ABSTRACT
Post-structuralist and constructivist feminists, most prominently authors like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling, have controversially claimed that biological sex – like gender norms and roles – is socially/culturally constructed, or ‘assigned at birth’. Such claims have commonly been rooted both in claims about the prevalence of intersex conditions within human populations and the long-standing practice of ‘rectifying’ ambiguous sex characteristics. In this chapter Carrie Hull examines evidence from biology, genetics and other scientific fields to make a contrasting argument; specifically, she claims that, while intersexuality is certainly real, the evidence for widespread sex ambiguity is not nearly as compelling as some feminist authors have made it out to be. Furthermore, Hull problematises the nominalist and relativist philosophical orientation that has caused authors such as Butler and Fausto-Sterling to be too deeply vested in uncovering relatively high rates of sexual nondimorphism.
