No Way Out of the Binary: A Critical History of the Scientific Production of Sex

Abstract

This article examines the concept of sex as a biological “fact” in Western science from the eighteenth century to the present and, in particular, how the binary definition of sex has been maintained despite empirical flaws and contradictory data. Since the 1990s, feminist science studies scholars have produced detailed empirical accounts of the different historical periods of the sciences of sex, analyzing how different scientific disciplines have focused on various body parts as markers of biological sex, including anatomy, gonads, chromosomes, hormones, genes, and the brain. Despite all these works, I argue that the concrete mechanisms by which binary sex has operated have yet to be understood. This article deals with the history, changes, fractures, and alliances in sex research and traces how the uncritical commitment to the two-sex model has operated in the different areas of the biological sciences. Further, I show how the different variables of sex have intertwined with each other through their scientific history in ways that have been used to maintain a shaky yet persistent concept of binary sex.

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