Gender/Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Identity are in the Body: How Did They Get There?

because as you may have noticed we've got a busy schedule. Dear Anne Fausto-Sterling, I can certainly assert that you were highly expected as we have been entertaining the idea of inviting you for more than 2 years. With my accomplices from the Bioscope, the Faculty of Medicine, the Gender Studies Institute, and the Institut Ethique Histoire et Humanité, we are in fact highly honored to welcome you in our institution and thank you so much to have accepted our invitation despite a long journey in order to share your knowledge with us this evening. In a conference entitled Gender {slash} Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Identity Are in the Body, How Did They Get There? And to our audience, the evening will run as follows. After a presentation by Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling, she will be giving a lecture of about 40 minutes and then Professor Bruno Strasser and myself will be asking her a few questions before we give you the floor. After the lecture, we will be asking you to leave the room quickly so that you can see a performance that called Gender Cubicles that was prepared and danced especially for us on the ground floor of Uni Dufour. I'd now like to give the floor to Professor Lorena Parini who is the director of the Gender Studies Institute of the University of Geneva who will be presenting her American fellow professor. Thank you very much. Welcome to this conference and I'm delighted to see so many people, both men and women in the room this evening. It's a great pleasure and a great honor for me to present Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling as a director of the Gender Studies Institute, I realize how important her work has been not only in the areas of biology and human development, but also in the field of social sciences, which is our research and teaching field because my institute is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor Emeritus of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry of Brown University. She was the founder and former director of a graduate program on science and technology in the same university. She wrote over 60 scientific articles and several books, some of which seriously challenged the binary way in which we thought and in which many people still think today about human beings belonging to the male or female gender. Her research led her to try to understand these complex objects in a more dynamic fashion by integrating social and cultural questions amongst other things and she therefore contributed significantly to rethinking the relationship that exists between nature and culture. One of the epistemological and methodological principles of gender studies is to question what may seem self-evident, to update and rethink the reasons why people think it's evident, what processes, what ideas, and what conceptions of the world of human beings, of their place in society in society are employed in this self-evident view. Natural sciences such as human and social sciences, research hypotheses, interpretations of facts and data are all profoundly part of their time and space. They're affected by political, economic, social questions that mark their time. I'd like to quote a few of Anne Fausto-Sterling's books. In 1985, she published Myths of Gender, Biological Theories About Women and Men, which was translated into German and Japanese, but not French. Just by the by, in 2000, she published Sexing the Body, Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, which was translated into French in 2013. La Découverte, Paris, and it was also translated into Spanish. In 2012, she published Sex, Gender, Biology in a Social World, which has not yet been translated. However, in the Petite Bibliothèque Payot, you can find a translation into French of an essay that she published in 1993 in a journal called The Sciences, which was translated in 2013 Her way of conceiving the dynamic relationship that exists between culture and nature led her to take an interest in intersex people who have particularly suffered from the dichotomic vision that she criticizes. By changing that perception, she can can contribute to rethinking the way the medical profession sees intersex children and more generally people who are not part of this binary vision of sexes and gender. She doesn't show two poles, but rather represents it as a continuum and in fact an exhibition had been organized by the Equality Service and many partners and it ended in January and the title of this exhibition was Continuum. The idea in the exhibition was to show through images and words that sexes and genders are a continuum, a spectrum on which you can find many ways of being a man or a woman. Her work has combined natural sciences, biology, biochemistry, social sciences, gender studies, and the relationships between medicine and patients in an emancipating view and we would like to thank her for all of this. Thank you for shaking up what seemed self-evident and thank you for having accepted to come tonight to talk to us at the University of Geneva. Thank you very much. Can um can we put up the start of mine now? Yeah. Okay. Um Hillary Clinton famously wrote a book, or at least it's famous in the United States, that says it takes a village to raise a child. Um and it kind of took a village to get me here and I wanted to thank um if let's see if I can remember everybody. Brigitte, Fabienne, Bruno, Celine, and Fernando who all in various combinations corresponded with me for well over a year to make this happen. So, I want to thank you very much um for your help in getting me here. I'm very delighted to be in Geneva and to um see a little bit of the city before we leave. With that, let me um begin to tell you my story. So, I'll start with my thesis, which is that gender sex, which I'll explain in a minute, gender identity, and sexual orientation are in the body. And my question is Come on. Oh. That didn't work. My question is All right. Come on. All right, I'm going to tell you my question. My question is how did they get there? Um Oh, I see. I was expecting it in a different place. Good. Okay. So, um so, gender sex, gender identity, all on the background of these little babies who don't appear to have any of them yet. Come on. There we go. Orientation. So, that's that's the basically the question that I'm going to address and I'll explain what I mean by various of these terms as we go through. So, first let me discuss sex, gender, and gender sex, what I mean by those terms. Sex, we normally think of as something that's bodily, that's of the body, and that has evolved through a process of natural selection. And we usually refer to the words we use in English are male, female, and sex diverse, that which is a a newer term um that covers uh the category of intersex. Um And usually the kinds of things we think of about as sex are body hair, voice, body frame, genitals, etc., etc. We can think of other examples. Gender, on the other hand, is something that we think of usually as socialized, learned, and cultural, part of a of our culture, part of particular cultures. And instead of the terms male and female, we use the concepts of masculine and feminine and gender diverse, rather than sex diverse. And here we may be talking about interactions, uh behavior, self-presentation um at the level of the individual, and at the level of our culture, we may be talking about structural aspects such as the legal system, um which has laws that govern gender um embedded within it. And usually people talk about sex versus gender. They're usually set up as a binary, as something in opposition. Um and or they may talk about nature versus culture. And that's the question I most often get asked, is it sex or is it gender, is it nature, is it culture? Um but I'm going to suggest that this is absolutely the wrong framework, not a helpful way to look at it at all. Um and instead, we need to introduce a third term. There we go. Which is gender sex. And myself and a number of other scholars, at least in the US, are starting to use this term almost exclusively, uh but I will explain it to you a little bit. So it refers to people, identities, and developed bodies, and it and encompasses both aspects of the older idea of gender and the older idea of sex. It includes gender sex diverse children and adults, and I especially am emphasizing development, so I'm really talking, you'll see I'm talking a great deal about children today. Um and it includes things such as legal identity, recognition, communities, felt identity, and a variety of other things. Now, to give you an idea of of a of what this third term might look like, first let's go back to the older thought of nature of nature versus versus culture. Um and we have, if we use a Venn diagram to look at it, uh we have on the one hand, in this drawing, the old oppositional way of looking at the world, we have sex, or we have gender, and we have a little area of overlap, um which is which is gen which I would call gender sex. But in this in this sense, uh in this way of looking at the world, we have we either emphasize sex um or nature and say that that determines behavior and identity, or we emphasize gender or culture and we say that that determines behavior and identity. So whether we emphasize gender as our explanatory method, or whether we emphasize sex, in either case, we're talking what about what is essentially a a determinist point of view. Either we're cultural determinists or we're um we're biological determinists, and there's very little um that that we explain by this overlapping term. Um so there's relatively little interaction, that is in this in this model of nature versus culture, um there's relatively little interaction or gender sex. And identity itself, which is what I'm going to be talking about quite a lot, is understood as a fixed trait. Identity is something you get as a small child and then you have it. Um it's you that's it. Um and identity usually in this discussion just seems to appear at about 3 years of age, and there's no explanation about where it comes from prior to 3 years of age. It's sort of whoop, the child's got an identity and she, he is off and running. They. Um but the kind of model that I'm developing is what I'm calling embodied culture, in which you have a great deal of overlap. Most most of what we understand about the world is in the area of overlap, and there are some little things that are sex and some small component that's gender, um but most of how we develop identity is this um this overlapping term, which I'm calling gender sex. And one important aspect of gender sex is that it's a developmental process. So um if you see a trait in someone that you identify, it's not enough to say, "Oh, they have that trait." You have to ask how that trait developed. You have to go back to a period in time before that trait existed and watch it come into existence to understand where it came from. And identity, I understand as a usually stable process, but it's not a fixed trait. It's an ongoing process that has a a certain kind of stability, so that it can remain quite stable, but it also has the potential to change. And identity develops over time. Um and that's one These so these principles, these are my major principles that I'll be talking about today. So what is identity? That's the next thing we have to ask. I think many of you in the room may think you know what identity is, and um but I'm going to ask you to question what is meant by the word what we mean by the word identity. Um because I'm arguing that it's a process and not a singular trait, then we have to ask what um what we might mean by it. So is it a trait or a thing, something that's in the brain somewhere that we could find the right the right location and neuron and that would be what identity is, or again, as I'm going to argue, is it a process or and is it a steady state? And most of the time I believe it's a steady state. So I want to start also, as we think about identity, with what the common underlying assumptions are, the ones you're used to using to think through this problem with, and then I'm going to tell you what my assumptions are, which probably are ones that you're less used to using. Uh so the common under underlying assumptions as most people think about this and as scientists try to do research on it, is that um binary gender identity is normative. So the idea is that the the normal state in standard in the standard story is either male or female, it's binary, and then there are all of these other states that we need to explain somehow. So the non-binary is what requires explanation in the standard um in the standard ap- approach, and binary itself just is natural, it doesn't need to be explained. Um identity is seen, as I said, as as static, and it's unsituated. It's unsituated with regard to other people in the world. It's unculturally unsituated. It's just, as I said, a thing that you have. Um gender identity um is determined by, and this gets back to the whether you're a biological determinist or cultural determinist, it's either determined by sex, gender, or sex, gender. Um but it's but um but it's one of those, usually one is emphasized quite a lot over the other. So my underlying assumptions are a bit different, and let me spell them out for you, because they form the again form the basis of the talk. My first is that gender sex identity is non-binary, it's a continuum. And the corollary of that is that you need that a single process explains everything. So you have a basic under underlying developmental process, which produces a continuum or a spectrum of human beings with uh with a continuum or spectrum of identities, and in this process, everybody needs to be explained. All identities, all types of human beings require explanation, not just the other. Um the And then, if we have a continuum, then well, how is it that we have all of these different categories, cis, trans, bi, binary, non-binary? Um and my answer to that is that cultural practice looks at the continuum and imposes categories at it. The biggest cultural practice that we know of, the most fundamental one, is birth certificates. So birth certificates looks at babies, and they say in most countries, or in and in the US, there are a few states that have begun to change, they say either this is a boy or it's a girl. Um so and and there may be as I say, a continuum of identities may may develop, um but we there's a cultural practice that carves that continuum up into groups. And then my third point, which I will emphasize over and over again, is that identity itself is a dynamic process. So, just to summarize in a more theoretical point of view, on the one hand if you we think about identity, it's traditionally been thought of um under what I'm calling a Cartesian theory of things or traits. And I'm offering an opposition, a process dynamic theory. And let's just compare um a fixed trait on the one hand versus a dynamic process on the other. Um, Cartesian theory of things emphasizes stasis. It talks it uses phrases like hardwired. Um, so you hear people often say um identity is hardwired in the brain. Um, whereas process dynamic theory uses uh emphasizes a process of change and speaks of um speaks of something called soft assembly. So, you have different processes maintaining a steady state. They are assembled together, but they are not hardwired together. They are softly assembled. Cartesian theory of things thinks of traits as the characteristic only of an individual, only as part of um autonomous individual who has no relationship with the rest of the world or with other individuals. Whereas a process dynamic theory, as I'm developing it, um is intersubjective. That is, identity partly in part can only be established and maintained as part of interactions with other individuals and with the world. Identity is seen under Cartesian theory of things as uh as a thing located usually people think of it as located somewhere in the brain. Whereas um a process dynamic theory thinks of it as um a felt or uh that it's felt or maintained continuously in the body through various aspects of bodily expression. And uh under this thing located somewhere in the brain, it's it's people usually believe that autonomous biological processes, things that just happen naturally, produce um fixed identities. Whereas the process dynamic theory suggests that stable interactions produce stable identities. But then lastly, what's true of both theories is that identities are felt subjectively. Um, and so the end the in each case, the theories are are designed to explain that subjective sense of self, um which is ultimately expressed. So, psychologists have studied infant development with regard to how they acquire knowledge about gender, which is different than identity, but um but uh it's important to understand that well before identity is established, even very young infants are learning to recognize gender in the world. And they do it in a in a pattern that's timed partly with regard to how their senses are developing and partly with regard to what aspects of gender they're exposed to. Uh so, um these are are months after birth. So, at 6 to 7 months, um infants can dis- tell the difference between male voices and female voices. And they can also learn to recognize male or female faces. So, they begin to discriminate gender in adults in the in the world around them. By 9 to 10 months, they can correlate male and female voices with gender-related objects. So, um so, if you show a 9- or a 10-month-old a series of pictures of um of a woman doing things that are traditional um female things to be doing, cooking, washing the dishes, but then show a picture of a woman um uh hammering a nail to with a hammer and wearing pants. And and the the babies, they can't talk yet. They can't do much yet, but they go, "Huh?" Um, you know, they do a double take. They can tell they they recognize that something doesn't belong in the world they're used to. Um, and you can do the same if you show a picture a series of drawings of men doing traditional masculine things and then you show a drawing of a male of a man putting on lipstick. You get the same dishabituation of the infant. Um, and so they're recognizing not only physiological gender in the world, um but by 9 to 10 months, before they can walk, before they can talk, they are very aware of gender roles in the world. Um they can they begin to also associate male and female voices. And as they get older, um so now we're getting up towards uh 2 years of age here. Um they begin to develop metaphoric gender associations. Um, they start around 2 years being able to label others so others as boy or girl. And it's a passive labeling and again they don't have language yet, but they can do it by pointing at a picture. And you say, "Who which of these pictures is more like mommy? Or which of these pictures is more like you?" Um, and they can begin to point at at pictures. Um, and so in this period they begin to develop um uh a receptive labeling of self. So, they begin to start to develop what I would call a proto-identity. Um, and uh they are able by just prior to 3 years, um to have a nonverbal gender identity. Cuz again, most of most children aren't really talking at this age. So, you be you see that um that gender develops, what we know about it, first through a recognition of gender in the outside world, uh in the world that surrounds the infant. Um, and then um uh slowly and gradually uh an infant and then a toddler and small child begins to um apply what they've learned about the outside world to themselves. So, I want to start next and I want to show you some videos that begin to talk to talk to you about what we mean by embodied, what I mean by embodied. And they'll they'll be a test at the end of these videos. Um, I'm going to ask you to just shout out one or two things that you see for each for each child. Um and these are from studies that I've done 15 months. There is not an established gender identity that psychologists know how to measure at 15 months. There is no language yet at 15 months. Um, but I want you to just watch a couple of minutes of this child first playing house and then of this child playing ball. And then we can talk about it for a second. And I've subtitled some of the speech in English. I'm sorry, but Hold up the Queen Elizabeth baby. Okay, now let's look at the next one. Um, and then after I'm going to ask you for what you notice about the bodies uh how these children use their bodies. Just one last thing. Okay. Um So, I want to very very briefly ask you to tell me some things that you see. First, either for the playhouse, a something that you notice about the child in that. Yes. In the the child on the left was looking all over the place. Was very aware of the surroundings and was engaged by a lot of different things, whereas the child on the right was focused exclusively on the ball and nothing else, in spite of some of the other articles that were in the playhouse. Okay, exclusive. Okay, anything else? Yes. Uh she was quite a more delicate Okay. Who? Well, this isn't working perfectly, but more delicate. She's more aware of the people around her. And more aware of Yeah. More interactive with with with the people. I mean, the videographer wasn't in the scene, but she was certainly interacting with the videographer. Yes. She's walking and he's just in the ground. That's that's true, and he isn't walking yet. They are exactly the same age, but there's a huge variability in what age a child starts to walk in. That Yeah. He explores the space much larger space. You say he was in a large covered a larger space. That's interesting. Any one more essential thing and we'll move on. Yes. All right, she goes inside the house. She goes inside the house. And close the door. Um Okay. Excuse me? He's mimicking adult like She's mimicking adult behavior. We might think of it as she's she Well, I earlier on you'll see I start to use the word narration. Um but let's Yes, mimicking. Whoop. Okay. Um Great. Now, let me move on. These videos come from a longitudinal set of videos that I have. I've started you with these two children at age 15 months. I'm going to show you the same children. Oh, I have to get this out of here. Moving back in time. Time marches backwards. From 15 months to 7.4 months. Same two children. Um And uh I've titled these My Heart Belongs to Daddy becau- this one My Heart Belongs to Daddy because in the um in the uh in an earlier segment of the video, the mother is feeding the baby and the baby is wearing a a bib to catch the food and the bib says My Heart Belongs to Daddy. And this one is called the Red Sox. The Red Sox is a is a baseball team in the area that I live in and in the area that these children were filmed in originally. And he's wearing a Red Sox uniform. He's got number 28. He's got the colors on his top and on shirt and on his pants. Um So, uh let me get rid of Daddy. Okay. Can you push it back and forth? Hey, Beep. It's my dragger. There it is. Go for a ride, miss. Come on in. Can I take him out? HEY. CAN YOU MAKE HIM BOUNCE? SIT. YAY. Go back and forth. Back and forth. You do it. Good job. Let's take turns with the shoe with you. Beep beep. Go around. Yay. You did it. Can you do it again? No, no, around is to get it. How are you getting so soft? You're sitting in the back. Did you even notice it? All right. You want to go home? You try it. Yay. All right. Can you get yourself back up so you don't fall down? Yay. Look at you doing that. How do you do that? Two hands. Hey, and you sat right back up. You're so smart. I'm sorry. Yay. Go around. Back it up. Back it up in the talking drum. Beep beep. Excuse me. Yay, Morgan. Can we try it again? How does it look in the mirror? Do you want Let's move on to Red Sox here. And just before I let this go, when I ask you this time, feel free to talk about um what the mothers are doing as because in in the minute we move, they these children at 15 months were pretty autonomous, but at 7 and 1/2 months, they are far less autonomous. Can you take that for a walk? Go to see him in the ball. Can you see the bounce of the ball? You like this walk? You like it? Whoa. Whoa. Okay, let's move on to the question of what what you're seeing in these in these videos. Again, remember the same children that you saw at 15 months. Um and uh so we have My Heart Belongs to Daddy and Red Socks. Yes. So you think that teaching in the first one and diversion in the second one? Okay, couple others? Yes. Okay, more protective um Can I say that she behaves more roughly with the baby? All right, one more and then we'll move we'll move back further in time. Yes. I'm sorry, and in the second one? Okay, so showing versus accompanying. All right, great. Um well, while I'm over here uh you moved your Y on the French keyboard. I couldn't find it. Um so accompany Ah. versus um versus um show I'll just say. Okay. So if we move further back Oh. Again. Now again, remember it's the same two children but this time calendar leaves flying away. We're moving them back to two and a half months. Um and this will be the last of my data and then I will try to put together a story about identity for you. Um So Oh. No, let's stop that. There we go. So this time I've I've entitled them primary colors and keys to the car because those words are used by the mothers in conversation and you'll see them in the subtitle. Same toy. Oh, it comes out. Hey, you hold them. Look at this thing inside. What did you do? You try. You try. You do. What is this guy? Who is my name? Looks like a cat. Looks like a cool cat. What do you think? Got a blue sweater on. Where did the bird get the ear? I get it. It folds out. I don't like that one. Let's see. Let's see what we do. I like this one. Let's see what this is. I thought this is a little bear. Let's see. What are you looking at? See the colors? And that's orange and that's yellow. You do know your primary colors yet, don't you? No, not yet. Not yet. That's a fun one. Who's this? Who's this? Not yet. Huh? It's a little teddy bear. Oh. Okay. Um let's now look at this interaction. See you playing with these two toys? Like this? Like that? Yeah. You want to see your car? Pretty soon you'll be driving, huh? Yeah. That's where my voice begin, huh? Yeah, road. What do you What are you trying to say, huh? You might be able to sit up by yourself, huh? You can't tell yet, huh? Look at this. Can you feel it? You like that? And this one is together, huh? You want to try laying down, huh? You can play with it. All right, you want to go to sleep, huh? Okay. So let's go to our last um set of uh commentaries or what we what we see. And Yes. Uh-huh. So closer the Y Take me a long See, the what the keyboard is embodied in me. That's an example. Um and I can relearn it if I were to use the French keyboard for a long time, but right now I can't every time there's a Y I'm in trouble. Um But so closer physical contact um and this is more distance. And it Yes. So um you say the child is more focused on the toy. Yeah. Um Okay, and this is an important point because there are different parenting styles in these videos. Um so so but let's just say uh Let's just say child focus. Um and we'll assume on the other one. One other thing is one thing I always notice, but yes. It's about how the parents focus on the body of the baby. So like the boy more focused on the body perception body and the girl is more focused on the toy. So That's where the Y is supposed to be. Um Okay, and I'm going to add one Got it. Uh one other thing in um and then move on because I noticed this always is that the mother of the little girl is using a lot of words. Um and there's a narrative and there's a narrative um there's a narrative I'm going to argue that carries through. It shows up at the 7.4 months about that there's a driver, it's towing, well what are you doing? Um and that little girl at 15 months has a narrative too about playing house even though she doesn't have words. Um and there is no narrative the the mother of the boy uses many fewer words um and in fact we've quantitative that with a larger sample um and shown that that mothers talk at these ages talk a lot more to the girls than they do to the boys. Um so So let's let me move on then to talk a little bit more specifically about identity. Um First of all, I'm going to argue that identity becomes embodied um in infants uh through these dyadic interactions starting from birth up until the time that the infant has physical autonomy um and that they include various aspects. There's timing, the infant stores the rate, rhythm, sequence, and contingency of two-way interactions and you could see that those were very different in those two dyads, the mother the mother infant the mother boy infant the mother girl infant. Um The infant stores spatial aspects of approach approach or approach avoid patterns. You can see that the spatial relationship between the mother and child differed in those two dyads. Um the infant uh has different proprioceptive experience um the that is knowing where their bodies are in the world because they have different kinds of contact within the dyadic pair. The infant at this at the earliest stages are they are not in independent. I speak of the single unit, the developing unit is the dyad. It's not the infant. Um There are different patterns of arousal patterns um with these different exchanges and by arousal um I mean uh how excited the infant is, how excited the mother is. It can be a positive arousal, it can be a negative arousal um but this is this is part of of what's getting stored in the body in these very early exchanges. And lastly Come back. Come back. Blew my cover. Um So the inf Let's try it again. Come on. There. So uh and the last thing is that the infant stores positive or negative facial aspect and also how faces move together and they match um and they match tone. Um so um so the two mothers are interacting very differently with their with their infants and they are in uh in the process the interaction the dyad the how the infant responds and how the mother responds um uh are are embodying different aspects of space, time, proprioception um in the ner nervous system of the infant now in the beginning. So in the beginning I'm arguing is the dyad. And an infant's developmental task is to become an individual. So at birth an an infant is not an individual. If you don't touch it, it will die. If you don't feed it, it will die. It does not it cannot even regulate its own body temperature. It learns it it becomes able to regulate its own body temperature by touching another body by touching a caregiver whether it's the mother or any other human um who is the caregiver. Um and it's it's through that physical interaction that the infant's physiology itself comes online. Their ability to regulate their body temperature, their ability to regulate their sleep their sleep cycle, all of those things physiologically um temperature regulation, sleep cycle um bathroom control, all of those things uh the infant doesn't have at first, it only acquires it as part of a dyadic interaction. And then psychically um they develop it by developing um by developing autonomous identities that um that uh that I mean their task is next to develop um autonomous identities that reproduce and sustain themselves through a process that's called autopoiesis which is self-reproduction. Um And so these are this is the job the infant has um and they accomplish that job by about um sort of by about 3 years of age much many of the tasks although it's obviously a longer um a longer process. Now I get back to how I said I was going to challenge your idea about what is meant by identity and this will be sort of closing out the argument here. Um but usually when someone says says something about somebody has an identity, they're thinking of that person as an individual. If they're talking about gender identity, they're talking about this quadrant um that is the identity a 3-year-old says I am a boy or I am a girl um and that is a representative of their individual identity. Um But they can't have that I that identity um without interacting in the world. So notice that I have here um uh this half of the oval represents individuality, this half represents the the world in which the individual exists. Um and this identity I am a boy or a girl must necessarily entail a domain of interactions with others that dyadic interactions with the primary caregiver, with peers, toys, plays, clothing, color choices. These are all um all part of what's involved um in in uh in an individual being even able to say they are a boy or a girl. It has to be in relationship to what they are experiencing in the world. Um but having this information then causes um causes the emergence down here of the next quadrant um which is having a domain of interactions with others then offers significance to the the statement I am a boy or I am a girl um and so the significance uh includes that others interpret um behaviors any particular behavior as belonging to a gender sex. So there's feedback about what a behavior means in terms of a gender sex identity and others can also not only offer feedback with a label but can offer um can label behaviors as positive, negative, or neutral. Um so the same behavior uh could be labeled negatively in a uh in a child who is perceived as a girl um compared to a child perceived as a boy. So um so this interaction with the world word world also um gives uh offers significance and meaning um and that is all part of the feedback onto the notion of identity. And then lastly uh this this offers significance offers an intentional link um by which I mean uh things there's a concept in psychology called self-socialization. So at some point quite early um a child begins to develop a notion of themselves uh say if we're talking about gender in particular as a boy or a girl and they do and they try to socialize themselves in that in that direction. So they will say they will insist no I am a girl, I'm going to wear that pink dress. Um and the mother may want to put them in jeans or overalls um but the child hi- his her himself will insist um if they have a notion of themselves as a girl that they they want to socialize themselves as a girl. So that intentional link is feeds back to um to this last thing that I'm calling operational closure and this happens at about 2 and 1/2 to 3 years to start with although it goes on through the life cycle um in which uh you start with linguistic labels that are passive, active, and of you begin to label others and self um and develop the notions of gender constancy and gender stability um and uh and as these come online as the linguistic capacity to label comes online. So it's very in my view very related to the development of language, the ability to label, the ability to understand others, the ability to see all of these other things in the world, um then uh identity becomes fixed in uh in or or becomes stabilized in some way uh and that's what I'm calling operational closure. So, we have on the one side this half of the oval, I've labeled as the individual and here we have an autonomous individual who is self-reproducing, self-socialized and this notion this becomes established in the nervous system, the sensory motor um neuronal network. So, it's not just in the brain, it's all throughout the body, the way the body moves, how close the child stands, how far a child ranges from the mother. These are all part of the sensory motor neuronal networks. Um but that is always related to it is not separable from the child's the individual's existence in the world. Um and you always have an individual in this in the world, the individual is always in interaction with others um and this and so they have uh through the processes of perception and action self-recognition of their body versus an another body. So, I've just taken the notion of identity as a single characteristic of an autonomous individual and I've said that um that it's actually uh it you can't explain it that way. The the basic notion of identity is a much more complicated thing. Um and I worded it this way. Identity it as constituted by the flow of events in the drawing I've just covered over for you is a property of the individual body-mind and at the same time a collective property involving interactions with others and with objects in the world. So, you cannot understand identity as a as one or the other, they are simultaneously the both. You may reflect on one more than the other at any moment. Um but I'm arguing that identity is is a complex a complex individual and collective property at the same time. So, and that may take some getting used to because that's not the usual way we think about identity. So, we have identity and we could be talking about um gender sex or sexual orientation. I haven't really talked about sexual orientation so much um but it is at the meeting between individual properties and interactions with others and objects in the world. And I guess it circled back. Oh, I guess we're up to the debate. So, that is that's the that was my my final conclusion then. We won't have a very long debate because we're running out of time. It doesn't matter. It was absolutely fascinating. I think that Bruno will come up and join me on the stage. We'll ask one question each then we'll give you the floor. Unfortunately, we're only able to take two or three questions uh but I think we've already learned a great deal. Sexing the Body, Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality published in 2000 in the States and translated in French 12 years later, you explained very precisely and clearly that you are first of all a scientist but that at a certain point in the '70s, you decided that it was time to get rid of the belief in the pure objectivity of science. How did you get there and how was this book received in the States at that time? So, I actually got there by writing the book. Because no, seriously. I mean, I'd written this earlier book Myths of Gender in which I um well, I really got there starting by writing Myths of Gender because what I found when I did Myths of Gender was the the task of that book was to look at um things scientists have said about women and men over a couple of centuries. So, you know, scientists in the 19th century said women can't work in the world, they can't be politicians, they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are highly variable, they are the most variable sex. They're so variable that sometimes they might deserve a different species name um uh homo variabilis as opposed to men who were seen as the stable sex. Um and that those idea those ideas were were believed by the major scientists of the world. You'll find it in Charles Darwin's writings, you'll find it in Henry Wallace's writings, you'll find it in anyone writing about gender, any well-known scientist. So, these weren't um these weren't minor people writing about these ideas. But in the 20th century, that switched. Um and psychologists began to say, "No, women are the stable sex and that's why there aren't so many women um in politics or in the academy because men are highly variable which means that at the positive end of the variability spectrum, they produce more geniuses. There are more smarter men because they're so variable, whereas women occupy a narrower space." So, the same outcome, the same conclusion was women don't belong in politics, women don't belong outside the home, um women aren't as smart as men but for the um opposite reason also held by the by major um major minds of the early and mid-20th century. So, I and I saw that kind of example over and over again in Myths of Gender um with different aspects of explaining the roles of men and women in our culture and I began to say there's something wrong wrong with with there's something there's something underneath about science that is producing the same answer but switching the data uh in opposite ways. So, what is it? So, I'm I'm saying by this time I'm saying, "Well, our cultural ideas about men and women are getting into the science somehow." And the question is how? And that led me because I wrote that book in 1985, that led me on really a a 10-year journey into science studies because I thought I have to understand how science itself works in order to understand how um how science itself, the knowledge that we produce as scientists is also a cultural product and how it in incorporates culture into its knowledge system. Um and so, when as I began to understand that and I really did very little women's gender studies in that period, I I did a lot of science studies. My the the person who probably influenced me more than anyone in that period was um the writings of Bruno Latour um uh who I imagine most of you have heard of and uh and um a- and uh I began to understand science as a process that is a pretty good process that it's pretty reliable but it always has um has culture embedded it's embedded in culture and it takes culture and embeds it in its knowledge system. And then I thought, "Well, how does that work with regard to gender?" And I began to to collect examples um from intersex, from the naming of sex hormones, from all of the things that I cover in Sexing the Body as examples of how culture becomes part of scientific knowledge about gender. And so, that's how I came to write to write the book. So, great. Thanks. Thanks a lot for a really amazing talk. Um I I think I'll just try to do something that men are not really good at uh doing at all and that is just to shut up. Um so, I'm not going to ask my questions. We can talk about them over dinner. I really like, you know, all of you to have a chance to to ask some questions. I'm so proud of you. So, one question. It it's Wait for the Explain to them that they can ask it in French. I've got No, no. Oh, all right. Thanks. Yes, could you please explain the picture that we are seeing here? That's not mine, that's theirs. Uh okay. Because in particular, I saw that you wrote something a book called The Five Sex. Could you elaborate more about this and do we have more than five? Um yes, the I've I've um The Five Sexes was an ironic title given to catch people's attention. I modeled the essay when I wrote it um and and this little book that Bay um reprinted and that is includes two essays, The Five Sexes and The Five Sexes Revisited which I wrote 10 years after The Five Sexes. They're they're fairly short um but I modeled it after um the British writer Jonathan Swift who wrote an a very famous um essay uh which I've now just blocked the title of. What? A modest proposal, thank you very much. I've been saying using it all day so and it just left my head. So he wrote a modest an essay called a modest proposal in which he proposed that the solution to overpopulation was that we eat eat the children or at least eat some of them. Um so he did not mean that seriously. He meant it as an a way to get attention and as a way to present a problem and discuss it. Similarly, I did not mean the five sexes literally but it this was an essay in which I began to explore um the birth of children um who at the time were called intersex. Um that is they were born with genitalia intermediate between um between males or females. So a girl or an XX baby might be born with an enlarged clitoris that was identified at birth as a penis but she might have ovaries and a uterus. Um and so and then there's a whole medical practice about how to how to approach children with that um with with uh with with births like that with characteristics like that. Um and they differed depending on whether uh they were the the medical practice identified some who were who were true quote true boys or true girls and then they identified people who they said were were XY and they should have been boys or XY and they should have been girls and then there were some people who they called true hermaphrodites um because they had gonadal tissue that contained both ovaries or sperm and eggs and um and so that added up to five. Uh so but what I was doing was beginning to challenge the idea that uh that there is an ideal that two is the ideal number that were that humans are born with and I also began to challenge the medical practice of trying to fit again take this spectrum and fit them into a binary by what I considered to be fairly violent surgery on um on newborn infants to fix them to make them be as if they fit into one category or another. Um so that's the origin of the title. Une question. Yes. Sorry. I was I was curious about the the videos where you showed that you showed how both children were socialized and how they respond to the responded to the socialization and how there was a narrative and I was thinking how in mainstream American culture there are essentially two genders two sexes which are accepted and I was wondering if there if you were aware of any work that had been done or have you done it yourself in cultures where there are more than two accepted genders? Um so there certainly is work done in cultures where there more than two accepted genders. Um not this kind of longitudinal study on infancy. I don't think that's been done and I'm still getting part of this work published and I have a still a little bit more to analyze and do because I really want to do a kind of take just a small number of families take I've got um I've got basically tapes running from three months to 15 months twice a month. Um so but if I analyzed all of them to sort of look at the phenomena phenomenology of bodily movement and interaction I could probably only do I'll probably do two boys and two girls and write a kind of phenomenological piece um but I haven't that I haven't done yet. So that kind of longitudinal sample has really not been done um in other cultures. Uh so there are cross-sectional studies in other cultures. There are certainly people writing about um adult adults in cultures where there's um three or more genders uh but but not this kind of approach. I'm hoping it will I'll start a trend. Allez, une dernière question. One last question. If we go back more in time and study the pregnancy what happens between the parents the more the mother and the baby and then is there any interaction which can influence the the behavior? So um going back in time and studying the pregnancy I have not done the the tapes that I have don't start until about three months but I think that this is this is something that needs to be done. Um there are some things we know about pregnancy. One um one is uh obviously that the basic sexual systems themselves are developing and differentiating in in utero. Uh the basic anatomical systems and some of the hormonal systems are developing. So there are those um physiological differences that are that are present during pregnancy. But amazingly there are also um in especially in the last trimester uh things like the the infant can hear the outside world. So an infant born in um a French culture for example in a French-speaking culture if you um just look at the at the body rhythms in response to um to a native French speaker they will be very in synchrony with the with the French with the French speaker's body um body language as they speak but not in syncrasy in synchrony with an English speaker or a Japanese speaker. You can show This has been shown for a variety of different language systems. So clearly an infant is hearing language in utero and already developing their motor systems and probably their audio systems their ears their audio cortex is developing in their brain in utero and then develops quite a lot after birth. Um in the first year of life the brain is developing. I didn't show you these images uh because I didn't want to keep you here all night um but uh the brain is developing enormously in the in the especially in the first six months but even more so that um you start out with nerve cells in the brain being not very connected with one another and they grow out all of these um protuberances and the protuberances connect with each other and form synapses and soon the brain growth has has developed the enormously and that growth happens in response to um to the uh to the experience the sensory experience of the infant starting from birth but probably starting from before birth. Uh so um I think there are many more things that could be studied. Uh I don't know for example that whether there are good studies yet of of say families where they in the United States now just about every set of parents identifies the sex of the child as soon as a sonogram can show it so really early in development and whether that makes any differences in the way they're speaking to about the child carrying the child. I think that hasn't been studied well yet but it that I think it would be something important to study. Certainly makes a difference in how they prepare the nursery. Um so that they're no more they're no more yellow nurseries. They're either they either have the the hearts and flowers or the baseballs if it's an American nursery um or already set prepared. Thank you so much. I'm pretty sure we are much more connected in our brain now after your brilliant conference. Je vous prie maintenant thank you so often. Thank you all. Great questions.