practices, ostracism, active persecution by the state
and other organs of the culture —as inexplicable embarrassments, as odious examples of “filth” and/or
“maladjustment. ” The attempt here, however modest
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175
and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, one
which discards the fiction that there are two polar
distinct sexes.
We have seen that androgyny myths present an
image o f one corporality which is both male and female.
Sometimes the image is literally a man-form and a
woman-form in one body. Sometimes it is a figure
which incorporates both male and female functions.
In every case, that mythological image is a paradigm
for a wholeness, a harmony, and a freedom which is
virtually unimaginable, the antithesis o f every assumption we hold about the nature o f identity in general and sex in particular. T h e first question then is: What
o f biology? There are, after all, men and women. They
are different, demonstrably so. We are each o f one sex
or the other. If there are two discrete biological sexes,
then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete
modes o f human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined.
One might argue for a liberalization o f sex-based roles,
but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.
Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to
develop new means o f human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies o f
formation o f gender identity in children provide basic
information which challenges the notion that there are
two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens
to transform the traditional biology o f sex difference
into the radical biology o f sex similarity. That is not to
say that there is one sex, but that there are many. The
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evidence which is germane here is simple. The words
“male” and “female, ” “man” and “woman, ” are used
only because as yet there are no others.
1. Men and women have the same basic body structure. Both have both male and female genitals —the clitoris is a vestigial penis, the prostate gland is most
probably a vestigial womb. Since, as I pointed out earlier, there is information on only 2 percent of human history, and since religious chronicles, which were for
centuries the only record of human history, consistently
speak of another time in the cycle o f time when humans
were androgynous, and since each sex has the vestigial
organs of the other, there is no reason not to postulate
