Category Archives: Biology

10/30/2024
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Biology, Gender, Sex

1146 Words: Sex & Gender — What We Know (and Don’t Know)

A few years back, Rebecca Helm, a biologist then working as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote an X post encapsulating all we know these days about sex and gender. That is, what people who study human S&G, professionally and seriously, know about the stuff.

Scads of folks out there feel certain to their cores that they know all about it, but they don’t. What they know is a bunch of fuzzy chatter passed down through the generations, based on preconceptions, misconceptions, and outright bullshit, none of which helps them or us understand the true nature of our sexuality and gender self-identity.

Most people believe any and every human being is one or the other, female or male. That’s it. No argument tolerated. No uncertainty allowed.

If only it were that simple

Then again saying “if only…” implies things’d be better that way. Easier to understand, maybe. But better? No.

There are more than a few critters in this world who are both male and female. They include earthworms, moss animals (bryozoans), flukes (trematodes), snails, banana slugs, clownfish, certain types of wrasse fish, mangrove rivulus fish, and barnacles.

I suppose the social media pages shared by the Earth’s barnacles are not rife with uninformed pontifications on which one is a boy or girl since they all are both. See? Easy.

Recall how “gender reveal” parties were big among expecting parents a few years back? The future moms and dads’d send out invitations to all their friends and relatives saying, Wahoo, we’re gonna have a young’n! Let’s get sloshed and pig out on seven-bean salad. Everybody would come by and the parents would reveal the results of their fetal anatomy tests so that all the attendees would then know what color onesies to buy for the upcoming baby showers.

That fad seems to be either dying off or becoming something to be shunned, rather like those antebellum plantation dress up parties that were all the rage for a while. Here’s a thread from a website called what to expect, an all-around discussion forum and registry for expectant parents: “Gender Reveal Parties… Are They Even Still a Thing?” Comments range from “They are so FUN! Cupcakes or cake w fam and friends will never go out of style!” to “Gender reveal parties don’t reveal the gender of the baby, but the sex of the baby, AKA what their private parts look like.” 

Even that latter comment, albeit semi-enlightened, reeks of old school twaddle. Private parts? Really?

Anyway, a certain swath of the populace now embraces the notion that gender and sex aren’t the same things and that the binary nature of the terms fails to accurately represent the reality of things. Those folks are labeled “woke” (in the pejorative sense) by another swath that says a boy’s a boy and a girl’s a girl and if you believe otherwise you must be a commie rat.

So, here comes the aforementioned biologist Rebecca Helm with her straightforward, indispensable take on what we oughtta know (her prose is cleaned and brushed here inasmuch as she’s a hard science nerd, not an English grammar and usage maven):

Lots of folks make biological sex seem really simple. Well, since it’s so simple, let’s find the biological roots, shall we? Let’s talk about sex.

If you know a bit about biology you will probably say that biological sex is caused by chromosomes: XX and you’re female, XY and you’re male. This is “chromosomal sex” but is it “biological sex”?

Human Chromosomes.

Well, turns out there is only one gene on the Y chromosome that really matters to sex. It’s called the SRY gene. During human embryonic development the SRY protein turns on male-associated genes. Having an SRY gene makes you “genetically male.”

But is this “biological sex”?

Sometimes that SRY gene pops off the Y chromosome and over to an X chromosome. Surprise! So now you’ve got an X with an SRY and a Y without an SRY. What does this mean?

A Y with no SRY means physically you’re female, chromosomally you’re male (XY) and genetically you’re female (no SRY). An X with an SRY means you’re physically male, chromsomally female (XX) and genetically male (SRY).

But biological sex is simple! There must be another answer.

Sex-related genes ultimately turn on hormones in specific areas on the body as well as reception of those hormones by cells throughout the body. Is this the root of “biological sex”?

Hormonal male means you produce “normal” levels of male-associated hormones. Except some percentage of females will have higher levels of “male” hormones than some percentage of males. Ditto “female” hormones. And if you’re developing, your body may not produce enough hormones for your genetic sex. Leading you to be genetically male or female, chromosomally male or female, hormonally non-binary, and physically non-binary.

Well, except cells have something to say about this. Maybe cells are the answer to biological sex? Right?

Cells have receptors that “hear” the signal from sex hormones. But sometimes those receptors don’t work. Like a mobile phone that’s on Do Not Disturb.

What does this all mean?

It means you may be genetically male or female, chromosomally male or female, hormonally male/female/non-binary, with cells that may or may not hear the male/female/non-binary call, and all this leading to a body that can be male/non-binary/female.

Try out some combinations for yourself. Notice how confusing it gets? Can you point to what the absolute cause of biological sex is? Is it fair to judge people by it?

Of course you could try appealing to the numbers. “Most people are either male or female,” you say. Except that as a biologist professor I will tell you the reason I don’t have my students look at their own chromosomes in class is because people could learn that their chromosomal sex doesn’t match their physical sex, and learning that in the middle of a 10-point assignment is just not the time.

Biological sex is complicated. Before you discriminate against someone on the basis of biological sex and identity, ask yourself: Have you seen your chromosomes? Do you know the genes of the people you love? The hormones of the people you work with? The state of their cells?

Since the answer will obviously be no, please be kind, respect people’s right to tell you who they are, and remember that you don’t have all the answers. Again, biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.

Note: Biological classifications exist: XX, XY, XXY XXYY, and all manner of variation which is why sex isn’t classified as binary. You can’t have a binary classification system with more than two configurations even if two of those configurations are more common than others.

Biology is a shitshow. Be kind to people.

I guess my buying into Professor Helm’s argument makes me a commie rat. Or just “woke.”

04/03/2023
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Biology, Gender, Society

1000 Words: Gender Musing

I don’t know many men who, in the course of everyday conversation, make mention of the raw deal women have gotten in pretty much every society on Earth. Many friends of mine take to the chit-chat soapbox to decry racism, America’s history of slavery, the Native American holocaust, the savaging of our environment, the exploding wealth gap, and even bad refereeing in the NCAA basketball tournament.

But, try as I might, I can’t recall my liberal, progressive brethren pounding on the table and getting red in the face over unequal pay for women, the fact that we haven’t had a woman president yet, and the institutionalized maleness of science labs, corporate boardrooms, and Senate cloakrooms.

I can’t explain this other than to suppose my guy friends’ oxen are not being gored, so why should they get all het up over it? Then again, none of my friends is a Native American and, as I say, they’re uniformly offended by this holy land’s history of wiping that swath of humanity out.

Could it be some vestigial trace of the sex-typing lessons we all endure as little boys growing up? You know, the same gender-conforming pressure that forbids many, many, many men from admitting that, say, another man is handsome or sexy. Be a man. Don’t cry. Don’t be a queer. Other people should take care of their own problems. Guys, we’re instructed from infancy on, don’t feel for people other than themselves and others like them. Women, on the other hand, are encouraged to think of the other before themselves.

A lot of that has to do with biological imperatives, the hard-wiring that separates us, in most cases, into different genders. Women possess uteri, give birth, and suckle their children. All those things and more make the female spec list more conducive to producing loving, empathetic, sensitive humans. The sentient among us wish everybody possessed in more ample quantities those and other altruistic qualities.

Part of what makes me slightly itchy about today’s rewriting of gender rules and roles is the idea that gender is strictly a societal construct, that if it weren’t for some villainous puppet masters directing the rest of us eight billion from a fortified island in the South Pacific, we’d all be able to choose our genders the same way we choose which pair of socks to wear this morning.

And, this new line of thinking goes, we’ll wear a different pair of socks tomorrow morning.

This is not to say people can’t identify with one, the other, both, or many different genders. Me? I’ve always felt more of an affinity and identification with women than men. Maleness, especially toxic masculinity, not only bores me, it repulses me. I never wanted to outdrink anybody. I never wanted to break another person’s nose. When I played baseball, I didn’t care who won or lost, only that I was running in the sunshine. I indulged myself in “womanly” things: crying at movies or while listening to music, often wanting to please people, not caring if my domestic partner makes more money than I do, and so on.

And I accept that there are scads of women who’ll stand on their heads to win a game or are competitive in any other area. I’m happy to live in a world where one may choose to define one’s self according to whatever gender paradigm appeals to them.

But testosterone and estrogen levels play a huge role in those decisions. I know my own surging T-levels, especially when I was a raging youth, have made me act far more guy-like than I’d ever want to be absent them. They don’t totally define me but they do indeed have a hell of a lot to do with my behavior and self-image. Throughout the years, I’ve had to actively wrestled with chemical guy-ness in order for me to, as I’ve indicated, identify more with women than men.

All the above is predicated on the reality that not everybody is constructed according to the strict dictates of the binary gender system. Every one of us is on spectra that cover hormone levels, physical anatomy, psychological predilections, and perhaps a hundred or a thousand other factors.

Maybe I was lucky. I recall gym class at the boys high school I attended. Fenwick, in Oak Park, Illinois. Don’t ask me why but we were compelled to swim in the nude whenever the gym class schedule called for a week in the pool. Don’t get me started on that one, with fully-dressed swim coaches watching over fifty or so stark naked adolescents for 45 minutes a day. I shudder to think what drove that line of thinking.

Anyway, I recall one kid — let’s call him Paul — who, alone among us, had a hairless, curvy, jiggly body and whose genital package was shockingly minuscule. Fifteen-year-old guys universally check each other out to see whose junk is bigger, more dangly, more manly. Paul could never hope to win out that competition over anybody else. His stuff was so small as to be nearly non-existent.

Thankfully, none of us teased or bullied Paul. Perhaps we felt sympathy for him. Perhaps we said to ourselves, Thank god that’s not me. But, make no mistake, none of us failed to note Paul’s differences, even if none of us ever brought them up.

It’s because we swam in the nude that I was able to see that certain people are born with indistinct, undeveloped, or otherwise “un-average” gender anatomy. When I was 15, I began to understand people like Paul very possibly would be candidates for gender reassignment surgery. That’s something his parents would might have suspected from his earliest days. His differences surely were driven into in his consciousness every day he walked into the Fenwick pool along with 49 other adolescent boys.

All this is to say the idea of gender is far more complicated than This one’s a man and That one’s a woman. These lunkheaded anencephalics in Florida and Tennessee and every other statehouse where lawmakers are trying to codify gender may as well try to legislate which way a candy bar wrapper will flutter in a whirlwind.

The Gold-anodized Discs Attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 Space Probes.