Pieter Nagel: Swapping Thoughts

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 On top of that, it is factually confusing and built on outdated knowledge.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

The photo above is from Natual History Museum’s Darwin – Big idea big exhibition.

I like it. It seems to humanize Darwin more. Maybe it’s because of the pose – or rather, lack of one, compared to the typical stiff an over-posed Eighteenth Centrury portraits. It almost seems as if the photographer interrupted him halfway while doing something, and any moment now he’s going to put his finger down and show us some or other delicate earthworm observation he was busy with.

Hat tip to  Antonio Martínez Ron.

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