#third gendering

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).

In his 1968 book on Sex and Gender, Stoller published a chapter on “The hermaphroditic Identity of Hermaphrodites.” In line with his continuing habit to create new categories and to naturalize identity, he invents a new gender with a different core gender identity. He reports from his clinical data that there are people who “do not feel themselves to be members of either one of only two possible sexes.” [...] Stoller cannot resist, even though having cautioned against the concept of gender identity in the introduction of the same volume Sex and Gender, to install a separate core gender identity for the hermaphroditic person. He states that “such a person, then, belongs to an entity that has not previously been distinguished from other identity problems.” Stoller will now do this and create a “third gender” category for the hermaphroditic person. He proposes a “resulting character structure” for the intersexualized person and “special ways” of managing his_her life, which, as Stoller argues, are “in our society at least, (...) evidence of a different core gender identity, and therefore of a different life perspective.” This third core gender identity Stoller postulates is portrayed as fundamentally different from the male and female core gender identity: it is a hermaphroditic core gender identity. However, the postulation of a different life-perspective for the person with a hermaphroditic core gender identity does not result in the possibility of living this different life perspective with a different body. Quite the contrary, Stoller suggests, that s_he “can wait with relative equanimity for the day when he [sic!] will be fixed so that he can belong; or he does not wait, but bows to his fate of not really belonging to the human race” (34, 5). Therefore, according to Stoller, the hermaphrodite does not belong to the human race. He states that the only option for a hermaphroditic person to belong to the human race is to be ‘fixed.’ The human race as a powerful narrative is called upon to delimit what a hermaphrodite is, or rather what s_he is not. This discursive production of humanness as the expression of binary sex(ual) difference is a condensation of norms that are repeatedly articulated. The person who is neither male nor female—or both—which interestingly does not feature here as an option, is not considered to be a part of humanity.

In Stoller’s theories, this mechanism becomes clear; the norm is reinstalled by reference to the ‘natural abnormality’ of the hermaphrodite. The relation between the natural and the normal is in itself contradicting. In short, the ‘normal body’ is diametrically opposed to the ‘natural body,’ which is paradoxical in that Western discourses are organized as conceiving of the normal and the natural as one and the same. Thus, ‘other’ bodies and identities become invisible through the techniques of normalizing bodies which are at the same time made to appear natural (see for example Holliday & Hassard, 2001). The intersexualized body with the accompanying hermaphroditic core gender identity is one of them. If a male body produces masculinity and a female body produces femininity then a problem arises if a hermaphroditic body is acknowledged. Because the two other core gender identities are said to be produced by the body and are referred back to the body, then a hermaphroditic body disrupts this logic. Subsequently, the hermaphroditic body has to produce a hermaphroditic core gender identity in order to not threaten but reaffirm the naturalization of core gender identity as dimorphic. The postulation of a hermaphroditic gender identity for a hermaphroditic body does not put the binary framework into question; it reaffirms it.