The reflections on sex and gender presented in this chapter were set in motion by the experience of giving birth to my son four years ago in London. Under the influence of the National Birth Association, I was determined to have a “natural birth,” free of any unnecessary medical intervention. Accordingly, one of my requests was that the midwife should refrain from telling me the sex of my baby, for I wanted to be allowed to register it “in my own time,” and to decide for myself whether the fact that the newborn was male or female should be of any relevance at all. At the time, I imagined that my Vezo friends in Madagascar, unlike some of my British and Italian friends at home, would have no difficulty in understanding why I did not want the sex of my baby to be the first thing to be uttered about him or her, only seconds after the birth. I thought they would understand my attempts to escape the strictures of the dominant “gender system of the west” (as in Errington 1990), in which a person, from the very beginning, cannot be anything at all if it is not sexed.

I thought they would understand because the Vezo with whom I had lived and worked for almost two years had impressed me for their lack of interest in the difference between people with male and female genitals – a difference which, in many contexts, appeared to make very little difference (Astuti 1993).