The biologist and feminist Anne Fausto-Sterling once wrote that we should dump our two-sex system in favor of five.
She more or less picked five out of a hat - three or thirty-three would've been fine. What Anne Fausto-Sterling objected to, and still objects to, is the either/or dualism we use to parse the world.
Why not a whole spectrum of sexes? That's the only frame that could fit the seventeenth century soldier, Daniel Burghammer, who shocked his regiment by giving birth to a girl, or even the Spanish runner disqualified from the Olympic hurdles because her chromosomes said she was a man.
Sterling says determining sex isn't always so easy as genetics and genitalia. Boys and girls are made by nature and nurture - and what we think about all four, she says, is a social construction. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
