By the time I was ten years old I was responsible for the laundry. That included ironing everything; pillows, sheets, and shirts, spraying everything liberally with Niagara™ (hmmm, I wonder if that memory of starch went into naming Viagra?). I also helped make dinner, cleaned up afterwards, dusted the furniture, and pulled weeds, along with a dozen other chores. My brother’s sole duties were to mow the lawn and carry out the garbage. By ten I already knew that my parent’s would pay to send my older brother to college, but not my sister and I; that they would buy him sports equipment, and I had to make do trading with neighbor boys for their discards. Our culture’s polarization of gender value was well defined in my family, and I chaffed at my inferior post.
I spent years developing my competence wherever I could, to prove to myself women’s value, my value. Now I can see that I was still thinking within the box of dual thinking. Our culture recognizes two genders; male and female, their value based upon who holds power. What if there are more than two genders, what if there are twelve genders? How would we divide up value then? Our culture may recognize two, but how many genders does biology recognize?
Our sex hormones influence our brain and bodies throughout the majority of our lives. Fisher (1990)[1] gives a succinct description of the masculinization/feminization process we undergo while a fetus. This maturation process, as we shall see, does continue, a little less spectacularly up to and through puberty.
At conception the embryo is neither male nor female. Around the eighth week of fetal life, however, a genetic switch flips. If the embryo is to be a boy, a gene on the Y chromosome directs the gonadal buds to become testes. These developing sex organs then produce male hormones that further build the male genitals. Later they mold the male brain.
If the embryo is genetically destined to be female, no male hormones act on it and female gonads appear by the thirteenth week of fetal life—followed later by the female brain…Woman is the primary sex—the first sex. You have to add chemicals to get a man… (Yet) nobody is wholly male or wholly female.
…Even this intriguing amalgam of male and female in each of us is shaped by biology. The fetal brain grows slowly and unevenly, so different parts of the brain become susceptible to sex hormones at different times. Levels of these fetal hormones also change continuously. So, tides of powerful sex hormones masculinize one part of the brain while they leave another region untouched. As a result, every human being lies somewhere along a continuum that ranges from super feminine to hyper masculine, depending on the amount and timing of hormones the individual was doused with in the womb.
So, there is a continuum from “super” feminine to “hyper” masculine. That reminds me of junior high when many of us were feeling an undertow of hostility to take a stand on one end or another. Some boys that weren’t near the hyper end were called “fag” and beaten up. While I didn’t join in the ridicule, I certainly didn’t do much to defend them either. I had what I felt was excessive arm and leg hair and I didn’t enjoy cooking, so I was plagued with doubt about my femininity, and worried that I’d be able to attract boys. One of girlfriends never seemed feminine enough to me. She wore clunky shoes and pants, wouldn’t wear make-up, and loved to hike and camp out. When we were in public, ostensibly to flirt with boys, I was usually upset because I didn’t think she was even trying. I’m sure that in that climate and my ignorance finding out she was gay would have ended our friendship. It ended anyway, and I suspect that was from the burden of not being able to be authentic with each other.
What else happens to our gender while we’re a fetus? We undergo three different chemical washes at three different times while in the fetus. [2] One wash determines the sex of our external genitalia. Bear in mind that even our genitalia is not always clearly a vagina or a penis.
A second wash of chemicals determines our sexual identity, which is to say whether we feel we are a boy or a girl. For those of us who’s chemical washes corresponded we didn’t balk when we called “girl” or “boy”. I imagine it would be very difficult to navigate childhood if one’s identity was male (or female) and one’s genitalia was female (or male) especially if one’s parents couldn’t see beyond a dual gender.
The final chemical wash we undergo in the fetus stage determines our sexual preference, that is, whether we are sexually attracted to men, women, both, or in some rare cases altogether asexual.
If we take into account that sometimes the genitalia appear to be indeterminate, as in the case of hermaphrodites, I count a possible configuration of twelve genders.
Comparing and contrasting is one way that humans acquire knowledge. Polarizing, seeing things as black or white, right or wrong, up or down, is a short-cut and takes us away from critical thinking. After I wrote a college paper on Hermaphrodites, uncovering a lot of informative gender research, and facing a requirement to volunteer somewhere, I decided to volunteer at Ingersoll Gender Center which supports the trans-gendered. My interview did not go well, however. Theoretically understanding and experience are not the same thing. I was not prepared to be greeted by a woman who looked to me like a man in drag. I couldn’t shake my limited experience and old biases. Needless to say, she did not think I’d be a suitable volunteer. The silver-lining, if I can call it that, is that I became a bit more aware of my assumptions, prejudices and even of my privilege of not having to defend my gender from being called wrong, or sinful, or simply a problem all in my head.
Once we’ve exited the womb our sexuality is still not fully pronounced. Staying with the hermaphrodite track, I was amazed to find out that one in three hundred people are born with ambiguous genitalia. By ambiguous I mean that there is not a 100% certainty of the child’s sex. A large number of people are born neither clearly male nor female. Since we can’t have that inconvenience in a two-gender world the medical profession working with the parents' “assigns” a sex to the child and surgically imposes one or the other, usually as a female. Fortunately, there are groups protesting against what can only be seen as a crime against the defenseless.
The physical criteria used to determine “true” sex, has changed depending upon cultural attitudes toward our definitions of male and female. I think these criteria will continue to change as technology and knowledge increases.
Generally speaking, we are used to humans designated as females having an XX sex chromosomal pattern, are born with a clitoris, ovaries, fallopian tubes, a vagina leading to a uterus, a separate outlet for the passage of urine, and with the labia minora and majora. They also usually have breasts and relatively little body hair.
Humans designated male have an XY sex chromosomal pattern, are born with testicles contained in a scrotal sac, vas deferens, a prostate, and a penis through which the urethra passes to open at the tip of the glans. However, these XX and XY chromosomal patterns are not fixed. XO, XXX, XXY, XY and even a mosaic of XX and XY are possible combinations. “In other words, females cannot without exception count on being chromosomally 46, XX, nor can males count on being 46, XY” (Money 1998).[3]
Our bodies contain receptors for the male hormone testosterone and for the female hormone estrogen. The receptors may accept, or they may reject the chromosomal pattern’s implied sex. It is also possible for receptors that appear to reject the implied sex to accept it later during puberty. In such a situation a child could have been labeled female only at puberty to develop a male body, or a child labeled boy to suddenly become feminized. I don’t have any experience with known acquaintances who have had this happened and can only imagine the emotional whirlwind they would go through at school and home in our two-gender world.
In a world that must make some sort of division has turned to external identifiers. (I mean, we do wear clothing, right? And we aren’t all privy to each other's “privates”). External identifiers require time to develop and are not 100% accurate either. For instance, “practitioners often relied on the menses as the female diagnostic counterpart to semen…But like so many of the traits generally thought sexed, menstruation as a sign was rife with problems, problems that boiled down to this: some women did not menstruate, and some men did.” (Dreger 1998).[4]
Breasts are hardly reliable as indicators, especially in a culture of obesity where both sexes now have breasts. In the 1800’s the medical community maintained very definite ideas about what made a breast feminine. “They gave to one’s hands grasping them the distinct feeling of mammary glands, and not merely that of masses of fat.”[5] Of course, even in the 1800’s men possessed “feminine” breasts, and they were lacking in some women.
Other discarded measurements have included height, bone weight, slope of shoulders, the overall proportion of one’s hand or feet, and my favorite, “a confidant masculine gait versus the feminine waddle”.[6] The use of delicate facial features and even of hair, since supposedly women have more hair on top and less on the way down than men, are not reliable indicators.
The seemingly fail-safe test of the presence of testicles or ovaries is not all that reliable either. Testicles may remain undescended until puberty and ovaries are occasionally found in unexpected places. In some cases laparoscopic evaluations are used and still the “true” sex is not determined. The criterion for what makes one a male or female becomes less clear the more we look it.
So what does this mean? Well, for starters, for me I’m aware of my privilege of having a vagina, feeling female, and liking men, because that fits in a two-gender world. During the past 35 years psychologists have devoted a great deal of research to “pinning down the differences between the sexes, independent of myths and stereotypes” [7] and find that some stereotypes are correct, others incorrect. This still leaves us inside the duality box though. We do need to become aware and question our assumptions about gender, and with it our roles, our values and may I say, even what many of us consider the basic human right to choose who we decide to love?
I would like to see us use this information to champion civil rights. Just as one example, knowing this makes me angry at the narrow viewpoints of people who fight to keep marriage “safe” from those who don’t fit neatly into the box. Why don’t we just admit there are several genders and support marriages that are between two consenting adults? (So, let’s see…that would be Adam and Eve; Adam and Steve; Eve and Sue; Chris and Pat.…You and me?)
[1] Fisher, Helen. The First Sex; The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World. Random House, NY. 1990 p xvi-xvii
[2] Seligman, Martin. What You Can Change and What You Can’t. Fawcett Columbine; NY. 1993
[3] Money, John. Sin, Science, and the Sex Police. Prometheus Books; NY. 1998. p 321.
[4] Dreger, Alice. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Harvard University Press; NY. 1998 p 97.
[5] Dreger, p 101.
[6] Dreger, p 103
[7] Pool, Robert. The New Sexual Revolution. Hodder & Stoughton; London. 1993 p 40.
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