Anne Fausto-Sterling Dualisms Summary

Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Dueling Dualisms” explores the concept of gender and sex through society’s perspective. Fausto-Sterling initiates the selection by introducing readers to the story of Maria Patiño. Patiño who is a Spanish Olympic hurdler who was forced to have a sex test to prove her sexuality. She tested positive for being a male and was eventually “barred from competing on Spain’s Olympic team” (Fausto-Sterling, 4). Readers eventually learned that the reason why Patiño tested positive for being a male was that she was born with a condition called androgen insensitivity. Androgen Insensitivity means that although she has a Y chromosome and her testes made plenty of testosterone, her cells couldn’t detect this masculinizing hormone. …show more content…
This could be the reason why the author states, “but only our beliefs about gender, not science can define our sex” (Fausto-Sterling, 5). Anne Fausto-Sterling additionally states, “our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place” (Fausto-Sterling, 5). This quote additionally proves the author's reason to why she believes that gender norms are socially and not scientifically like some individuals want to propose. Furthermore, the author refers to the “second-wave feminists of 1970s” and states that this is an idea that states, “that sex is distinct from gender that social institutions, themselves designed to perpetuate gender inequality, produce most of the differences between men and women” (Fausto-Sterling, 6). Basically, what this idea presents is socialization as the main factor which creates the concept of gender, rather than a physiological perspective. I agree with this point because society does play a role in framing the “correct” way in which individuals should behave to embrace the gender of male or female the “ideal”