Abstract
Disinterpellation emerges at the moment of diagnostic disclosure when a patient’s dualistic understanding of sex is intersected by the scientific fact that sex is variant and this variance is inscribed onto his/her body disturbing the subjective coherence of the patient’s identity. This discordance is described as a tear in the fabric of knowledge where two forces, social ideals and scientific facts pull in opposite directions. To mend this tear this book explores three different mechanisms: essentialism, naturalism and emergentism. This chapter critically examines the third of these, emergentism which involves changing the meaning of the term sex (social ideal) to reflect the varience of sex anatomies (scientific fact) and identifying a mechanism for applying ought while respecting autonomy. This requires three processes: firstly, to expose the deeply entrenched assumptions that make sex variance seem unnatural; secondly, to highlight biological perspectives which recognise variance and contingency to be fundamental features of all living things; and thirdly, to identify a means of differentiating desirable and undesirable variance that is not oppressive.
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Notes
- 1.
The Chinese Yin/Yang symbol is a pictorial representation of this trope, where the black and white elements of Yin and Yang are sexed dichotomies of a single unit.
- 2.
Prior to this, Plato describes humans as sowing their seed ‘like grasshoppers in the ground’ (Plato 1953, unpaged).
- 3.
Simpson’s interpretation is supported by both the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance and the New American Standard Exhaustive Concordance, both of which recognise the word tsela (Hebrew: צְלָעֹת) as occurring 41 times in the Bible but referring to ‘a rib’ only in relation to the Adam and Eve creation myth. In a vast majority of the other occurrences (31:41), the word refers to ‘a side’ or ‘sides’ and nowhere refers to ‘a rib’. Simpson also points out that though the word ‘ribs’ does occur once again in the Bible, it has been translated into English from an entirely different Hebrew word (Simpson 1996).
- 4.
Below are two examples taken from the Qur’an which describes the creation of humanity from a single source.
An-Nisaa/The Women 4:1
‘O mankind! reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, His mate, and from them twain scattered (like seeds) countless men and women;- reverence Allah, through whom ye demand your mutual (rights), and (reverence) the wombs (That bore you): for Allah ever watches over you.’ (One Ummah Network, undated-a: translated from Arabic).
Al-A’raaf/The Heights 7:189
‘It is He Who created you from a single person, and made his mate of like nature, in order that he might dwell with her (in love). When they are united, she bears a light burden and carries it about (unnoticed). When she grows heavy, they both pray to Allah their Lord, (saying): “If Thou givest us a goodly child, we vow we shall (ever) be grateful.’ (One Ummah Network, undated-b: translated from Arabic).
- 5.
The ahadith is a collection of writings from an oral tradition and attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and according to Hassan has been ‘the lens through which the Qur’an has been seen since the early centuries of Islam’ (Hassan 2009, unpaged).
- 6.
While Rousseau’s use of sex complementation to justify women’s inferior social status was enormously influential there were many in his own time and shortly thereafter who opposed him. Writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1792/2004), John Stewart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill (1832/1970) and John Stewart Mill (1869/2017) argued contrary to Rousseau that women’s inferior social status was caused by social rather than biological inequality and resulted from lack of access to education, employment and politics.
- 7.
One passage cited by both Cornwall and DeFranza that is particularly interesting is credited to St. Paul; it states: ‘“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”’ (passage taken from Galatians 3:28, DeFranza 2015: 84).
- 8.
In her book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God, Megan DeFranza refers to a passage in the Bible ‘(Matt, 19:12 NRSV)’ where Jesus calls on his listeners to accept ‘“eunuchs who have been so from birth”’ (DeFranza 2015:70).
- 9.
She makes the point that if we are going to accept all variation as part of the human condition, we will not be induced to act where individuals are born with ‘variations’ brought about by environmental contaminates such as Thalidomide (Hull 2006). However, she does not provide any means of grounding the delineation between acceptable and unacceptable variation.
- 10.
It should be noted that the term ‘Neo-Lamarckianism’ was first coined in 1885 but was not clearly defined as it was used to describe several slightly different perspectives. However, with Weismann’s Mendelian interpretation of Darwinian natural selection Neo-Lamarckianism went into decline.
- 11.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 1744–1829 was a French naturalist who developed a sophisticated theory of biological inheritance. While he has been derided for his belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics, several contemporary biologists keen to emphasise the limitations of natural selection and genetics have emphasised Lamarck’s unique contribution to our understanding of inheritance (Jablonka and Lamb 2005).
- 12.
Emergent properties are properties that exist only at the point of intersection between different components or factors and therefore cannot be understood by reducing properties to their parts e.g. when we combine eggs, flour, butter, sugar and heat we get a cake, but we cannot know much about the properties of a cake (its spongy deliciousness) by studying its components. To adapt an old saying ‘cake is greater than the sum of its parts’.
- 13.
See Sect. 3.2.3 for discussions highlighting concerns relating to normative interventions and eugenics.
- 14.
These concerns were raised with regard to preimplantation genetic diagnosis PGD (see Sect. 3.2.3).
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Delimata, N. (2019). Disinterpellation and Emergentism. In: Articulating Intersex: A Crisis at the Intersection of Scientific Facts and Social Ideals. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 131. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21898-0_8
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