Rebuttals

[liv]

Two rather good pieces recently, pointing out that binary gender is not an eternal verity. It's not scientific or natural or genetic. And it's not classical or what European culture (let alone all humans!) has always believed until the recent few years.

I mean, I don't expect this stuff to be news to most people reading here, but it's really good to have such readable, erudite rebuttals to essentialist and transphobic views making spurious appeals to authority.

Comments

[sfred]

This comes on the day when I have, for the first time, actually mentioned (in passing) being genderqueer at work, and (more relevant, actually) have said I'll find some resources for explaining the non-binary nature of sex and gender. Thanks for links! Obviously I'll be giving them gentle-introduction ones as well.

[liv]

Nicely done on the mentioning your gender stuff at work, I hope the consequences are only positive. And good luck on taking on the Explainer role, that's a really good thing to do if you can but I know very well how exhausting it is.

[sfred]

Thanks!

[ptc24]

That first one - there's a small side point about indirectness and gene interactions that makes me slightly twitchy, but I think this is about presentation rather than any dispute over facts... No, if I'd read that article not knowing what I know now, and then went on to find out what I know now, I may well have ended up feeling like I'd been lied to, or at any rate misled.

In the 1980s, it was believed that scientists would find a single gene on the Y chromosome and that could be christened the "sex-determining gene." My first impression was, yes, we've found it, it's SRY, XX people with SRY routinely get assigned as male, XY people with no (or no working) SRY get assigned as female, this seems to be OK most of the time. Then I remembered CAIS, and that XY (with SRY on the Y) and no working androgen receptor usually gives a female phenotype. There's more about interaction later when I've introduced some more ideas.

The amusing twist is that AR is on the X chromosome, which really messes up the "essence of femininity" thing.

My understanding from your book is that the only known role that the Y chromosome plays in sex is that it helps with the development of testes and sperm, and that's about it, right? ... That's about all we know

As I understand it, if you consider a Y chromosome in splendid isolation, it does very little - maybe it decomposes slowly in vacuo. If you consider it in the context of a typical rest-of-genome and environment, then it's presence correlates very strongly - well, much more strongly than a social scientists "strong correlation" - with just about any operationationalisation of maleness or femaleness going. Or even mere correlates of these. Beards, for instance. You might want to define a big disjunctive pheontype that's beard-or-shaving-or-electrolysis/laser-or-castration-or-early-antiandrogen-therapy-or... (or no-beard-or-testosterone-administration-or-...) and get a very strong correlation that way. I'm talking about the differences differences in Y-chromosome-having make, in the context of human life as we find it. It's not deterministic, but what (except maybe the evolution of the universal wavefunction, should there be one) is? Either way, it's hard for me to come up with a way that means it makes sense to say that Y chromosomes make testes but not beards. Maybe you can say Y chromosomes make beards by making testes, but that's the opposite of saying that Y chromosomes don't make beards.

So, back to gene interactions. How to take the context of a gene into account, given that strands of DNA in isolation do very little? One approach is the statistical approach, looking for correlations within some population or sample. Another approach is to look at multiple-gene genotypes one at a time. To a certain extent this latter approach is interesting, but if you consider too many genes at once, then you get a combinatorial explosion, and if you don't, then you have to take the same statistical approach, looking at the differences differences make.

That got rather long, didn't it?