Michal Raz, researcher in sociology, traces the way in which science has addressed the difference between the masculine and the feminine over the centuries, until the decree of November 15, 2022 which prohibits medical interventions on intersex children .
words collected by Lilas Pepy
Author of a thesis in sociology at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences in 2019 on the medical care of intersex children, Michal Raz returns to the contemporary manufacturing of sexual binarity and its impact in interventions Early medical medical suffered by these children without their consent. The order of good practices of November 15, 2022 taken in application of the bioethics law of 2021 in principle prohibits the interventions of sexual conformation on intersex children, those whose body does not correspond to the classic definition of male and feminine.
Recent legislation concerning intersex children go in the right direction?
The content of article 30 of the new bioethics law starts from a good intention to modify practices but remains in a pathologizing paradigm: intersex variations are “rare diseases” that must be taken care of “. Doctors have been trained with a normative approach to bodies and, for them, the existence of intersex people does not question sexual binarity. It is a postulate when it is the consequence of an intervention process on the body which maintains the illusion of this supposed binarity.
This notion of incontestable biological difference between men and women Did she always exist?
Difficult to say. Before European modernity, the theory of moods predominates. Developed by the Greek doctor of antiquity Claude Galien (i e er
é> century AD), it affirms a kind of continuum between the feminine – cold, humid but also lower and sick – and The masculine – hot, dry and more successful. The American historian Thomas Laqueur has shown, in his work La Fabrique du Sex (1990, French edition at Gallimard in 1992), that, during this period, the physical distinction is not necessarily an exclusive binarity anchored in biology. Medicine does not yet exercise authority in the matter and a great heterogeneity of positions emerges.
Later, in the sixteenth e century, the anatomy plates of the Belgian doctor André Vésale (1514-1564) represent the vaginas as inverted penis. At the same time, the Surgeon Ambroise Paré describes the case of a woman whose male organs would be “brought out” by excess heat and following a brutal fall. One can imagine that it is a case of intersexation, called at the time “hermaphrodism”, a term considered today as stigmatizing.
How then this duality emerges?
You have 72.29% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.