remind me which of these things constitute “gender” instead?

It seems in the world of Fausto-Sterling no matter how much you’re “battling against the constraints of our sex/gender system,” you’re bound to be looking for some sort of order. It could be in the name of understanding the world around you or safely categorizing people so that their medical treatment can be accurate…whatever the motivation, everyone is doing it.

In short, it seems we can’t not categorize ourselves and each other. Hello, Descartes. Hello, Cartesians. We want logic, we want truth. We want to fit it all onto one page so we can save ink. We are brainwashed, and either we don’t know it or we don’t know how to change it. I wonder vaguely, pointlessly, whether aliens (the Martiany kind from space) are as scientific and Cartesian as speculation has portrayed them if they didn’t have Descartes. Though I suppose they probably had someone similar.

I imagine there are some brave studiers of gender and sexuality out there who rebuke charts and tables, instead demanding we knock down these boundaries altogether and just be. It sounds beautifully organic and post-Cartesian, but would it work?