Sex and Gender

The Development of Masculinity and Femininity

Robert J. Stoller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429918919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, the author describes patients with marked abberrations in their masculinity and feminity--primarily transsexuals, transvestites and patients with marked biological abnormalities of their sex - in order to find clues to gender development in more normal people.

Part I

Patients with Biological Abnormalities

Chapter 1

Biological Substrates of Sexual Behavior

While the practice of sex has a venerable past, a more systematic understanding of its biology is still beyond us. Recently, however, and with increasing momentum, the study of biological aspects of this phenomenon is permitting us to see at least the dim outlines of the answers we shall be finding in the next years. This will permit us to take over a subject formerly the prerogative of philosophers, whose freedom from the responsibility of proof permitted them the assurance of certainty.

It is obvious that so many disciplines of biological research are now involved in studying problems of sex (for example, genetics, endocrinology, embryology, comparative anatomy, physiology) that in a short chapter one can only indicate some of the major areas in which significant investigations are taking place, and attempt to suggest the richness and promise of the field.

Forsaking the luxury of expressing all my confusions as to fundamentals, I should like to mention one: I do not know how to define the term “sexual behavior” or the related and even more frequently used term “sexuality.” One of the great contributors to (though undoubtedly one of the complicators of) the subject was Sigmund Freud, who in 1905 pointed out that significant parts of human behavior that seemed to common sense to be quite unrelated to sexual behavior, are in fact found, when one traces the thread out adequately, to derive from clearly sexual origins.¹ It was Freud’s underlining the point that there is far more to sex than the coming together of a male genital and a female genital that put us in our present predicament of not being sure what should be termed sexuality or sexual behavior. This discussion, however, will restrict the meaning of these terms to that whose function is directly a prototype of, leads to, or accompanies either procreative behavior or that which is clearly a substitute for pro-creative behavior.

We know that reproduction is the fundamental purpose behind sexual behavior.^* In the most primitive living creatures, reproduction occurs simply by binary fission, with the genetic makeup of the individual organism being identically reproduced. However, when one gets beyond the simplest organisms one finds techniques for combining genetic material in new combinations. Let us skip across the millennia of evolution and pause a moment with amphibia. At this level of evolution, we have long since passed the state of development in which sexual intercourse between males and females has first been introduced for reproduction. These creatures have both external and internal genital organs. The amphibian larva has an indifferent gonad made up of two parts: a medulla, which, if it develops, can only become a testis, and a cortex, which, if it develops, can only become an ovary. In the normal creature, gonadal differentiation is controlled by the sex chromosomes, which cause the opposite-sex cells in the indifferent gonad to melt away. Yet, though advanced and differentiated, the gonads of many amphibia are easily reversible: regardless of the genetic makeup (and on this level of development sex chromosomes are determining the sex of the creature), the genotypic female can be converted to a phenotypic male by suppressing development of the gonadal cortex and promoting medullary growth. If the experiment is carried out in embryological life, the destined female will become an anatomically normal male, having a completely male, sperm-producing testis, despite the fact that had the individual not been tampered with, it would have developed into a completely normal female. This can be accomplished by even such unrelated experimental modes as temperature extremes, castration, or gonadal grafts.³

* Though less and less clearly so the higher the organism, until in humans we find that sexual behavior may also have psychological purposes very distinct from procreation.²

Such experiments are increasingly difficult to produce as one gets higher in the evolutionary scale, but there may be certain degrees of gonad reversibility possible in humans (difficult not only for the obvious reason that we must not do such experiments but also because we have no evidence from “natural experiments” that such reversibility occurs, unless the “true” hermaphrodite is such a case).

Let us stay with mammals, upon which and whom within the last five or six years there has occurred an explosion of fine research related to neurohumoral mechanisms influencing sexual behavior. Two areas especially have been investigated. The first has been the effect of prenatal hormones on postnatal sexual behavior. What one does, in essence, is to give male or female hormones in varying doses to pregnant animals or to newborns.⁴ If one does this, for example, to female offspring, not only do they become (anatomically) pseudohermaphroditic if one gives male hormones but also there are apparently central nervous system changes as well: These females shift both their normal childhood sexual behavior and their adult sexual behavior in the direction of markedly increased male behavior. Especially interesting has been the discovery of critical periods: If these sex hormones are given only during very limited periods in fetal development, the reversals in childhood and adult sexual behavior occur, but if one gives the hormones before or after the critical period, then the same aberrant behavior will not develop.⁵

The second area of investigation has been the use of implants of hormones directly into those parts of the animals’ hypothalamus that directly affect sexual behavior. Sexual behavior and sexual drive can be influenced in direct relationship either to the cells that have the hormone implant in their immediate neighborhood or to the quantity of the implant.⁶ From these studies emerges the very provocative thesis that in each animal there are both male and female CNS subsystems for the regulation of sexual behavior.^* According to Young and co-workers,⁷ in the normal animal genetic control leads to fetal anatomical-biochemical development causing one system to become dominant, so that, in a male animal, for example, that system which controls male behavior becomes dominant while the second system with its potential for female behavior plays a far lesser role. When the normal development of the animal is distorted by the experimental use of sex hormones, the normally secondary system becomes increasingly predominant. As yet there is no histological evidence that such subsystems exist, but the experiments to date seem to demand such an explanation. Certainly it has been described for many years, especially by Ford and Beach,¹⁰ that the higher mammals show degrees of both masculine and feminine behavior in any individual, and there is much evidence that there is no such thing as an exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine mammal.

* This may blunt the effects of Rado’s attack⁸ on Freud’s belief in a biological bisexuality as one root of psychological bisexuality.⁹

It will be helpful in our future discussions if we have available to us a very short review of embryological developments of the sexual apparatus in the male and female. It is interesting to note—and to note it can open up some rich fields for speculation¹¹—that in most mammals, but especially in humans, the resting baseline of the sexual tissues is female. That is to say, if something else is not added to the tissue, whether the embryo be genetically male or genetically female, no masculinization will occur. Masculinization, when it does occur results in a penis of normal size, with the urethra running through it and a urethral meatus opening at its end, with fusion of the scrotal skin, and with testes within the scrotal sac. When this masculinization does not occur one has a bifid scrotum, which is in fact external lips, a clitoris with the urethra opening below it and no external gonads. In those individuals who instead of having the normal two sex chromosomes (XX or XY), have only one (XO), the external genitalia are female, and although the internal reproductive system does not finish its development, there is a tendency for the tissues to move in the direction of developing into female organs. It seems that by the third month in the male fetus’ existence a masculinizing substance begins to be secreted in a few sexual cells, this process being initiated in some unknown way under the control of the Y sex chromosome. Once this masculinizing substance begins to be produced even in minute amounts, it influences more cells in that area to become masculinized so that they produce more of this substance so that more cells get masculinized so that more of the substance gets produced and so on, thus starting the process of the masculinizing of these and mort distant tissues until the final normal male sexual anatomy results that is found at birth.

Now to shift to a whole different discipline, ethology, a special aspect of the study of animal learning behavior and a radically different methodology of research. From this treasure house of data, I shall take only one popular example. Lorenz, as is well known, has made himself available to greylag geese at certain critical times in their infancy, times when in the birds’ natural state the mother would be with them. Under these unusual conditions, in infancy the birds attach themselves to Lorenz; then throughout their growing period they follow and respond to him as if he were their mother. On reaching sexual maturity, their sexual drives are directed exclusively toward him and other humans and not toward their own species.¹² Many species, it is postulated, are genetically endowed so that certain systems of the brain will respond to certain stimuli in the outside world and not to others, and so that the animal is receptive to being permanently influenced by these stimuli only (or at least especially) at certain circumscribed periods in its development—the critical periods. This process, called imprinting, is found in different degrees in many species of birds and mammals and is now being investigated biochemically and neurophysiologically.¹³ In grossest form, we might say that we humans are able to respond sexually to humans, rather than to other animals or inanimate objects, in part because of certain not yet discovered central nervous system “states of readiness” that are produced by our having been imprinted by human mothers rather than by, say, monkeys or lizards.

Work has been under way recently to determine to what extent these imprinting mechanisms play a part in human infants, but the impossibilities of controlled experiments and the difficulties of interpreting mother-newborn interrelationships make this still a wide open field. A number of workers feel that some sort of imprinting does take place in human infants.¹⁴ Of interest to us now is the fact that at this level of theorizing one comes upon the impossibility of separating out the biological from the psychological; at this point, one recognizes that the two words biological and psychological only represent two conceptual schemes for looking at the identical data.^*

* I leave out the important writings of learning theorists, and especially the fascinating work of Harlow, because these studies are not as immediately “biological” as those reviewed above.

We can summarize our knowledge of sexual behavior in animals by saying that, as with other behavior, the lower in the evolutionary scale, the more bound the animal is by fixed responses either to the suitable external stimuli or to the internal nervous and chemical systems. The more complex the animal, the more variability in response is provided by these systems, until imperceptibly one enters a sphere in which, first, learned (postnatal) behavior becomes prominent and, finally, in which conscious choice plays a part. The higher the animal, the more difficult it is to trace the course of a piece of behavior from its biological origins to its ultimate action.

We must be careful: Extrapolation from lower animals to humans is exhilarating but dangerous. The mechanisms involved are often too complex to permit this. Nonetheless, we must not be too insensitive to comparative physiology. It can serve us well if we discipline ourselves to separate demonstrable data from our speculations; we must learn to accept the data and to enjoy the speculations.

This brings us to humans. And here great problems confront us. To what extent do biological forces play a part in a piece of sexual behavior? How much of an individual’s sexual behavior and preferences is thrust upon him by predetermined biological forces, to what extent are these biological forces influenced by learning experiences, and to what extent are pieces of behavior primarily psychological (that is, culturally determined)? These questions cannot be answered yet, but we have clues, a few of which I shall try to indicate.

It will help our discussion of these problems to distinguish two different orders of data: sex and gender.

As mentioned earlier, I prefer to restrict the term sex to a biological connotation. Thus, with few exceptions, there are two sexes, male and female. To determine sex, one must assay the following physical conditions: chromosomes, external genitalia, internal genitalia (e.g., uterus, prostate), gonads, hormonal states, and secondary sex characteristics.¹⁵ (It seems likely that in the future another criterion will be added: brain systems.) One’s sex, then, is determined by an algebraic sum of all these qualities, and, as is obvious, most people fall under one of two separate bell curves, the one of which is called “male,” the other “female.” It is well known that there is a certain amount of overlapping in all humans, and in some unusual cases the overlapping is considerable, as in certain hermaphrodites. There are also, genetically speaking, other sexes; thus, in addition to the XX female and the XY male, there are individuals (XO, XXY, XXXY, etc.) who have a mixing of some of their biological attributes of sex. Such people are often anatomically intersexed as well.^*

* While the term intersexed has occasionally been used in the past to refer to people with gender problems without genetic or anatomical defects, everyone today, I believe, uses it to mean only those with pronounced biological defects.

Gender is a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the proper terms for sex are “male” and “female,” the corresponding terms for gender are “masculine” and “feminine”; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex. Gender is the amount of masculinity or femininity found in a person, and, obviously, while there are mixtures of both in many humans, the normal male has a preponderance of masculinity and the normal female a preponderance of femininity. Gender identity starts with the knowledge and awareness, whether conscious or unconscious, that one belongs to one sex and not the other, though as one develops, gender identity becomes much more complicated, so that, for example, one may sense himself as not only a male but a masculine man or an effeminate man or even a man who fantasies being a woman. Gender role is the overt behavior one displays in society, the role which he plays, especially with other people, to establish his position with them insofar as his and their evaluation of his gender is concerned. While gender, gender identity, and gender role are almost synonymous in the usual person, in certain abnormal cases they are at variance. One problem that arises to complicate our work is that gender behavior, which is for the greatest part learned from birth on, plays an essential part in sexual behavior, which is markedly biological, and at times it is very difficult to separate aspects of gender and sex from a particular piece of...