“There are only two sexes: male and female.”
Here is an equivalent statement:
“There are only two colors: black and white.”
In ancient Greece and other cultures, they thought about color differently and described objects in terms of their lightness or darkness, their intensity, their texture. But not their color as we understand it today.
All cultures start with black and white, then eventually they add red to their vocabulary. Then one by one green, yellow, blue and finally brown. (No idea when mauve or chartreuse get in on the action, probably the advent of L.L. Bean catalogs).
No-one believes the colors weren’t there at the time, we just culturally didn’t recognize them yet. In The Odyssey, they spend all this time on a boat but it never occurs to Homer to describe the sky or the ocean as “blue”, because the concept didn’t exist.
And not to blow anyone’s mind, but Cary Grant wasn’t just black and white—the technology of the day just couldn’t capture his colors.
So too technology and human knowledge have caught up a bit with gender. If I were to extend the color metaphor, I would assess that our culture has discovered red, green and maybe yellow, but we’ve got a way to go before we hit 4K OLED technicolor.
So what do we know?
We know that back in the evolutionary chain of life, the Y chromosome is a late development in our ancestrial species. The genes that drove “masculine” attributes didn’t collect on the single chromosome until much later, and before that gender expression was likely more influenced by environment, temperature, etc. than simply an X/Y Mendel Square.
We know that there are at least 32 combinations of the X and Y chromosomes discovered in people (XXY, XYY, etc). We know that being XX or XY don’t solely determine your outward appearance of gender—there’s a whole host of other enzymes and counter-genes that interact and battle for supremacy and each person settles in with different percentages of their territories claimed by the opposing factions. The SPY gene pushes for “male” genitalia, WNT4 champions ovarian development, and on and on.
XY individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) grow up to appear completely female and likely go through their entire life not knowing their XY status. In cases of reabsorbed twins, the resulting person can have liver and stomach comprised of XX DNA and heart and lungs of XY DNA. XX individuals can receive an X with a stray SRY gene which causes them to generate outwardly male appearance. There are countless examples—gender is a messy spectrum, not a binary.
What about the perception of gender? What if by all outward appearances you are on one side of the spectrum, but you feel like you belong on the other side? Surely that’s just an excuse to go in a different bathroom, get an unfair advantage in your neighborhood field hockey tournament, get into a lower rent apartment (Bosom Buddies) or evade mobsters (Some Like It Hot)? It must be a mental disorder or an ulterior motive, there can’t be a biological basis, can there?
Brain science still has a long way to go, but early indications are yes, there could be a biological basis. We know that brain chemistry varies based on gender. We know that there is an area of the Hypothalmus (INAH3) that varies in size correlating to gender identity and/or sexual preference—studies of this brain area showed that the size corresponded to the self-reported gender identity regardless of whether the individual had undergone gender affirming surgeries or hormone treatment. We know that the sexual chemistry of the brain develops at a different stage than the gonadal development, so there is ample opportunity for the development direction to diverge. Given that that area of the brain’s size is a spectrum, not a binary, people could land anywhere in their perceptions.
That’s some of the science so far (highly recommend watching Professor Sapolsky’s lectures on human biology, linked below). At the very least, stating that there are only two sexes or two genders is on mighty shaky ground, and any confidence in that conclusion is not based on observable facts.
So why haven’t we recognized the gender version of the color blue yet as a society?
In my own case, I had always hoped to someday have a daughter. I wanted a chance to raise them in a way that empowered them and send a person off into the world without the weights of societal pressure that hold back women. I wanted them to know they could do math or fix cars if they wanted to, to have relationships with equal standing with their partners. I come from a family awash in males—my dad had 3 brothers, I had a brother, my mom had two brothers, of my 7 cousins only two are women—we had to marry into gender balance.
So when my second child was outwardly female, I was very pleased. When they started giving indications of being lesbian, I was even more pleased—potentially two daughters someday! My older son had previously come out as gay, so it had looked like the family inclination towards maleness was still in force—my youngest was the last bastion of girl power.
That bastion fell when he came out as a gay transgender male. I took it hard, not because I had any particular issue with transgenderism, but rather it is the disappointment of a mechanical engineer parent who wants their kid to be an engineer and they decide to be a doctor. Or something like that. You get the idea. (Spoiler alert: I got over it and realigned my advocacy energies, hence this article)
So that’s one resistance to the color blue. Another is a general discomfort that comes from internalizing another’s tastes upon yourself; if someone tells me they like liver and onions, I get a feeling of squeemishness even though I have no issue with people enjoying whatever food they like. I *should* rejoice that a fellow human has found joy in a food comparable to my love of Skyline Chili (which certainly repulses most non-Cincinnatians), but that can take growth. Growth can be hard.
Another roadbock is an aversion to complexity and embarrassment at being unable to master new (to you) gender concepts (“How do I keep track of all these pronouns!”), or just a general resistance to change, or The New, or these kids with their rock n’ roll lifestyle.
Probably a big consideration is religion—even if subscribing to a belief is not a cause of resistance to the spectrum idea, then it can be and certainly is used as a justification of opposition. Some belief systems have long acknowledged a “two-spirit” gender or the like (they got a jump on recognizing the color blue early), but many western Genesis-based religions haven’t gotten there yet.
I’ll state here that I am not a believer, and I understand I’m going to be providing opinions on someone else’s beliefs. So ignore them if you like, I’m not demanding you agree. I’m just offering an alternative to condemnation.
Many religious arguments center around God making two types of people, male and female, referring to the two Genesis creation stories, the Priestly (P) account and the Jahwist (J) account in Genesis 1 and 2. In one, they appear to be created simultaneously “in God’s image, male and female”, and in the other Adam is first, then Eve.
In the second story, the most common tradition is that God took Adam’s rib and turned it into Eve. One interesting item is the original Hebrew word sela means “side”, not “rib”. In Genesis 1:21 it is coupled with the word meaning “one of” resulting in “one of his sides”. This confused people and was thought of as awkward phrasing, so they just said “rib” in the translations.
But what if, and hear me out here, the story means that God took the prototypical human Adam, created in God’s image, and split “him” in two? He took one of his sides (the female side) and what was left was the male side. What if the original Adam was androgynous, made in God’s image, and then split to keep himself company?
This has some nice literary resonances, with marriage being the coming together in “one flesh”, essentially two people together making a facsimile of the androgynous God.
Furthermore, if God split the maleness and the femaleness in the first two, that can mean that the maleness and femaleness would intermingle, cross-contaminating down through the generations , possibly as we move closer to Godliness, we get closer to androgyny. When gay people marry, they are recognizing their intermingled maleness and femaleness to create that unity of gender that is God’s image.
Again, this is just the interpretation I would follow were I a follower of a Genesis based religion. But… all of religion requires an interpretation. Understanding the internally consistent belief system of the Bible often seems to me like trying to suss out the plot of Star Wars by examining Hardware Wars and Spaceballs. Why not choose the interpretation that brings us closer together instead of demonizing our brethren, and best supports the fundamental commandment “love one another”?
Blue is a great color. In modern times, it is claimed by the majority as their favorite. The sooner we all grow and recognize the blue of the gender world, the sooner we can learn about chartreuse in the sexual L.L. Bean catalog to come.
References:
Colors:
Biology:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6677266
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7139786
Can Biological Men Have XX Chromosomes? A Detailed Exploration of XX Male Syndrome and Related Conditions
Religion:
Data Over Dogma Podcast
http://dataoverdogmapod.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative
