No Sex for You!

Ritchie Calvin
7 min readJan 21, 2025

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Photo by Nastia Petruk on Unsplash

Western society is deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes. . . . But if the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party sexual system, they are in defiance of nature.
(Anne Fausto-Sterling)

In our house, we’re big fans of nature shows such a Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life and others. If you take anything away from those programs, it is the idea that nature is both wondrous and strange. You will encounter all sorts of creatures, all sorts of conditions, and all sorts of behaviors. These shows give life to the cliché that you couldn’t make it up. The world in which we live is just too amazing, too varied, and too abundant for us to imagine.

And, yet, we have a very long history of trying to take it all in, and of trying to make sense of it. One way to make sense of the vastness of nature is to categorize it. We look for similarities — or what we take to be similarities. We look for patterns — or for what we take to be patterns. But, remember, these categories do not exist in nature. We are imposing them upon nature. And whenever we do so, we do nature a great injustice.

Maybe it is only human nature to categorize. I cannot say. Even so, we do it a lot. However, we must remember that the categories are an imposition and that we can always revise categories when we discover new information. And that is something we do, as well.

Our understanding of the world bears little resemblance to that of ancient Greeks or the Dark Ages. It bears little resemblance to our understanding in the 1950s. We have revised many categories since then. For example, we no longer believe that the human body is comprised of earth, air, fire and water (Empedocles). We no longer believe that the human body is comprised of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (Alcmaeon). We no longer believe that an imbalance of these four elements is the cause of disease. We’ve replaced that with germ theory. We no longer believe that a fetus is a tiny, perfectly formed human (homonculus). We now understand the process of DNA and genetics. And so on. Given the info they had at the time, and given their understanding of the world, this was how they categorized the world. Information changes, and so do our categorizations.

In the Western world, though, we have a tendency toward binary thinking and categorization (see an earlier essay here). In childhood, we learn word pairs and children are required to recite them. Black — white; short — tall; rich — poor. And, yet, we know as adults that an awful lot exists in between either of those poles. One is not simply short or tall. One is almost always somewhere in between. However, making things into binaries leaves out a LOT. Consider the graphic below.

gradation from white to black.

I have used this graphic in my Introduction classes for years. If we reduce the world to binaries, then the point one one thousandth of an inch to the left of the center line is white, and the point one one thousandth of an inch to the left of the line is black. That’s absurd. Those two points are far more alike than they are different. In fact, given the limits of our eyesight, we probably couldn’t tell them apart. And, yet, we would have to call one white and one black. And it is, in Fausto-Sterling’s words, in defiance of nature.

And, yet, we are encouraged to think in this simplistic way. Something is right or wrong. Something is a plant or an animal. Someone is female or male.

In nature, all of those things are vast. They are not simple binaries, and to make them into a binary is just as absurd as making black-white into a binary.

Well, you might say that biological sex is not the same as colors.

Well, first off, look at how we imposed categories onto color. (This is same for any and all colors. Just play around with color palettes on any app on your computer.) In nature, we can find thousands — if not millions — of gradations in between white and black. And, yet, we did not make that many distinctions. Those differences exist in nature. We just did not codify them. Consider the graphic above. Print it out. Take a boxcutter. Cut it into a thousand slivers. Everyone will be different. It may be hard for US to see, but that does not mean that the distinction is not there. Yet, those differences exist in nature.

Now, what about sex? In the plant world, for example, papayas come in three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite. Cultivators of papayas generally cull the male plants because female and hermaphrodite plants can produce fruit. As another example, avocados change sex every day. Sort of. Avocado trees have flowers with male parts and female parts. They open at different times in the day. The flower can open as male in the morning and as female in the afternoon. So, the same flower sometimes pollinate and can sometimes be pollinated.

In the human world, we hear over and over that only two sexes exist. Indeed, in his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that only two sexes exist! How absurd. It’s laughable. He might as well sign an executive order declaring only one color of green. Or that there is only one kind of tree. (Maybe he can get those papayas and avocados in line!) That, too, would be in defiance of nature.

But beyond the absurdity, it’s dangerous. It erases and delegitimizes thousands and thousands of people. It threatens their safety, their medical care, and their existence.

In her essay “The Five Sexes” (quoted above), medical research Anne Fausto-Sterling proclaims that more than two sexes exist biologically. She says we should acknowledge 5, though she also clearly says that the number is much higher, but that 5 would be a good start to break the binary. And, prior to Trump we were making progress in that area. Many countries and many states were beginning to acknowledge more than two sexes on birth certificates and government documents. That’s all threatened now.

Fausto-Sterling is hardly novel or alone. Many cultures around the world have acknowledged more than 2 sexes. Ancient Greeks have a tale about how hermaphrodites came into existence. If they didn’t exist; if the Greeks didn’t know they existed, then they would not have created an original story for hermaphrodites.

In another culture, they acknowledge that someone born female can change into someone male at puberty. They recognize the natural phenomenon. They have a word for it. They have no trouble understanding that some members of their society change sex at puberty.

Fausto-Sterling mentions some of the reasons and ways in which someone is not biologically female or male. For example, the levels of hormones during gestation can produce the conditions in which the individual has fully (or partially) developed male and female gonads. Some might argue that those conditions are rare, or that they are the result of an error. Far from it. They exist in nature — without any human intervention. The levels of hormones vary in every single individual. Every single person gestating a fetus will have different levels of hormones. That is the abundance of nature. And the result is some who does not simply fit into the “female” and “male” categories that we have imposed onto nature. But make no mistake, that individual is 100% a product of the natural process.

What is unnatural is the response to then force that person to fit into the binary. Fausto-Sterling argues against “sex corrective surgery.” (Both the procedure and the term are controversial.) That practice is an example of bodily harm done to someone in the name of conforming and compelling binary sex.

Donald Trump can issue his decree — but it will make no difference on the abundance of nature. The biology of human bodies will continue to be varied and multiple. He cannot compel nature to conform to his narrow view of the world.

However, the reality is that his decree WILL make a difference in the lives of thousands of individuals. It will cause harm; it will endanger them. They will be endangered in medical settings. They will be endangered by unenlightened people who will take Trump’s decree as license to enforce binary sex. For that reason, we must take in the new information we have and begin to categorize the world differently.

It’s the natural thing to do.

Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Queering SF: Readings (Aqueduct), Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction (Palgrave McMillan) and edited a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls (McFarland). His most recent book is Queering SF Comics: Readings (2024, Aqueduct Press).

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