Intersexuality

Intersexuality, in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of biological sex, names variation in the development and expression of sex characteristics. Her examples complicate a simple division into two wholly separate kinds of body: sexual development begins from shared or undifferentiated forms, and some individuals exhibit characteristics associated with both sexes. The discussion supports a broader distinction between bodily variation and the social conditions that turn sex into a fixed account of women’s destiny.

Biological Development and Variation

De Beauvoir describes sexual differentiation as a process rather than an absolute boundary. In mammals, the tissue that will develop into gonads is initially undifferentiated; testicles or ovaries form later, and embryonic development begins in a similar way in both sexes. The account notes bodily structures associated with the complementary sex, including the male toad’s atrophied ovary, called Bidder’s organ, which can be made to produce eggs artificially. It also lists mammalian vestiges of sexual bipotentiality, such as mammary glands in males and Gartner’s duct in females.

The discussion identifies intersexuality in both animals and human beings as a condition in which male and female characteristics are present in the same individual. It distinguishes this from gynandromorphism, described in butterflies and crustaceans as a mosaic juxtaposition of male and female characteristics. The examples establish that sexual variation is not limited to a single species or a single pattern of bodily development.

Hormones, Organism, and Sexual Characteristics

The account gives the environment and hormonal regulation a role in sexual development. For ants, honeybees, and termites, nutrition can affect whether a larva develops as a reproductive female or fails to mature sexually and becomes a worker. In insects, sexual differentiation of the body occurs early and does not depend on gonads in the same way as it does in vertebrates.

For vertebrates, the discussion emphasizes the regulatory role of gonadal hormones. It reports that experiments involving changes to the endocrine environment, grafting, and castration informed a theory in which the soma is initially treated as identical or neutral in males and females, while gonadal action gives it sexual characteristics. The genital tract itself is somatic and develops under hormonal influence from bisexual precursors. Intersexuality, in this account, occurs when hormonal balance has not been realized and neither of the two sexual potentialities has been clearly accomplished.

Relation to the Book’s Argument

The account of intersexuality appears within a wider examination of biological claims about women. It cautions against taking bodily categories as self-explanatory: even where male and female organisms are treated as complementary types, defining them simply as carriers of sperm and ova is inadequate, because the relation between an organism and its gonads varies and gamete differentiation does not by itself define the whole organism. Intersexuality therefore forms part of a discussion of the complexity within biological classification, not a claim that social identity follows automatically from anatomy.

That distinction connects to the book’s larger argument that women’s subordination cannot be explained as the inevitable consequence of a natural condition. De Beauvoir contrasts bodily facts with the historical and social arrangements through which women are positioned as dependent and as the Other. She also describes how women’s circumstances differ across class and race: women are dispersed among men through family, work, and economic ties, and bourgeois women may be aligned with bourgeois men rather than with women workers, just as white women may share social interests with white men rather than with Black women. These divisions complicate collective resistance to subordination.

The book likewise examines how physical experiences acquire social and psychological consequences. Its account of the adolescent girl describes bodily changes as becoming charged with shame and anxiety; it argues that the perspective through which a biological condition is understood can intensify its burdens. This argument does not erase bodily experience. Rather, it distinguishes the body from the meanings and constraints imposed upon it, consistent with the book’s account of women as autonomous freedoms whose possibilities are restricted when society fixes them in an inessential role.