If Judith Butler is The Queen of Gender, Anna Fausto-Sterling is his goddess: zoologist, biologist and lecturer in gender studies -now at Brown University- starting with the rare genetic condition of intersexuality in the early 1990s was the first to attack the concept of sexual binary, arguing that sexuality is a spectrum and that at least five sexes can be identified ('but come on, it wasn't a theory, I was being ironic, it was just a provocation' he said afterwards. But in vain).
His most famous essay, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, published in 2000, is the theoretical foundation of the now established and current expression 'sex assigned at birth'.
Sensational, then, indeed sensational that today Fausto-Sterling, announcing his own conference on 29 September, anticipated that "In this intervention I will explain why ... we should probably give up the idea of gender identity altogether'..
It could be that Fausto-Sterling, who is a lesbian and married to playwright Paula Vogel, is seeing the sea of troubles that has been produced since his youthful intuition, especially against children and womenand in particular homosexual women. One will have to wait for the conference to find out, but that is a possibility.
On gender identity, new animula, have been disputing for years furious political and legislative battles -including our ddl Zan that held it at the centre, to the point of justifying the horror of manipulating the bodies of girls and boys to make them 'conform' to the perceived identity (on the verge of arriving in Spain any day the terrifying Ley Trans): but perhaps also on the hormones to minors Does Fausto-Sterling today have something to talk about again?
Not to mention the male bodies in women's sports and spaces reserved for women, and transphobic hate speech and workplace marginalisation and persecution of anyone who does not adhere to the cult.
We will listen carefully to Fausto-Sterling: his intervention could be the final turning point and the end of the gender wars. It could, we repeat. There are no certainties at the moment.
There is a possibility, in this case, that the transactivists will also denounce their Goddess for a hate crime.