Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Animal Transex

2006; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 49 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08164640500470636

1465-3303

Myra J. Hird,

Bioethics and Human Rights Issues

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Punky and Elvira's case evinces one side of the ambivalent relationship between nature and morality. Animals also represent all that is base or inferior in humans. See Daston and Park (Citation1998). 2. See my discussions in Hird (Citation2002b, Citation2003a, Citationb, Citation2004a, Citationb, Citationc, Citationd, Citationforthcoming). 3. For examples of these shifts see De Landa (Citation1997a, Citationb), Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1987), Jonson (Citation1999), Kirby (Citation1997, Citation1999, Citation2001), Margulis and Sagan (Citation1997), Rabinow (Citation1992), and Sagan (Citation1992). 4. Indeed, elsewhere I suggest that some of the most thought-provoking and promising explorations of new materialism have recently been produced by Australian feminists. See Hird (Citation2003b). 5. For example, much has been written within feminism on eating disorders and the body, including the social construction of dieting, fitness, beauty and the patriarchal system that regulates women's relationships with their own bodies. See, for instance, Orbach (Citation1986) and Bordo (Citation1993). Despite the enormous number of feminist analyses on the gendered construction of eating disorders, 'these analyses consider the cellular processes of digestion, the biochemistry of muscle action, and the secretion of digestive glands to be the domain of factual and empirical verification … only a certain understanding of the body has currency for these feminist analyses, an understanding that seems to exclude "the biological body"' (Wilson Citation1998, 52). 6. Wilton parenthesises the word 'shallow' to allude to her critique that the sex change of post-operative trans bodies is only skin deep, such that a technology-made vagina is not connected to a uterus. Elsewhere I detail the problems with this account of phenomenology and corporeality. See Hird (Citation2003c). 7. Transsexualism currently defines an individual's relation to gender reassignment: pre-transition/operative, transitioning/in the process of hormonal and surgical sex-reassignment, and post-transition/operative. Transgender and trans signify an attempt to loosen the association between transitioning from one sex to another, and hormonal and/or surgical intervention. As such, transgender and trans (and more recently still the term 'queer') eschew a foundational essence and focus instead of performativity within socio-cultural relations of power. 8. For a discussion of child abuse within non-human primates, see Reite and Caine's edited volume Child Abuse: The Nonhuman Primate Data (Citation1983). For ethologists and biologists, sex change typically refers to an organism that functions as one sex during one breeding season and the 'other' sex during another breeding season. This definition excludes those organisms that can change sex within one breeding season. 9. People recognise that sexual intercourse between a horse and donkey might produce an ass, but, on the whole, transspecies sex is considered impossible. 10. Bruce Bagemihl (Citation1999) notes that transvestism does not mean taking on activities or behaviours that are considered to be either typically 'female' or 'male'. For instance, the sexual reproduction of offspring is typically considered a female prerogative. But for sea horses and pipe fish the male bears and gives birth to offspring. So male sea horses and male pipe fish are not practising transvestism when they produce offspring. Bagemihl (Citation1999, 38) notes that this is also the case for behaviours involved in what biologists term 'courtship'. In many species, females are more aggressive than males in these behaviours. Should a female in these species behave passively, she would be practising transvestism. It is worth noting here that non-human animals that engage in transvestite behaviour, like their human counterparts, specifically avoid homosexual behaviour. The misconception that transvestites (usually male) attempt to be 'feminine' in order to attract sexual relationships with men is as erroneous for the non-human as it is for the human animal world. 11. This scepticism is not limited to academia. Witness the outcry that ensued in 1995 when Kimberley Nixon, a trans woman, attempted to train as a volunteer counsellor for women sexual assault survivors at Vancouver Rape Relief organisation. When Nixon revealed herself to be trans, the Rape Relief organisation refused to allow her to engage in counsellor training. This decision culminated in a British Columbia supreme court ruling, and a case that remains ongoing. See Prasad (Citation2005) and Namaste (Citation2000). The case pivots on arguments about the authentic embodiment of femaleness. 12. Ontology tends to be (as in Wilton's case) morphologically defined. 13. Here I refer to ethology as a post-modern synthesis of Darwinian theory. 14. I am not the only social scientist interested in bacteria. For example, Donna Haraway (Citation2001, 82) provides a superb example of how knowledge of biological diversity can inform key feminist debates about embodiment and subjectivity. Haraway describes Mixotricha paradoxa, a minute single-celled organism that lives in the gut of the South Australian termite. For Haraway, this tiny organism engenders key questions about the autonomy of identity (we tend to assume that single organisms are defined by the possession of nucleated cells), or, as Haraway puts it, 'the one and many'. Mixotricha paradoxa lives in a necessary symbiotic relationship with five other organisms, none with cell nuclei but all with DNA. Some live in the folds of the cell membrane, whilst others live inside the cell, whilst simultaneously not being completely part of the cell. Haraway asks: 'is it one entity or is it six? But six isn't right either because there are about a million of the five non-nucleated entities for every one nucleated cell. There are multiple copies. So when does one decide to become two? And what counts as Mixotricha? Is it just the nucleated cell or is it the whole assemblage?' Advancing a similar argument, Joost Van Loon (Citation2000) uses symbiosis theory within non-linear biology to argue the parasite with the body as the ultimate 'Other', and invites a reconsideration of a politics of difference from inside the body. 15. Mixis refers to the 'production of a single individual from two parents by way of fertilization occurring at the level of fused cells or individuals'. See Margulis and Sagan (Citation1986, 232).