Is intersexuality real?

Does the natural incidence of hermaphroditism show whether sexual difference is 'real' or 'constructed'? What might performativity mean for intersexuality, and vice versa? Medicine generally conceives of cultural differences between women and men as indicative of natural differences between females and males. But when intersexuals account for around 1.7 per cent of all live births, dimorphic sexual difference cannot be cast as real and inevitable; indeed, when surgery is performed on intersexual genitalia, the opposite is true. Sexual difference is fabricated in response to 'social pressures' - as one surgeon puts it - on parents to have a child that is clearly either male or female. But if sexual difference is culturally constructed and malleable, how do physicians know what counts as intersexuality in the first instance? Specifically, is intersexuality real ? This article is a detailed semiotic analysis of the ontological assumptions that ground not only the medical treatment of intersexuals, but also the very idea of anatomical sex. Why do medical professionals call most intersexuals 'pseudohermaphrodites'? Why do they define human sex determination in terms that do not apply to females? The article suggests that intersexuality is made 'real' as only a 'construction' in order to protect the androcentric sex system which it threatens. Such a dialectical process raises vital questions for gender theory concerning the notoriously overlooked materiality of performativity. The article concludes by suggesting a way of recuperating intersexuality through the notion of flesh as a texture.