The Five Sexes: Scientific Categories?

For the most part I fell inline with the ethical arguments made in Fausto-Sterling’s article. When discussing (via McCullough) medical protocol for intrasex infants, she writes “The treatments mantra, in other words, should be therapy, not surgery”. I agree. She makes the case that parents should have access to the full range of information and options available  to them. I agree. People should have the right to choose their gender, sex and whom they marry. I agree. 

Since its no fun writing about how and why I agree with these points, I’ll instead nitpick  her misrepresentation of science (bearing in mind that she is a professor of biology and I’m a mere philosophy undergrad).

In this article, Fausto-Sterling writes that biology divides human beings into two sexes or, as she puts it: “a perfectly dimorphic species”. This, of course, is not the case. Does she imagine that in writing “The Five Sexes” she would bring forth newly discovered phenotypes that science was previously oblivious to? Would an intrasex person be ignored by science? No. What does she mean then?

Biology is a science. Science is a method. Methods yield results. How we then interpret the results, categorize and divide based on them, has little to do with the method itself. Just to give her the benefit of the doubt, lets assume that science was a body of knowledge complete with categories and divisions for just about everything empirical. Should there be five sexes? 

Open up any institutionalized science book and it will tell you that we have two sexes. If you dig deep enough, you will also find the varying forms of hermaphrodites, etc. It will likely have all the bases covered, albeit with the possibility of still working within the two-sex based system. In short, science is not ignoring anything. 

Open up that same science book and you’ll find that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. If you dig deep enough you will find varying genetic cases (syndromes) that yield more or less than the normal 23 pairs (ex: down syndrome and the extra 21^st chromosome). - this is something I am recently familiar with because my wife and I just had an obstetrics appointment last week- Is “science” wrong to say that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, granting that there are special cases when this is not true (and they are not ignored)?

My argument, that has admittedly taken on more than Fausto-Sterling was probably stating in the first place, is that categories based on science are practical. It is only the unfamiliar person that would read “two sexes” or “23 chromosomal pairs” to mean that there can ONLY be these and nothing else. If we wish to broaden the categories to always include all know special cases, then, in my opinion, we would need a better reason then the actual (rare) existence of these special cases. If we apply this logic elsewhere, we’d be left with a hodgepodge of scientific terminology filled with PC disclaimers and the word “unless” throughout science journals and textbooks. It just isn’t practical.