Pieter Nagel: Swapping Thoughts

Nowadays it happens more and more that I can’t find what I want on the shelves, because the marketers of the products are too scared to say what the products actually are – doing so would confuse the customer, you see.

Say, for example, my swimming pool is cloudy. I’ve already checked the acid, chlorinator, etc. so I surmise that the problem is that the pool is full of a little suspended particles – underwater dust, as’t were. Lots of Gautrain construction in my area, so that’s no wonder.

No problem. I know exactly what I need and what it’s called: a flocculent. The particles are so fine that they never settles to the bottom of the pool, where the Barracuda can suck it up. But a flocculent is a chemical that will make them stick together into larger clumps, that will sink and be caught by the filter.

Off to the shops, then.

I innocently and straightforwardly ask the shop assistant “where do you keep your flocculents?”, and I get punched in the face almost as hard as that time I told the petrol attendant “I want ethylene glycol” and he yelled at me: “I don’t care where you want her, pervert, you stay the HELL away from my wife!”

No, I lie. Today is a good day, the shop assistant just gives me a blank stare. For some reason they often give me blank stares when I ask for things.

So I just tackle the shelves myself. There’s rows and rows of Sparkle-Brites, and WonderBlues, and SuperClears – and SuperClear Plusses. Hmmm. On closer inspection, none are subtitled “WONDERBLUE flocculent” or the like, so a deeper inspection is warranted.

I turn the bottles round, expecting to find some marketing shpiel to the effect that “SuperClear is a superior flocculent that has been lovingly developed in our high tech labs in order to…”. Nothing. Nada.

What I do find is lots of promises that WonderBlue will make my pool wonderfully blue and clear, or that SparkleBrite is an essential part of every pool-owners poolcare regimen. Of course, I read the exact same statement on all the chlorine, all the Hydrochloric acid (pardon me, Pool Acid), Cyanuric Acid (oops, I mean Stabiliser), and algaecide (sorry, that would be “underwater disinfectant – kills blue-green pool-germs DEAD!”).

What to do?

If I’m lucky, the back of the product will at least say “… cleans the pool by making tiny particles that cloud your water sink to the bottom, where they can be sucked up by the automatic pool cleaner”. Then I can reasonably safely guess they mean “flocculent”.

If I’m less lucky, the back will read “…helps your pool filter clean the water better”. Then I can make a somewhat more cautious guess that they mean “flocculent”.

Alas, I’m left trying to guess whether a flocculent is most likely to be a powder, or a liquid, or a gel. Why can’t they just label their products with a description of what they actually are?

As it stands, I can just buy the damn things and see if they act like what I hope they are.

Which is, I guess, what the average consumer does, anyway: buy lots of stuff until they find something that works (because it complements their particular habits for neglecting certain pool chemicals), and then swear by that as the be-all and end-all of ultimate poolcare.

In a future installment, I shall relate my adventures when trying to purchase vulcanizing glue for a hobby project, and how the helpful shop assistant pointed me to “a theatre make-up shop where other that can help Star Trek fans like you”.

Humor, Society

One reason why I’m blogging so much about this is because I am angry. I picked up a Star newspaper the other day, and they were going on about the recently leaked reports that Caster Semenya was a “hermaphrodite”. Mindful of the fact that that was an unverified leaked rumour, they added a nice, sober-looking “factual” sidebar that explained “What is a hermaphrodite?” for their scientifically illiterate readers:

A hermaphrodite (or intersexed person) is someone who has some or all of the primary sex characteristics of both genders (for example, a penis and a vulva).

A young woman’s emotional health is on the line, and they can’t even bother to go to the trouble of getting good, up to date, information to balance the rumours!

The term “hermaphrodite” has fallen into disfavour. Virtually all of the people to whom the obsolete label applies find it offensive. On top of that, it is factually confusing and built on outdated knowledge.

A hermaphrodite is a creature that is fully and functionally male and fully and functionally female. Like an earthworm – for whom being a hermaphrodite is, of course, a totally natural state of affairs.

Now, I’ve got no problem with hermaphroditic sentient creatures, if such existed, and I’m sure their society would be very interesting and instructive. For all we know, they’d have support groups for the earthworms that turned out to be only male or only female.

But the fact of the matter is that us humans can’t ever be hermaphroditic. Even someone who, as in the Star quote above, has a penis and a vulva, does not have all the characteristics of both sexes. Due to having a penis, they lack a clitoris. Due to having vulva, they lack a scrotum. (I guess the closest you could come to a true hermaphrodite in humans is a male and female conjoined twin with a single upper torso and head – you’d need the two pelvisses in order two have two complete sets of genitals.)

More importantly, the obsolete “hermaphrodite” terminology just gets it plain wrong. At the time, the medical establishment was trying to salvage the notion that there really are only two human sexes. Which left them in the position of having to decide, in each and every corner case, which sex a baby really belonged to on purely anatomical grounds. They decided that the essence of sex is in the gonads – if you have any trace of testes you were a “male pseudohermaphrodite” (i.e “really a male”), if you had any trace of ovaries you were a “female pseudohermaphrodite” (i.e. “really a female”).

But by that reckoning, this would be a man:

Eden Atwood

That’s Eden Atwood, Jazz singer. She says she’s “…hard at work on “The Last White Horse,” [her] memoir that chronicles [her] experiences with [Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome] as well as [her] music and performing career”. You can watch a short ABC segment, including interview, here.

This would be a man too:

Melody, member of AISSG-USA

Now. Really. I know that the distinction between male and female is not always as simple as we’d like to believe (as these posts of mine attest). But to insist that these are men just because they have Y chromosomes would be like fighting so hard to preserve the simple binary male/female distinction that you’re willing to fight to the point of destroying it even in those cases when there is no grey in-between.

By the way, I suggest – tongue in cheek – that any men that disagree about the “grey in-between” and consider themselves obviously physiologically male without a doubt, go and have themselves checked out by ultrasound for internal uterusses and ovaries they had not been aware of. Just in case. Because it can happen, and has happened.

I could also point to the 1 August 2006 Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders from the journal “Pediatrics in review” that says:

Advances in identification of molecular genetic causes of abnormal sex with heightened awareness of ethical issues and patient advocacy concerns necessitate a reexamination of nomenclature.1 Terms such as “intersex,” “pseudohermaphroditism,” “hermaphroditism,” “sex reversal,” and gender-based diagnostic labels are particularly controversial. These terms are perceived as potentially pejorative by patients2 and can be confusing to practitioners and parents alike.

The article then goes on to advocate dropping the “hermaprodite” based terminology.

All these newspapers, going on about hermaphrodites. It’s obvious that the “experts” they consult, if any, are not really up to date, so one wonders how much effort they went to to find the “experts” in the first place.

It’s also obvious that the newspapers seem to think that Caster Semenya is such an oddity, that they never bothered to go search for support groups etc. of other, real, live people with other comparable conditions. Because if they did, they would have found out how problematic the term “hermaphrodite” was soon enough.

Science, Society

I must admit, throughout all the recent hoopla around Caster Semenya, it’s the science behind the various intersex conditions I find fascinating. It feels like every day I came across yet another genetic or endocrinological sequence of events through which a person with XY chromosomes can end up a woman, or a person with XX chromosomes can end up a man (sometimes after first having started out life as a woman!).

I know there’s this trope that scientific study is dehumanising. But for me, once I’ve read of, say, Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, about how a genetic mutation that makes cells oblivious to the presence of testosterone can make someone develop into a woman despite the fact that, as fetus, they developed testes, and once I’ve thought to myself: “Cool! How fascinating” – the people within whom these fascinating genetic events take place just become much more human to me.

Because there are fascinating genetic events in all of us.

Philosophically, I feel: for millenia we’ve been human without the slightest awareness of cells, or atoms, or chromosomes, or the like. Being human, male, or female, has never been about any of that stuff (except that we’ve had and still had the sad tendency let our notions of “male” and “female” limit our notions of “human”). For an extremely short slice of that time, we’ve known about X and Y chromosomes, and that XX makes women and XY makes men. And soon afterwards, we’ve discovered that er, no, it’s not always that simple.

Seen from this perspective, it almost feels just as silly for, say, a CAIS woman to be bothered by the fact that she has a Y chromosome in her, as it would be to be worried about the fact that you’re made up of electrons and quarks. From the perspective of our humanity, our hopes, dreams, friendships and relationships, all of that stuff under our skins is, in a way, abstract and irrelevant.

When I just wrote that, it seemed like a contradiction to me – superficially at least. On the one hand, I am intensely interested in the precise scientific details of these things. On the other hand, I say they are irrelevant to our humanity.

I think Alice Dreger (whose writing I on these things I strongly recommends) sums it up well:

I keep running into smart people who seem to think I believe that sex “isn’t real” because it is all “socially constructed.” Allow me to correct this erroneous social construction of me by summarizing here what I think about sex and gender. I’m tempted to say “what I know about sex and gender” because there are few things I feel as sure about as this.

Testes are real. Ovaries are equally real. They sometimes make real gametes. (I don’t mean to imply they sometimes make fantasy gametes—just that they sometimes don’t make gametes.) Chromosomes and genes are also real. As anyone who’s every forgotten to wear a pad on the right day knows, menstrual blood is real. To the delight of this straight woman, penile erections are real. So are clitoral erections. I’m equally delighted about those.

When I say these are “real,” what I mean is that these things have a material existence independent of our ability as humans to notice, study, deny, politicize, or categorize them. I can’t believe I even have to assert this claim, but some academics have gone over the deep end and disagree. (I don’t hang out with such people unless there I have some form of pain killer at the ready.)

…Nature doesn’t care that we humans tend to like discreet categories. The real world is messy.

And whilst we ponder and agonize over the mess, all of the cells, genes, chromosomes, gametes, quarks, leptons, protons etc. in our body quite happily continue being us, quite oblivious to all our wrangling about how they ought and oughtn’t go about the business of being us.

Science, Society

I’m not no red football
to be kicked around the garden
No no

Red Football, Sinéad O’Connor

As I watch the tragic farce of the Caster Semenya’s sex verification debacle unfold, I feel sorrow for her. What must it feel like for her to learn, in such a publicly humiliating spectacle, that she has testes hidden inside her?

One small piece of good news in all of this is that apparently someone finally saw fit to give her access to professional trauma counseling. I just sincerely hope that those counselors are well and truly independent of those bastard organisations that put Caster in this spot in the first place.

As the sex row washed over our newspapers, like a weeks-long slow-motion crash test, I’ve learnt a lot more about the many ways in which human sex and gender is só much more intricate than our simplistic notions would suggest. (Not from the newspapers though – their reporting is generally atrocious).

And I feel a growing sense of outrage at the paternalistic, daddy-knows-best, keep-em-in-the-dark way these people have been treated.

It’s a recurring theme: well into early adulthood, pediatricians, gynaecologists, parents, deliberately lie to someone about exactly why doctors are so concerned about their nether regions. People giving consent to surgery to have their “twisted ovaries” removed – only to find years later in life that they never had ovaries in the first place, and that “twisted” was an euphemism for “your ovaries were testes, girl”.

I know a lot of this is motivated by a desire to protect these children with atypical sex development. But what I read from the adults who emerge on the other side, it just doesn’t work. They know there’s something different, they know it’s not normal to have genital surgery every few years, to have countless hormone therapies – and the fact that no one will tell them what and why this is happening to them just makes them feel isolated and lied to. That’s a recurring theme: for many of these people, having been lied to and operated on without their knowledge and consent is the bigger pain – not so much the fact that the have unusual sex organs.

And amongst the shameful treatment of Caster, I see echoes of that same paternalism. The fact that Athletics South Africa saw fit to do a secret sex verification means that someone there very well suspected that she had some or other intersex condition. The fact that they did it under false pretenses, and didn’t involve her in weighing the risks of competing internationally versus having her sex questioned on the world stage, just feels like gambling with an innocent teenager’s psyche.

As an aside: how the heck does one do the intensive kind of sex verification they did surreptitiously, any way? “Ok, girl. The first part of your drug testing was when we took blood. That was to test for steroids. The second part was when the psychologists kept asking you questions about whether you feel more like a man or a woman. That was, ahem, er – to test for cocaine. Now, for the next part, we now need you to get in the stirrups so we can photograph your privates, so, er, we, um… it’s all Science my dear, just trust us!”

Lastly, I am outraged at the cowardly way some of the officials involved try to hide their mistakes. “The South African constitution forbids us to do sex testing, and that’s why we had to send her off to Berlin without warning”. Yeah right. The constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. How do you leap from there, to the notion that the constitution forbids the consensual diagnosis of sex-related conditions, or forbids psychological counseling to help a teenager learn and understand why that diagnosis might need to be sought in the first place?

Society