Asexualism: The Genetics but Not the Sex

A final type of gender category is asexuality. On occasion, usually due to a mother's hormone use during pregnancy, a child is born without sexual organs of any kind. This means that the child has no ovaries, uterus, or vagina; has no penis or testicles; and usually has only a bladder and a urethra ending in an aperture for the elimination of urine.

Personal Voices

Toby: An Asexual Person

Toby was born without any internal or external reproductive organs; Toby has no penis, scrotum, or testicles, and Toby also has no vagina, ovaries, or uterus. Therefore, Toby also has no male or female sex hormones, except the small amount secreted by the adrenal glands on the kidneys. Though at a chromosomal level Toby is either XX or XY, it has no impact on Toby's life; therefore, Toby has no real gender and has adopted the term "neuter" rather than male or female. Because Toby has no gender, terms like "he" or "she" are also inappropriate. Toby therefore uses the word "xe" instead, to signify those who have neither male nor female gender.

Toby as assigned a female gender at birth because the doctor saw no penis. Toby was raised as a girl until the age of about 12, when Toby began refusing female hormones because xe did not "feel" like the girl everyone thought xe was. Of course, without hormones, Toby could not begin puberty at all. During Toby's early teens, xe also spent some time taking male hormones. But that did not feel right either. Between the ages of 13 and 18, the doctors began to experiment with Toby's gender. Finally, at 18, when Toby was no longer a minor, xe reused to take any more hormones and has been living as a neuter ever since.

When official or school forms ask for the person's sex, Toby writes "neuter"; Toby has the first driver's license in the state of Kansas with the designation "O" under sex. Toby uses whichever restroom is less crowded, dresses in jeans and other unisex, casual clothes, and has close friends of both sexes. Toby also taught Sunday school, where, after a period of intense interest, the children decided that the fact that their teacher was neither a male nor a female was no big deal. Toby talks about what it means to be a neuter and to be asexual:

I conclude that I'm neuter because I don't see anything in being male or being female that I can relate to. It's partly a matter of anatomy; the basic medical definitions of maleness and femaleness involve the presence of body parts which I don't have. Most people who don't have those body parts still somehow relate to the idea that there are these things called maleness and femaleness, and everybody has to be one or the other, and therefore I must be one or the other because everyone is. Therefore there has to be something wrong with me that has to be "fixed." I have to be "repaired"—I have to have hormones, I have to have surgery, I have to pretend, or acquire somehow these characteristics that I didn't start out with. I didn't do that. I started out saying "I don't know what being male or female means; I read the definitions, I looked at myself, they didn't match, and my conclusion was, therefore: I must not be either male or female, therefore it must not be true that everyone has to be one or the other." And that is what I mean what I say that I am neuter.

(Author's files)