8
Radical Fluidity
What is the relationship between gender, sex, sexuality, and the sexual difference – it all seems
to reduce to the relationship between the mind and body. Do the categories of male and female
correspond to man and woman, respectively? Butler chooses to leave unanswered the conundrum of
sexual difference. 24 Although, why should it be a problem? The answer is a key premise of the popular
sense of gender, evident in the growing trend to deny real sexual binaries as evidenced in the works of
such scholars as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Joan Roughgarden. 25 In Evolution’s Rainbow, for example,
Joan Roughgarden argues against equating transgenderism with illness, because the frequency of
intersexuals – people of ambiguous sexual anatomy – surpasses the necessary threshold to be
considered a valid genetic defect. 26
To be considered a valid genetic defect – a true disease – the relationship between rarity and
severity must meet or pass a specific frequency threshold. Roughgarden, an ecologist and evolutionary
biologist, explains that if a genetic trait interferes with an organism’s Darwinian fitness – its ability to
pass on genetic material – at a frequency of 1 in 50,000 births then such a trait has proven itself to be a
24
Ibid, 192.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books,
2000); Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004).
26
Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004), 282-285.
25