ABSTRACT
Skepticism about the sharply and exhaustively binary character of biological sex sets the stage for understanding just how thoroughly the ideas of sex and gender are intertwined with the idea of race. This chapter considers claims that although biological sex is often assumed to be sharply binary, biologists have never succeeded in establishing this. Indeed, some critics have argued that an unquestioned attachment to a particular understanding of gender – the psychosocial character of men and women as they exist in the social world – has biased biologists’ theories about sex difference. Furthermore, since, as is widely acknowledged, conceptions of gender are imbricated with race, this racial dimension of conceptions of gender is likely also to shape conceptions of biological sex. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Zune Magubane, this chapter explores these matters through an analysis of reactions to the controversy concerning the South African Olympian Caster Semenya, whose classification as female was called into doubt. The chapter ends with an examination and defense of the work of Thomas Laqueur, who argues that the two-sex model of sex arose only with modern biology, which, on his view, could not have confirmed the two-sex model’s truth even in theory.
