The 'problem' - 'solution' - problem cycle.
Resisting the containment and control of intersex bodies.
Recently, I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to join in (online) with a local Gender Studies class and have had my mind blown in a few different directions. One of these directions concerns sex as a construct, something I’d never previously understood, (which is not to say I’d been against it, I just didn’t get it). This week in class, however, we learnt about intersexuality and read a late 90’s U.S.-based text on Cheryl Chase’s experience of being intersex, ‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude. Mapping the Emergency of Intersex Political Activism.’ I was appalled by the violence of what Chase experienced, and the lack of consent and autonomy she was allowed by the medical establishment over her own body, and also surprised to learn of how common intersexuality is; that “about one in two thousand [births] is different enough to render problematic the question “Is it a boy or a girl?”[1] A more recent statistic actually quotes the number of intersex people globally as considerably higher: “The UN says as many as 1.7% of the world have intersex traits - that's the same as the number of people with red hair.” There are cultures around the world where intersex and transgender people are (or have been prior to colonialism) treated with dignity and even reverence, including in India and amongst Indigenous North Americans. Yet here in the West the medical establishment is empowered by a binary view of sex and gender to violently ‘correct’ intersex bodies.
Whilst there have been some improvements in the decades since Chase’s text was written, surgery on intersex infants remains the norm, and Chase continues to campaign against medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants and children. A 2017 Human Rights Watch report on surgeries in the U.S. entitled I Want To Be Like Nature Made Me, recognises that, “a growing number of doctors are opposed to doing unnecessary early surgery under such conditions” but advocates that legislation should be passed to completely “ban all surgical procedures that seek to alter the gonads or genitals of children with atypical sex characteristics too young to participate in the decision, when those procedures both carry a meaningful risk of harm and can be safely deferred” and for access to health care as well as social and psychological support. In the UK, a Times Article from just a few weeks ago indicates that there are actually already draft proposals by the NHS to stop genital or gonadal surgery on children “until children could consent for themselves.” There seem to be promising steps being taken, and intersectional feminists should undoubtedly be supporting those steps.
That surgery is performed on intersex infants demonstrates how violently Western culture is committed to upholding the sex, as well as gender, binary that intersectional feminism is committed to dismantling. It represents the most violent extreme of our society’s desire to categorise people as either male or female, and is described by Chase as a form of genital mutilation - IGM: Intersex Genital Mutilation - that she considers akin to FGM: Female Genital Mutilation. Chase has been consistently vocal in pointing out the colonial mentalities behind why mainstream feminism protests FGM but not IGM, including the way in which FGM is viewed as a foreign and backward cultural practice from elsewhere, whilst IGM is not even recognised as a cultural practice. In the same way that work against FGM must be lead by those who are at risk or who have been harmed by this practice, surely we need to be listening to intersex people on the issue of IGM, and supporting their efforts to ban it.
A theoretical crux of this issue is that being born intersex is not in itself a medical or physical problem. It is a social ‘problem’ in a society that cannot think itself beyond a binary view of sex and gender. And yet intersex infants are commonly “corrected” / “fixed” / “solved” through a medical procedure. The Human Rights Watch I Want To Be Like Nature Made Me report summarises that, “the paradigm remains one of unreasonable haste to embrace a surgical “solution” to a social problem, without waiting until the wishes of the patient can be the deciding factor.”
A key point that came up in our Gender Studies class, was that this speaks a lot to our (Western) relationship to nature or idea of what is natural, and to the perception of scientific practices as neutral or objective, when in the case of intersex surgery or IGM we can very clearly see science/ medicine physically - violently - constructing the values of our society. There is a history of the flaws in “the much-celebrated objectivity of science” that Rosi Braidotti outlines in Post Humanism: Life beyond the self. “The uses and abuses of scientific experimentation under Fascism and in the colonial era prove that science is not immunized against nationalist, racist and hegemonic discourses and practices. Any claim to scientific purity, objectivity and autonomy needs therefore to be firmly resisted.” [2]
The idea of intersex infants being a ‘problem’ requiring a ‘solution’ and our post-Enlightenment Western ideas regarding nature resonate loudly with ideas that I encountered whilst writing around an art project I did in 2019 that involved floating large textile pieces on the River Mur(a) where it serves as the border between Austria and Slovenia.
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The speed of the river, which is what enables the piece to float, is the result of human intervention in the river: regulating its banks in such a way that increases its flow, exemplifying a desire to contain or control nature, which can be traced back to Enlightenment ideas. Cockerill, Armstrong, Richter & Okie’s make the key point regarding such human interventions in nature that, “what are defined in the twenty-first century as ‘environmental problems’ are often the consequence of perceived ‘solutions’ implemented in the previous era.” They go on to suggest that the flawed “perception of these issues is derived in part, from Enlightenment ideas segregating Homo sapiens from nature and a belief that humans can contain or control biophysical processes.”[3]
[Exerpt from my piece ‘Contain/ Control’ published by Das Magazin der Slowenninnen und Slowenen in der Steiermark:] the Enlightenment recurs as a key historical moment in which Western humans in particular, understood themselves as separate to, and able to control, dominate or master the natural world, with disastrous consequences. Naomi Klein argues that, “the roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment Western culture is founded - myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable.” [4] And similarly Anna Tsing states that, “ever since the Enlightenment, Western Philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature.”[5]
Tsing goes on to credit the “non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers” that both remembered and developed more complex ways of understanding the entanglement of humans and nature, thus indicating the clear relevance of decolonial thinking to reconceptualising this relationship, and another avenue of research that extends far beyond the scope of this article. Tsing is amongst a growing number of cross-disciplinary theorists, including Donna Haraway, that challenge the Enlightenment view, and underline the importance of humans understanding ourselves as utterly entangled in the natural world.
The speed of the river Mur, on which the instalment of CONTAIN / CONTROL relied, is thus not its natural or original speed but symptomatic of centuries of human intervention in the river, stemming at least in part, from Enlightenment ideas that saw humans as separate from, and able to dominate, the natural world. Such ideas contribute substantially to the problem-solution-problem cycle that plays out with regard to human intervention in the environment generally, and which can be applied to a reasonable extent to the history of human regulation of the river Mur. CONTAIN/ CONTROL could only be installed in the river for a couple of hours, and it was evident from the straining of the fabric and installation mechanism under the power of the water that it could not have remained their long. In this way, the brief installation of CONTAIN/ CONTROL in the fast flowing water, can be seen to symbolise how temporary human containment and control of rivers is, as well as our attempts to contain and control the natural world more broadly. [END of excerpt.]
I enjoy the mischievous way that the river keeps producing new problems in the face of human ‘solutions,’ especially in the context of the river as a border between nations, which are in themselves a means of containing and controlling people. The border river keeps moving, changing course and bursting its banks, causing all kinds of problems for the humans that try to contain and control it.
The problem-solution-problem cycle is of course hugely applicable to intersex surgery/ IGM, as the medical ‘solution’ of surgery addresses the ‘problem’ of non-conforming genitalia and gonads. The injustice here is that the resulting problems fall overwhelmingly on the intersex person on whom the ‘solution’ surgery has been performed without their consent. It needs to be down to the intersex person as to what they want to do with their body whilst our society constructs it as ‘unnatural’ or outside of the norm. It’s their body, and their choice.
Meanwhile, we need to work to create a world in which genitalia or gonads that fall outside of the male/ female construction of sex are not considered a ‘problem’ in need of a ‘solution’ and where it is safe for intersex people to “want to be like nature made me.” Part of this work involves developing an understanding of sex as a spectrum rather than a binary. And beyond this, it involves reconsidering our relationship to natural world and to what is considered natural beyond the prevailing hegemony of Western Enlightenment ideas.
(Perhaps we need to learn to live with nature and the Earth, rather than violently on it.)
[1] Cheryl Chase. Hermaphrodites with Attitude. Mapping the Emergency of Intersex Political Activism. (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998) pp.189-211
[2] Rosi Braidotti. The Posthuman. (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013) p.32
[3] Kristan Cockerill, Melanie Armstrong, Jennifer Richter and Jordan G. Okie, Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
[4] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2014) p.159
[5] Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) p. vii
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/25/i-want-be-nature-made-me/medically-unnecessary-surgeries-intersex-children-us
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surgery-on-intersex-children-may-stop-p2p8qq5dc