Teaching and Learning Guide for: Building Boxes and Policing Boundaries: (De)Constructing Intersexuality, Transgender and Bisexuality

The process of social differentiation, or the process of creating boxes in which we can place other people and in which we can place ourselves, is key to the existence and persistence of social inequality. The focus of this article is on the construction and maintenance of boxes and boundaries with respect to sex, gender and sexuality. We take the existence of these boxes and boundaries for granted, organizing our lives around them in a variety of ways. Exceptions to them call our categorizations and the decisions we make based upon them into question. Particularly interesting in this context are intersexuality, transgender and bisexuality. Intersexuality, transgender and bisexuality have in common the fact that they challenge our easy reliance on categories and the boundaries between those categories. Our responses to, treatment of and understanding of these exceptions provides striking insights into our system of boxes and boundaries and, correspondingly, to sex-, genderand sexuality-based inequalities. The process of social differentiation, or the process of creating boxes in which we can place other people and in which we can place ourselves, is key to the existence and persistence of social inequality. Once we (as a society) have constructed these boxes, we also have constructed a vested interest in preserving them. Without a process of making distinctions among people, or creating ways to tell different ‘types’ of people apart, there would be no basis for treating people differently. And while differential treatment is not necessarily unequal, social inequality does boil down to treating people differently. My focus in this article is on the construction and maintenance of boxes and boundaries with respect to sex, gender and sexuality. In our society, these boxes and their corresponding boundaries rest on a variety of assumptions. First, we assume that there are two and only two sexes, genders, and sexualities. Everyone is either male or female, masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual. No one can be neither (these categories are universally inclusive); no one can be both (they are also 520 (De)Constructing Intersexuality, Transgender and Bisexuality © 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/2 (2008): 519–536, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00099.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd mutually exclusive). Such an assumption about gender, for example, belies the reality of substantial variation in how individuals actually ‘do’ gender, yet we continue to believe that there are just two mutually exclusive gender categories into which every person can easily be placed. Second, we assume that sex and gender are congruent. People who belong to a sex category (male or female) are assumed also to belong to a gender category that corresponds to that sex (male people are assumed to be masculine, female people to be feminine). In fact, because, most of the time, we cannot see what sex category a person belongs to (since they are wearing clothes), we not only assume sex and gender are congruent but we rely on that correspondence to decide how to interact with people. We assume that most people, most of the time, are performing a gender that corresponds with their sex. If they appear to be feminine and act in feminine ways, then we assume that they are females and treat them as such. If they act in masculine ways and appear to be masculine, we assume that they are males and treat them as such. In the event that their appearance and behavior does not clearly place them in one box or the other, we are not sure how to interact with them (Lucal 1999). To the extent that people believe men and women, males and females, should be treated differently, such assumptions open the door to sex and gender inequality. Finally, we assume that there is a relationship between gender and sexuality. How do we know someone is heterosexual or homosexual? Our categorization scheme tells us that we will know one or the other when we ‘see’ them. We learn that heterosexuals can be identified by their sex-gender congruence. That is, heterosexual men are assumed to be masculine males while feminine females are assumed to be heterosexual women. Homosexual men, on the other hand, are assumed to be feminine males and masculine females are assumed to be homosexual women. Sexual deviance is assumed to be signaled by gender deviance, just as sexual conformity is assumed to be evidenced by gender conformity. Of course, feminine men and masculine women are not necessarily homosexual and masculine men and feminine women are not necessarily heterosexual. But because we believe sex-gender congruity and heterosexuality are normal and preferable compared to sex-gender incongruity and homosexuality, these assumptions open the door to homophobia (the belief that same-sex desires and behaviors are wrong and/or unnatural) and heterosexism (the privileging of people who are or appear to be heterosexual over those who are not). With these assumptions in mind, we can start to think about how our boxes and boundaries operate in everyday life – as well as the social processes that serve to keep the boxes and boundaries in place. We take the existence of these boxes and boundaries for granted, organizing our lives around their existence and persistence in striking ways. We build our identities around them (or question ourselves or others when identities do not correspond to them); we organize our interactions with other people around them