The Five Sexes
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the constraints of even five categories." |
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"The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough" (1993) is an essay by Anne Fausto-Sterling first published in The Sciences.
In it, she "had intended to be provocative, but I had also written with tongue firmly in cheek." Fausto-Sterling laid out a thought experiment considering an alternative model of gender containing five sexes: male, female, merm, ferm, and herm. This thought experiment was interpreted by some as a serious proposal or even a theory; advocates for intersex people stated that this theory was wrong, confusing and unhelpful to the interests of intersex people. In a later paper ("The Five Sexes, Revisited"), she has acknowledged these objections.
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