How we think of biological sex is driven largely by a social impulse to maintain familiar and more comfortable gender constructs. People who don’t fit into our socially constructed categories of what it means to be male or female become medicalized and thus in need of an intervention to cure the “abnormality.” Our society tends to think of sex and gender as reliably binary. Most people never imagine it to be more complicated, and many don’t want to challenge these assumptions. But parents of newborn children who fall under the umbrella term of children with differences of sexual development (DSD) are immediately faced with the complicated nature of sex and gender.
Ian Wolfe (Mon,) studied this question.