When the herm turns
Andrew Brown
Girls and Boys Sara Stein (Chatto £9.95, £4.95)
Sex as a route to self-knowledge was one of the sillier ideas of the Sixties; the generation that was tempted by it disco- vered at length that sex could be a route to pregnancy; this book, about their children, is about self-knowledge as a route to sex, which is rather more fun, and more impor- tant if we want grandchildren.
I picked it up hoping for a good giggle, as one would any book published by Chatto with a chapter called 'Ten Million Years of Sexism', and where the blurb explains that 'the current generation [of parents] is the first to subscribe fully to the notion of sexual equality. Yet despite all the good intentions, gender differences insist on making themselves obvious right from birth; for committed parents, this can be a baffling problem.' The assumption that parents who are not baffled by gender differences are not taking their job serious- ly led one to expect a really splendid work of folly, replete with 'herms' — a wimminist pronoun that is meant to mean 'he,she,him or her'.
These expectations were dashed. Mrs Stein is an American, so her book is about a third longer than it need be; but what she has to say about the development of gender differences in children is extremely interesting, and in its detail quite new. The book is lucidly and grammatically written; and the position against which she is arguing is one so clearly at odds with common sense and the facts of experience that it is easy to believe that it is widely held. She herself puts it like this: 'We have only to know that a person has a penis to think of him as male and that a person has a vagina to think of her as female.'
When the theory is put thus baldly, it is. easily tested on hermaphrodites. Mrs Stein recounts the experience of two sorts of hermaphrodite: the first are biologically girls, born with masculinised external sex organs but female internal organs when their mothers were given hormones in pregnancy to prevent miscarriages; the second are biologically boys whose bodies, because of a naturally occurring foetal defect are unable to respond to the male hormone, androgen. Their external sex organs are feminine, but the development of internal female plumbing is blocked by another male sex hormone, so that they can never become pregnant, though a small operation and a hormone treatment at puberty can turn them into sterile women.
Both groups were brought up as girls; only the first group were able to have
children. Surgery on the first group was, where necessary, performed shortly after birth, and so presumably was as little traumatic as an operation for a hare lip is; and these girls were then biologically com- plete and potentially fertile, with a perfect- ly normal, if rather late development, and no higher incidence of homosexuality as adults than average. But only half of them claimed to be completely happy as girls, and a fifth of them would rather have been born boys.
The second group were also brought up as girls, and were in their tastes and interests as children much more girlish than the first. Though their operations were performed at puberty, and thus, one would have thought, thoroughly traumatic, these girls were far more satisfied with their lot. 90 per cent of them claimed to be wholly satisfied as females.
These stories are used by Mrs Stein to establish the existence of a foetal predis- position towards masculine or feminine behaviour. This predisposition is primarily caused by the hormones to which the foetus is exposed rather than by its chromosomes. Mrs Stein sees sex roles as something imposed by the children them- selves on their surroundings; an inversion, of the wimminist (not necessarily feminist) view that proves extremely fertile. Just as children impose their needs for sociability and for language on their parents, so, argues Mrs Stein, do they impose a need to regularise and make manageable sex dif- ferences by turning them into roles.
She points out that the child's discovery of its own sex coincides roughly with the discovery that mother is a separate entity; and that the way this appalling shock can best be handled is dependent on whether the child has prospects of growing up to be like mother, without the hope of clear distinction that comes with a penis, or whether the child must resign himself to being forever different and abandoning the hope of unity.
There is no room to do justice to the complexity and subtlety of her account of this process, different for girls and boys; and different again when it fails. But the one thing that emerges clearly is that sex roles — on the traditional lines of 'slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails' versus 'sugar and spice and all things nice' — are thor- oughly necessary and useful devices, im- posed by the children themselves upon their parents. It does not matter much what form these roles take: they are matters of style, not of the division of household chores.
Few Spectator readers are likely to be- have in some of the hair-raisingly 'non- sexist' ways mentioned in passing by Mrs
Stein; and anyone who does behave in such ways is unlikely to be moved by reasoned argument anyway. But the book can he warmly recommended to anyone who wants to bring up red-blooded heterosex- ual sons who will willingly do the washing up, and who feels that this desire needs some sort of intellectual justification.
Previous page
