Taher Ben Jelloun's novel L'enfant de sable (1985) familiarized us with biological females who are given male names and brought up as boys. In the novel, after his wife gives birth to several girls, a man decides that regardless of one of the children's anatomical features, it will grow up as a boy. The “boy,” Ahmad, has a faked circumcision ceremony arranged for him, and he marries a crippled girl. His “true” sex is revealed only after his death. Ben Jelloun describes the horrific scene when the corpse washers, on discovering that he is a “woman,” leave the house screaming. It is only then that Ahmad's sisters find out that they never had a “brother.” The novel's message is that gendering by way of calling people names was ultimately challenged on the man's deathbed.

I begin with Ben Jelloun's novel because it alludes to the old question about the constitutive power of names, which has occupied philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1977, 1978). More recently, social scientists have raised questions about how subjects are brought into existence and classified through speech acts such as naming. For example, according to Bourdieu, the “act of naming [is] a specifically social judgment of attribution which assigns to the person involved everything that is inscribed in a social definition.”