Constructing gender from the inside out: Sex- selection practices in the united states

In the July 2010 issue of the Atlantic, Hanna Rosin published a provocative article proclaiming “the end of men. " Among the evidence provided-increased rates of female employment and their higher levels of education-Rosin highlights girl preference data stemming from U.S. sex-selection practices. Her “unambiguous proof " of a signifi cant cultural transformation, which she purports has left boys and men in the dust, is that a majority (75 percent) of those participating in a clinical trial of one new sex-selection method known as MicroSort sought girls. 1 Rosin neglects to mention that MicroSort is technologically more effective at raising a couple’s chances of producing a girl rather than a boy, because its sperm-sorting technique produces purer samples of X-rather than Y-chromosome-bearing sperm. It would follow, then, that couples preferring boys would less likely utilize this method, but would turn instead to a second, also new, sex-selection method-preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)- that, unlike MicroSort, does not carry a technical bias toward the production of girls over boys. Rosin, however, provides no data from clinics offering PGD. And yet, in spite of these oversights, I will be arguing in this article that recent sex-selection practices involving new technologies in the United States do mark a signifi cant socio-culturaltechnical shift that feminists should be paying attention to-even if they do not portend the hyperbolic “end of men. ".