Hereby, Stoller’s postulated psychical protofemininity enables the celebration of masculinity. His theory of core gender identity is unthinkable without the construction of femininity as ‘other.’ Additionally, the construction of a third gender identity is unthinkable without the construction of a system of two against a system of three. The norm of binary sexual difference is naturalized through the inclusion of a third that does not interrupt the two, yet affirms them as the norm. The naming of intersexuality as an “extraordinary phenomenon” or a “natural experiment” (Stoller, 1964: 220) functions as an irritation and produces an affirmative argument concerning sexual dimorphism (Butler, 1993; Klöppel, 2002). The reference to the ‘human race’ hereby features as a powerful rhetorical instrument. The abject of the hermaphroditic body, through its positioning as the ‘other,’ establishes and reaffirms what is human and what is not. The concept of the abject can also be used to describe groups of people who are abjected by society. These groups of people are not objects but they are not subjects either. People on the margins of society are abjected because they do not conform to certain norms, such as hegemonic heterosexuality, masculinity, whiteness, ability, or middle-class attitude. Transgender theorist Riki Wilchins explains that the margins of society “are margins because that’s where the discourse begins to fray, where whatever paradigm we’re in starts to lose its explanatory power and all those inconvenient exception begin to cause problems” (2004: 71). Wilchins, furthermore, explicates that at these margins “science no longer asks but tells. Nature no longer speaks the truth, but is spoken to” (79).
-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 98-99.
