Why chromosomes?
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.