Transfers of Persons

Passing and the managed achievement of sex status in an “intersexed” person

Every society exerts close controls over the transfers of persons from one status to another. Where transfers of sexual statuses are concerned, these controls are particularly restrictive and rigorously enforced. Only upon highly ceremonialized occasions are changes permitted and then such transfers are characteristically regarded as “temporary” and “playful” variations on what the person “after all,” and “really” is. Thereby societies exercise close controls over the ways in which the sex composition of their own populations are constituted and changed.

From the standpoint of persons who regard themselves as normally sexed, their environment has a perceivedly normal sex composition. This composition is rigorously dichotomized into the “natural,” i.e., moral, entities of male and female. The dichotomy provides for persons who are “naturally,” “originally,” in the first place,” “in the beginning,” “all along,” and “forever” one or the other. Changes in the frequency of these moral entities can occur only through three legitimate paths: birth, death, and migration.

Except for a legal change in birth certificate no legitimate path exists between the statuses of male and female. Even the legal change is regarded with considerable reservation by societal members who take their bona fide sex status for granted.

The normative, i.e., legitimate sexual composition of the population as seen from the point of view of members who count themselves part of the perceivedly normally sexed population, can be described with the following table of transition probabilities:

This study reports one of a series of cases that fall into the normatively prohibited lower left and upper right cells. […]

Harol Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs 1967