Breaking Human Rainbows into Binaries

 

I often explain to people that physical sex is a spectrum. But what does that mean? Well, to understand, lets talk about color instead.

Colors exist on a spectrum. Nature gives us the rainbow, each color sliding into the next. So, how many colors are there?

Of course, there’s no “correct” answer. Some societies don’t even have a word for color, and describe an object’s color by analogy: “that ball resembles ginger flowers.” Some societies name a binary: dark or light. Some name three color categories: dark, light, or red. In Western civilization, Aristotle stated there were seven colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Today, Western science names a different seven as constituting the color spectrum, revealed when a prism splits light into a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.” ROY G. BIV,” as you may have learned at school.

I know that when I learned ROY G. BIV, it was in science class, and I presumed there was an objective reason for scientists to divide the spectrum into 7 colors. But there isn’t. Isaac Newton established these 7 colors during his research with prisms in the 1700s. He added two colors that Aristotle didn’t see in the rainbow: orange and indigo. Orange wasn’t a color recognized in European languages until the introduction of the sweet orange fruit around 1500. Newton added indigo because it was extremely significant as a color reserved for European royalty at the time, made from rare, very expensive dyes.

Today, when children in the U.S. learn to name colors, they learn to recognize orange—but not indigo. Dark blue-purple is no longer culturally significant—it’s not fabulously expensive to dye cloth such a color, and there are no longer special colors reserved for the nobility. And when you look at the contemporary classic rainbow flag, you’ll see it only pictures six colors, not seven, having abandoned indigo:

 

As I believe will be clear by now, there is no “correct number of colors” in the rainbow. In reality, the rainbow is a continuous phenomenon, blending across the spectrum. We can choose to cut it into five color categories, or seven, or a thousand.

Still, though the dividing lines are social and subjective, they do have power. As someone raised in the U.S., playing with the classic Crayola basic set of 8 large crayons for young children, I was taught to recognize blue and purple, but not indigo. And I just don’t see it in the natural spectrum, or it seems to me odd that we would name a tiny slice of the rainbow indigo, but not name the wider band of turquoise I see when I eyeball one:

 

This brings to mind some family history. Throughout my entire youth, my mother and her own mother had a running argument about whether turquoise was a type of green, or a type of blue. They would sometimes try to rope others into their lifelong debate, one demanding, “Look at the stone on this necklace; you agree with me that it’s blue, right?” Or “Look at this shirt—don’t you agree it is green?”

By the time I was 6 or 7, it was clear to me that this was a pointless debate. Turquoise is a color that is intermediate between blue and green. You could say my mother and grandmother were both right—turquoise is sort of green, but it’s also sort of blue. Or you could say they were both wrong. Both were able to identify turquoise as distinct from “regular” blue or green. Either way, arguing about it was a waste of time. Enjoy the pendant, appreciate the shirt, and stop trying to force their color into different boxes for adjacent ones considered more "pure"!

A friend told me that their sisters always argued about whether saffron should be considered “really yellow” or “really orange.” (It’s a yellow-orange color.) So it’s not just my relatives. You, however, may never have encountered such a debate. But imagine if you grew up instead in one of the world societies that just divides colors into a binary of “light” and “dark.” You can bet there’d be a lot more arguing, if you and your family were forced to negotiate whether to place a pile of color swatches into the light or dark pile! Maybe you’d agree that a crimson swatch goes in the dark pile, while pastel pink goes in the light pile. But what about a bright magenta?

I bet my family would debate such a color-sorting task into a binary of light and dark for hours! Or really, for life, since that is what they did with the color turquoise.

Dividing a spectrum up into a binary is extremely arbitrary. It’s bad enough doing it with color swatches. But you know what's worse? Trying to do it with people.

We’ve had battles over this for centuries now, when it comes to people’s colors. In reality, human skin comes in a wide spectrum of colors of beige and tan and brown and sepia. But in the U.S., under racial slavery, people were divided instead into a binary of black versus white, in areas colonized by the British. In Louisiana, colonized by the French, a 5-category spectrum of black/white racial categories was used (black, mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, white). In the West and Southwest, colonized by the Spanish, a rubric of mestizaje was used to define a 16-caste spectrum of privilege, depending on a person's blood quantum of Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry. These French and Spanish systems were both white supremacist, but they recognized different degrees of privilege and marginalization. However, in the East and South, colonized by the British, a person was assigned to a binary of “black” or “white,” subjected to or free from racial enslavement.

But where to draw the line separating the privileged from the oppressed? To ensure that a when slaveholder impregnated a person he enslaved, he produced, not an heir to his property, but a child considered his human property, the British colonies devised the “one-drop rule.” This said that anyone with “one drop” of African blood was black. After generations of such impregnation, by the time of the Civil War, many enslaved “black” people were mostly European by ancestry, and might have lighter skin than many people classified as “white.” All of the individuals in this photo, for example, were enslaved until the end of the Civil War, and classified as “black”:

 

We in the U.S. today inherit this history. Most African Americans have at least some European ancestry. And Americans continue to see people with mixed European and African ancestry as “black”, even when they are very pale of skin.

That said, today many more Americans of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds are rejecting a binarized vision of race, and claiming their mixed heritage. In the year 2000, the U.S. Census finally allowed Americans to check off more than one race/ethnicity to identify themselves, and the number of people doing this has surged. Many people are relieved and proud to be able to have the rich complexity of their backgrounds recognized. They want to locate themselves on the vast spectrum of human ancestry positions. They want to say no to participating in arguments over whether, for example, a person whose mother is Korean and whose father is Nigerian is “really Asian” or “really Black.”

And here’s where we get to intersex people. Today, a child born in the U.S. must be identified on their birth certificate as being either “male” or “female.” Physical sex is legally defined by a binary, and we are taught in our high school biology classes that this is scientific fact. But that is false. Sex, like the rainbow or the range of human skin colors, is a spectrum. There exist a wide range of intersex positions on the sex spectrum. Chromosomes, hormones, genitals, and gonads can each vary independently. There are many genotypes other than XX or XY (XXY, XXYY, Xo, XX/XY, etc.). People of all sexes all make, and need, the full range of sex steroids (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc.), and the balance of these hormones varies widely. People are born with a full spectrum of phalloclitoral forms between the expected norms of penis or vulva. All of this is true of all animals as well. The sex spectrum is a part of nature.

But Euro-American society has been trying to squash that rainbow of bodily forms into a binary since the high Middle Ages. It’s always arbitrary and subjective and awkward—yet like my mother saying that turquoise is “obviously blue," people have often believed firmly that they know how to classify someone intermediate into the “correct” binary box. Who gets to make that decision? In prior centuries, the church, then civil courts, and since the Victorian era, medical doctors. And on what basis? Church authorities and civil courts tended to focus on external genital appearance and lived gender. Doctors scoffed at this, and said the “true [binary] sex” was established by some principle laypeople could not observe, and only "medical men of science" could. Victorian doctors based their determinations on post-mortem dissection of the gonads, viewing them under the microscope, with testes making one “truly male” even if they were in the ovarian position, and the individual had vulva, substantial breasts, and did not grow facial hair. Early 20^th century doctors based one’s “true [binary] sex” instead on the newly-discovered testosterone and estrogen, based on the false presumption that people produced one or the other, which, it became quite clear, was incorrect. So that regime was replaced by a focus on sex chromosomes as soon they were discovered. But that chromosomal rule was soon displaced by a psychological and surgical focus on childhood sex reassignment surgery, with the intent to eliminate genital variance and produce a heterosexually-oriented, endosex-appearing patient.

Each group of authorities believed that they had discovered the “true dividing line” between male and female binaries. Each discarded the system employed by the prior set of authorities. And every one of them was equally wrong. There is no true, correct dividing line between light and dark colors, between humans being classified as “black” or “white, or between intersex people being pushed into male or female boxes. Whatever binary dividing line you argue for, it is equally wrong, because spectra are the reality. Intermediate positions are real.

And when you let someone else with power over an intermediate person decide what binary box to force them into, it’s always coercive and morally wrong. The one-drop rule may have been extremely clear and easy to apply—but that’s exactly the problem. It was used to enforce enslavement and allow slaveholders to benefit from sexual abuse.

Today, transphobic individuals, including those who conceive of themselves as feminists (the TERFs) are seeking to impose a new one-drop rule on intersex people. We see this emerging in the realm of athletics. We need to be able to examine and critique that, so let's explore.

Over time, various groups claiming authority under the regime of binary sex to decide who was “really male” and who was “really female” have drawn the line in different places in the middle of the spectrum. You might imagine that a rainbow of sex diversity would just be split evenly down the middle: 

 

 

But that’s not what doctors do. To some extent, their binary sex assignment choices are driven by the fact that physical sex has multiple dimensions--genitals, gonads, chromosomes, hormones—each of which can vary independently. This creates more of a complex multidimensional space in which physical sex is located. But their decisions are not just based on some preponderance of sex traits. They are driven by a principle of avoiding the surgical result of an “inadequate penis,” in service to the social phenomenon of fragile masculinity. In certain cases, they are driven by an aim of possible fertility, when ovaries are present, though they sacrifice testes without compunction. For many decades, the primary driver of binary sex-assignment decisions was to satisfy the principle of compulsory heterosexuality (and this lingers, long after queerness officially lost its label as a “disorder”). And from the 1970s-2010s, U.S. doctors claimed that it is generally better to assign intersex babies female, both to avoid psychological harm caused by fragile masculinity, and because, I kid you not, a surgical adage that “it is easier to make a hole than a pole.” So if we look at the binary sex assignments given to intersex infants by doctors, we get a strange patchwork, like this:

 

However arbitrary this may seem, it was presumed that doctors chose the medically correct, “true” or “best” binary sex assignment. Often, the fact that the children had born intersex was kept secret from them, because this was believed to ensure they did not question their status as girls or boys. Their “disorder of sex development” had been “cured,” and should no longer be relevant to their lives. Nobody but the doctors and parents need ever know. Concealment in a closet so deep even the person in it was unaware of that fact was deemed ideal.

But now transphobic politicians and TERFs claim that they have the authority to decide who is “really male” and who is “really female.” And their core principle is not to conceal a person’s intersex status. They want it revealed to the world. Their core principle is that “biological females” need to be protected from “biological males,” who are held to pose a sexual and social threat to them. Thus, they claim, anyone with male sex characteristics must be kept away from cisgender endosex women and girls. Intersex and trans women “do not belong” in women’s bathrooms or girls’ changing rooms. And intersex and trans girls and women must not be allowed to compete in sports with cis endosex females. It doesn’t matter, say these transphobes, if the trans and intersex women have received hormonal or surgical medical treatments, because they were born with “male sex traits,” and this can never be undone.

In other words, transphobic legislators and influencers follow a “one-drop rule” when it comes to deciding where to cut the sex spectrum in half to divide it into male and female. Any hint of sex variance permanently renders one male. As the racial one-drop rule supposedly protected white “purity,” so transphobic, intersex-phobic body policing is intended to protect “female purity.” That results in a scenario like this:

 

Yuck.

The thing about purity rules is that they always wind up harming the group they claim to protect. They cause moral harm to that group, by getting them deeply invested in exclusion and boundary policing and a search for traitors and infiltrators. And they wind up oppressing many within the group, as they are found to be impure in one purge or another.

Consider: over 10% of all cisgender women have PCOS, polycystic ovary system, which makes them produce testosterone well above the “normal female range.” This doesn’t make them magically into athletes, but according to the TERF female purity rule, people exposed to high testosterone have an unfair advantage that cannot be erased by medical treatment, and should be excluded from participation in women's sports. So there goes 10% of the population of people assigned female at birth. . .

And consider this: by the time she is age 40, the average cis woman has XY chromosomes in her body. That’s because the average woman will have, by that time, gestated, at least for a while, an XY fetus, and fetal genetic material crosses through the placenta into the mother’s body and implants there. (Also, XX genetic material from a gestator passes into the fetal body and implants there as well, but TERFs don’t care about whether men have XX chromosomes in their bodies.)

Should every woman who has been pregnant for any time with an XY fetus be excluded from playing in women’s sports? There are some scientists who posit that this implantation of XY chromosomes somehow prepares a woman to raise sons by making her more competitive. Many others roll their eyes at this as a just-so story of gender essentialism backed by no real empirical evidence. But that story very much fits with sex-policing reasoning about any "impurity" imparting a male taint that must be kept away from the biologically pure women.

If you slice the rainbow of human sex characteristics aggressively, paring off all deviations from the “pure female,” this violent act doesn’t just toss out women who were recognized as intersex at birth or assigned male at birth. It tosses out more and more women who were assigned female at birth without any controversy. (This is true of Olympian Caster Semenya today.)

Purity policing instills shame and secrecy. It does violence to the psyche. It harms not just people who have always known of their variance, but those who thought themselves pure, and benefited from that--until they are revealed to be "tainted", or they train to be an athlete, and then strike others as "too muscular."

Just look at life for people of mixed race under the American regime of the one-drop rule of white racial purity. Is that what we want to emulate, with regard to physical sex? It’s so very much better to recognize spectra. To embrace our mixed ethnic heritages, name them, take pride in them. To accept physical sex spectra in all their complexity. To celebrate human rainbows.

Let’s do that!

When Bigots Claim One Thing to Exclude Trans Athletes, and the Opposite to Exclude Intersex Athletes

This is Caster Semeya. Caster was assigned female at birth, without controversy, and raised as a girl. She always loved athletics. She found her calling as a runner, and trained hard, day after day, for years. In 2009, at age 18, she won gold in the World Championships 800 meter race. She was elated. But a competitor claimed to the officials that she did not believe Caster was really a woman. Caster was subjected to “sex verification” by an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, an internal medicine expert, an “expert on gender” and a psychologist. And it was found that she has an intersex status. In fact, the media found out before she did.

Caster has had to live her life under a gender-policing spotlight ever since. She’s been forced to take drugs to suppress her body’s naturally-high levels of testosterone, and had constant social media attention paid to how she dresses, the fact that she is a lesbian, and debates over whether the muscularity of her Black, athletic body reveals her admirable hard work and dedication to her sport, or some intolerable natural advantage.

Lately, transphobic “feminists”, otherwise known as the TERFs, have really been piling on Caster Semenya, in ways that reveal deep hypocrisy. Consider:

TERFs: There are only two sexes, you’re assigned one at birth, and that is your real eternal sex.

Also TERFs: I don’t care if Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth, he’s a man.

TERFs: Being raised as a girl socializes you to be a woman. Being raised as a boy socializes you to be a man. That determines your personality for all eternity and cannot be changed.

Also TERFs: You can tell just by looking at Caster that any attempt to raise him as a girl failed. Caster’s father says that as a child, Caster hated wearing dresses and liked to play sports with the boys.

TERFs: Trans boys are just girls who are tomboys with transgenderist parents! Their parents hate gender transgression and want to convert their inconvenient toyboy daughters into gender-conforming sons! Feminists must stand up for butch girls and save them!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya walks like a man, dresses like a man, makes muscles like a man, and therefore is a man.

TERFs: When someone says a child or teen is a trans boy, the truth is that the youth is a lesbian, and their parents reject that and are forcing conversion therapy on their lesbian daughters to try to make them appear heterosexual by convincing the poor girls that they are really straight boys! We must stand up for lesbians!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya married a woman, and the partner wore the white dress while Caster wore pants! Therefore Caster is a man.

TERFs: Prescribing medication to suppress someone’s sex hormones is pointless, as it doesn’t change who you really are. Also, it’s experimental, goes against nature, and is an intolerable thing to suggest to anyone.

Also TERFs: It is absolutely vital that Semenya be made to take testosterone suppressants, and be tested before every race.

TERFs: Taking testosterone or estrogen can’t change your sex. You are the sex you were assigned at birth.

Also TERFs: It’s irrelevant that Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth. Caster’s body was flooded with testosterone at puberty, making him male.

TERFs: Transgenderism is based on enforcing gender stereotypes. It equates being a woman with looking pretty and delicate and wearing makeup and being submissive. That’s evil misogyny!

Also TERFs: I can tell who is really a woman by looking at them, and that’s not a real woman. Caster’s too muscular, never wears makeup, is aggressive, and looks like a man. It’s not misogyny if *I* do the gender-policing.

There’s so much hypocrisy in all of this. And lest we forget, in Caster Semeya’s case, a whole lot of racism as well. The competitors who have challenged Caster’s right to compete have all been white women, crying white-women tears for the cameras. The TERFs who’ve been serving as talking heads in media interviews? Also a bunch of white women. There’s one who seems to find every Twitter conversation on the topic and post photos contrasting women athletes she claims are “really men” due to presumed intersex status—every one of them Black or brown—with women she says have been cheated of their rightful medals—all white.

(This makes me recall the weird racist claims made by a certain fringe about Michelle Obama—that she was really a trans woman or intersex, because she was too strong, and seemed to the racist detractors to have overly-broad shoulders.)

In the end, what we see are that trans-exclusive “feminists” are largely white women who believe they have ownership of the category of woman by right. And they seem to have no problem with deploying one set of arguments to exclude trans women, and totally opposite arguments to exclude intersex women. It’s sad and it’s ugly.

Yet Caster Semenya continues to rise up to compete, enduring intrusive media questions about her genitals, endless discussions of her dress and demeanor, and years of being forced to take testosterone-suppressant drugs against her will in a way that no person competing in men’s sports, no matter how high his natural testosterone levels, has ever been forced to do. Sometimes she’s allowed to compete and sometimes barred from competition, depending on rules that keep being changed for how typical a woman’s body must be in order for her to qualify for the Olympics.

Remember this: virtually every person competing in the Olympics has an atypical body. These athletes may be endowed with atypical levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge lungs, or extraordinarily long legs. We don’t police these biological differences, or require that to compete in the Olympics, you must have an average body. We don't randomly pick citizens of each nation to compete in international sporting events--we get to see average people running for the bus all the time. We don't find this exciting, and it's the very atypicality of elite athletes' bodies that enthralls us. It's only this very specific type of atypicality--being a woman with hormonal or genital or chromosomal variance--that has been policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.

And it’s all based on magical thinking about what testosterone does. Ten percent of cisgender women have PCOS, which makes them produce high levels of testosterone, but doesn’t magically make them athletic. And actually, when studied, it turns out that 17% of elite male athletes have testosterone levels below the bottom of the "male range." These men are not disqualified as "cheating by being intersex." They aren't regulated at all, probably because it's presumed that their low testosterone must be a disadvantage. Yet these men with low testosterone are not lesser athletes; they are just as extraordinary in their performance as the men with typical testosterone levels. This illustrates how there's no direct relationship between the amount of testosterone a person produces and their athletic abilities.

I myself am an intersex man, who has been taking testosterone for many years. My athletic abilities? Well, they’re better than those of a potato. But they are poor. What sort of feminist would argue that I should not be allowed to compete against women Olympians, because I have an innate male advantage over them and would win? That’s magical thinking, of a sort that posits a binary of male superiority and female inferiority. And it’s ridiculous.

The last thing a feminist should be doing is gender-policing women, telling them if they get too strong and muscular, they are no longer women. That refusing to wear dresses makes them men. That marrying a woman discredits them.

That’s not feminism, friends.

Understanding the Biblical Binary of "Male and Female"

 

According to certain Christians, the fact that the Bible states "male and female created He them" means that God only recognizes two genders, those assigned at birth. To be trans or nonbinary is unacceptable, and intersex status a tragic birth defect that must be corrected.

Of course, the Bible also says "the Lord makes poor and rich." This binary of rich and poor appears multiple times in biblical language. Do conservative Christians therefore say it is an abomination to be middle class?

Or consider the verse, "He will bless his loyal followers, both young and old." You'll find this binary of young and old many times. Yet there is no Christian movement to declare that people cannot be known as middle-aged, but must either be designated as old or as young.

The phrase "male and female created He them" comes from the book of Genesis, in what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Torah. Christianity started as a Jewish sect, reading Jewish Torah scrolls, and practicing Jewish religious traditions. Many of these traditions were relinquished fairly early in Christianity, such as the requirement of circumcision. By 300 years in, kosher dietary laws had been abandoned.

But many other Jewish traditions lasted much longer. One of these was recognition of intersex babies. Under the Jewish religious rules of halacha, babies were not just classified as male or female, but under a four-sex system that also designated babies androgyne (both) or tumtum (neither). People born androgyne were to perform the religious duties assigned to both men and women; people born tumtum were not required to practice either set of duties. Jewish tradition also recognized additional categories for those whose gender status changed, due to intersex characteristics manifesting at puberty, or to never experiencing puberty at all, or to human intervention such as surgery--all categories later Christians would lump together as "eunuchs."

For many centuries, Christians recognized androgynes, tumtums, and eunuchs as well as men and women. The Church canonized saints with these designations. It was not until the Middle Ages that the novel idea arose that the phrase "male and female created He them" was not a poetic dyad, but a limitation the Church should implement in categorizing human beings. And the courts immediately started dealing with a stream of cases involving people assigned to one binary sex at birth, but living as the other, or living in their birth-assigned sexes but having intersex bodies that they or the community felt was more like the sex to which they were not originally assigned.

This shift from accepting sex and gender diversity to squashing it into a binary was awkward from the very first. And violent, too: some intersex people were burned at the stake, like witches. The categories of witch, intersex person, and gender-transgressor were often conflated. It was a ugly time in history--witness the Inquisition--in which all sorts of people who deviated from norms were tortured and burned alive in the name of God.

Today, Christians are not in the witch-burning business. That period of history is viewed as one of superstition and terrible persecution. Yet some conservative Christians continue to revile people who are gender expansive, deem gender transition illegitimate, and demand that intersex babies receive forced genital reconstruction. They claim they must impose an eternal binary, for the Bible tells them so.

But there's no need for that. The phrase "male and female created He them" is a poetic dyad, just like the phrases "rich and poor" or "old and young."

Persecuting the socially marginal is the exact opposite of what Jesus called on Christians to do. Justifying such persecution by referencing a snippet of poetic Biblical language is not just nonsense. It is a great moral wrong

The Silly Idea of Your "Real" Binary Sex

 

Today, a lot of people insist that they can tell you what your "real (binary) sex" is. Let's talk about how strange that is.

Intersex is a fact of nature, found throughout the animal kingdom and across all of human history. Today, in Western societies, being assigned a binary sex at birth is a legal requirement--you need an M or F selected on birth certificates in most countries. This is so taken-for-granted that people are often astonished to learn that this is historically and culturally strange--that most world societies have traditionally recognized more than two sexes, allowing them to recognize and provide cultural places for intersex babies, and social roles for gender-variant people. This includes, by the way, Judeo-Christian societies, up until the Middle Ages. Jewish tradition recognizes four birth sexes: female, male, both (androgyne), and neither (tumtum), and early Christians followed this tradition.

But in the Medieval period, Christian authorities decided to abandon the Jewish halachic approach. They decided that the Biblical phrase "male and female created He them" was not a poetic phrase, but a prescriptive one: God demanded binary sex. 

The problem, of course, is that intersex people continued to be born. So you find court cases and church records in which judges and priests tried to decide what to do when there was a conflict over whether an intersex person (or even animal) was living in the "correct" binary sex, or "violating the law of nature" by being a man who menstruated or a rooster who laid eggs. Parties often fought vigorously, because the fact of the matter is that an intersex person or animal cannot be fit into the category "male" or "female" by definition, and what to do about that was a perpetual issue.

Then, in the 19th century, medical doctors seized on this issue and the social fascination with nature belying human ideologies of binary sex. The field of medicine was professionalizing and gaining status. And medical practitioners realized that they could gain social respect by claiming to be able to answer questions that laypeople could not. They said laypeople were confused when they saw a person with mixed sex characteristics, and could not categorize them as male or female. But medical doctors framed themselves as having impressive skills and arcane knowledge that laypeople lacked. They could dissect a person's body after death, examine their gonads, and usually, decide that those appeared to be ovaries or testes, only in rare cases finding those organs impossible to assign a binary sex status as indeterminate ovotestes.

Nineteenth century medical doctors seized on this process, as it proved successful in generating fascination and deference from the public. They proclaimed themselves teratologists (a term that literally means "having knowledge of monsters"), and declared that where unschooled laypeople saw intersexuality in a body before their eyes, doctors could determine a person's "true sex." And to do this, they announced that it was scientific law that one's "true sex" was defined by one's gonads. A person with a penis who had ovaries they named a "female pseudohermaphrodite," and a person with vulva and internal testes, a "male pseudohermaphrodite." Only people with ovotestes so intermediate doctors could not assign them as ovaries or testes, or those with one ovary and one testis, were "true hermaphrodites"--and this was rarely the case. 

And thus, long before they developed the ability to perform sex reassignment surgeries on intersex infants, medical doctors erased intersex people through classificatory sleight of hand. And in so doing, they both increased their professional prestige, and propped up dedication to binary sex ideology in the face of its obvious factual refutation.

Then, in the 1930s, scientists discovered the "sex hormones"--testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc.. Gonads as anatomical organs lost their luster, as it was the hormones they produced that were the new subject of fascination. And for the next several decades, the idea that testosterone was the "essence of maleness" and estrogen the "feminine essence" was all the rage. Doctors made all sorts of strange assertions: they could "cure" an abrasive, nagging, shrewish wife with estrogen therapy! Homosexuality was caused by a hormone imbalance, as men with too little testosterone mimicked female behavior and desired a husband to dominate and penetrate them! Testosterone "causes" leadership, and high testosterone would make one a politician or CEO or general! Meanwhile, low testosterone would impede mathematical ability or the capacity to read maps!

Only it turns out that people of all sexes produce and require all of the sex steroid hormones. And that women who are housewives tending young children produce more testosterone than women who are employed outside the home in business careers. And that there are no hormonal differences between people of differing sexual orientations. Yes, testosterone causes the growth of facial and body hair, and estrogen the growth of breasts and hips. But there are endosex cis men with very low testosterone who are elite competitive athletes. As a way to determine supposed "true (binary) sex," hormones didn't cut it.

So, scientists and medical doctors dropped sex hormone levels as the way to determine the "true sex" of an intersex person. And they switched their focus instead to chromosomes--particularly, the presumption that all females have the XX genotype, and all males XY.

Now, we should note that by this point, there were doctors and scientists arguing that no single factor could determine a person's "true sex." This camp would go on to develop the language of "best sex" rather than "true sex" in choosing a binary sex assignment for intersex infants (which sounds nice enough, though the outcome was the same--by this time, forced surgical sex reassignment was presumed "necessary" by doctors across the spectrum).

But there was great appeal to framing a person's "true sex" as based on their chromosomes for medical professionals desiring to hold onto the claim that their scientific abilities made them into oracles, able to perceive and proclaim a "true binary sex" where laypeople saw a spectrum. Chromosomes cannot be seen with the naked eye, so they make an impressive divination prop. Take a cheek swab, subject it to esoteric technical tests, and mysteriously out would pop the answer: XX or XY, female or male.

In fact, the claim of a neat binary sex division in chromosomes also proved quite false. There are so many variations, including people with the genotypes XXY, XYY, XXYY, XYYY, Xo, and more. There are people who are XX/XY, having some body cells with XX chromosomes and some with XY. This "macrochimerism" is accompanied by totally normative "microchimerism" in people who have gestated. It turns out that fetuses and their gestating parents exchange genetic material, so a typical XX woman who has gestated an XY baby will have XY cells found scattered throughout her body. Then there are people who have typical-appearing male bodies who are XX, and vice versa. 

In short, whatever tool medical science devises to divide the sex spectrum into two will always fail, because sex is not a binary.

However, there are those who are intensely devoted to the ideology of binary sex. These people have made a religion of it, and indeed, in the U.S. today they are often white evangelical Christians. But it can also be a secular faith--as we can see exhibited by TERFs. These are the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who screech that sex is an inborn binary that creates predator males and victim females, and frame trans women as males in dresses who pose a sexual threat to cis women. TERF ideology holds that sex cannot be changed, and that no matter what hormone therapies or surgeries a trans woman accesses, she will always remain "truly male" due to having an XY genotype that cannot be changed. This is a position of transmisogynistic bigotry, framed as "scientific fact." (That's hardly novel--the tactic of claiming one's bias is just a statement of scientific fact proved very potent in eugenics, culminating in the Holocaust. It's morally repugnant--but it's also effective.)

TERFs like to say that they have great sympathy for intersex people. They claim that most of us are disturbed by our status, and desire nothing but to have it corrected and to keep this medical past quiet, so we can lead normal lives. This position is the exact same one taken by doctors whose imposition of unconsented-to surgeries on intersex infants intersex advocates deplore. It also allows TERFs to frame intersex people who oppose their assertion that chromosomes determine "true sex" as at best unrepresentative, and as more likely charlatans--trans people pretending to be intersex to try to excuse their "delusional mindset."

But an intersex person need not be at all unhappy with their binary birth sex assignment to be appalled by Christian fundamentalists and TERFs championing the idea that one's "true sex" is determined by chromosomes. Consider a person with CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome). She has been assigned female at birth, having been born with typical vulva. Inside, she has no uterus, and what lie in the typical position of ovaries are testes. But because her body cannot respond to testosterone, and because some of the testosterone that those testes begin releasing at puberty is naturally converted to estrogen, she has developed breasts and broad hips in the course of a typical feminizing puberty, though she does not get a menstrual period. Her birth certificate says F, she was raised as a girl, her body looks like that of an endosex female, and she identifies as a woman. But according to the TERFs, because her chromosomes are XY, she is "really" a male.

This is just like how a 19th century teratologist would approach our intersex individual. Dissecting her body after death, they'd find that her gonads were actually testes, and declare her a "male pseudohermaphrodite." 

And this is violence. Sex policing and misgendering are always violence.

The fact remains that no matter what scheme devotees of binary sex ideology dream up to try to force the nature of sex into two boxes, it will always be silly, and it will always fail. By nature, sex is a spectrum of great diversity. Our intersex bodies are real, and they are not evidence of disorder or failure, but rather of the beauty and complexity of all of the natural world. Any claims that science can determine our "true (binary) sex" deserve no more than eyerolling.

Protecting a Baby Born with Three Penises

 

 

This story has been circulating through media and social media a lot over the past month.

A child was born with three penises: a typically-sized one in the usual place, and two smaller ones down lower. So media and social media have been full of people going, "Wow! 3," because a lot of people find both penises and atypical bodies fascinating.

What happened to the baby? Why, doctors "excised the supernumerary phalli" and then got lots of fame and attention publishing a report that they had performed the first such procedure on a triphallic infant ever, as the "condition" is "extremely rare."

And there's been basically zero pushback. People just circulate the story uncritically. It is taken for granted that if you are born with more than the typical number of fingers or toes or penises, the "extras" must be surgically removed.

Why? A surgery performed on a child without their consent should be functional, not social or cosmetic in nature. "Extra" fingers or penises are not dangerous; on the contrary, they can give a person extra, special abilities. Twelve fingers can make for great piano playing or baseball catching. And more than one penis can provide extra functionality as well ("wow, 3!").

I strongly believe that in a situation where a person is born with a body that is atypical in a way that is not hurting them physically, a decision about whether to make their body look more "normal" must be left up to them. All of us deserve autonomy over our bodies. Some babies born with 12 fingers may grow up to feel unhappy about their atypicality, and wish to have their hands surgically normalized. Some will grow up to love their special hands, and be grateful for the way their "extra" fingers enable them to, say, play guitar.

This is even more the case when it comes to genitals. So many intersex people who have had surgery imposed on them as children grow up feeling betrayed and mutilated, as doctors advised and parents consented to surgeries that turned out not to be what the child matured to want. Our genitals are our own business. Decisions about changing them should be ours alone, never imposed on us when we are infants. Only we can know, as we mature, what will make us feel most at home in our own bodies.

This story of the triphallic boy is not just some medical curiosity tale. It is an example of an approach to genital atypicality that is unethical. And we must criticize the presumption that doctors can usurp a child's autonomy to impose aesthetic normalization on special bodies.

Intersex Experience and Fears about "Gay Genetics"

Recently, results of a major genetic research study were published to substantial media attention. "Many Genes Influence Same-Sex Sexuality, Not a Single 'Gay Gene,'" wrote the New York Times.

The study, by Andrea Ganna and his large team, found that five genes were statistically significant in their correlation with whether a person reported ever having a same-gender sexual experience. But none accounted for more than 1% of the genetic association with same-gender sexual behavior. The study authors estimated that the total genetic contribution to same-gender sexual behavior was 8-25%.

The study was hugely controversial, and this is no surprise. In our society today, discrimination against people who are queer and/or trans and/or nonbinary is justified by bigots with claims that only cis heterosexuality is natural, and all else is disorder or sin. Opposing this, LGBT+ people employ "born this way" rhetoric, summarized in the Lady Gaga anthem: "No matter if you are gay, straight or bi/ Lesbian, or transgender life/ You are on the right track, baby/ 'Cause God makes no mistakes/ You was born this way, baby."

So, many LGBT-supportive groups fear that if scientific studies find that sexual orientation or behavior is not biologically set at birth, this will be used to justify homophobia. And that fear is rational; as soon as the Ganna study results came out, homophobic conservatives were claiming that they justified embracing conversion therapies, since people are "not born that way after all."

At the same time, other scientist-advocates fear that finding genetic markers associated with same-gender sexual activity would be terrible. They dread a eugenic outcome. That is, they fear that tests will be developed to screen for the marker genes, and parents will use selective abortion or selective embryo implantation to avoid having "gay babies."

Some reporters seem befuddled by the apparent contradiction here: LGBT-supportive commentators both fear that a genetic "cause" for same-gender attraction will be found, and that it it will not be found? So. . . is there something for everyone in this study, which found a genetic component to sexual behavior, but also found that it is pretty small in size? Actually, said some scientific critics, what the controversy shows is that this study should never have taken place. The findings were sure to have results that explained little, with the actual result would be that "a historically marginalized group has been left more vulnerable."

Well, the study took place and was published, and you can't undo that. For what it is worth, the study authors worked with LGBT+ groups to try to ensure the results would be presented in a respectful way. The authors stated that it was important that they do this study, if for no other reason than to preempt people with less sensitivity or active malicious intent from doing it instead.

So, how was the study finding of a small genetic effect "spun" in the media? Most of the major mainstream media and popular science reports on the study headlined the idea that there is no "gay gene." "No' Gay Gene' Can Predict Sexual Orientation, Study Says," wrote CNN."Search for 'Gay Genes' Comes Up Short in Large New Study," said NPR, and "The 'Gay Gene' is a Total Myth, Massive Study Concludes," announced LiveScience. As predicted by Forbes, the media chose to focus on the fact that there is no single gene determining sexual orientation, while all the complexities of why people might have the identities they do appeared, to use the newspaper metaphor, "below the fold;" that is, further down in the articles where only the careful or invested reader will bother to read or scroll.

So we know how the results were spun. But the debate remains: which finding would "really" hurt people who love people of the same gender? Would finding a "gay gene" protect people from discrimination? Or would it justify eugenic attempts to eliminate querity?

And here is where intersex experience can step in and advise LGBT groups about whether finding a biological "cause" for sexual orientation or gender identity would be a good thing or a bad thing. What our experience shows is that neither finding would be protective.

Intersex experience shows that the idea that finding a "gay gene" would protect people from discrimination is very naive. Our sex variance has nothing to do with identity or "choice," and there is zero doubt that we are "born this way." Has that made society embrace us? No, our birth status is flatly termed a disorder. Has knowing we didn't choose to be born intersex stopped the imposition of cruel conversion therapies? Absolutely not--the opposite is true. We are subjected to the cruelest of all conversion therapies: surgical sex changes imposed on us as children without our consent.

I wish more of the people who embrace the "born this way" LGBT advocacy position would learn about intersex experience, because we could show them that they are wasting their time. To be sure, it's not just intersex experience that can demonstrate that. Consider the Holocaust, during which millions of Jewish people were murdered because they were "born that way" (and so, for example, practicing Christians who were born to Jewish parents or grandparents were sent to the gas chambers, as "biological degeneracy" rather than religious belief was what counted in the eyes of Nazi eugenicists).

So, the "born this way" crowd is wrong, and the LGBT-affirming group with eugenic fears is right. Look what happens with respect to intersex traits. Some intersex statuses are genetic, and can be detected via amniocentesis. Selective abortion of these fetuses has caused the number of children born with genetic intersex statuses to fall substantially. Again, it's not just us; consider Down syndrome. Selective abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has led the birth of affected babies to decline by a third in the U.S., and to be virtually nonexistent in some countries like Denmark.

I have no doubt that if there were a prenatally-detectable marker identified for same-gender attraction, and especially for trans identity, it would be employed eugenically by some parents to avoid producing children with such a marker.

My question for the Ganna et al. would be: what would have happened if you had actual made a dramatic discovery of the thing you sought?

To be sure, I think that is impossible, because looking for a "gay gene" is like looking for a "democratic socialist" gene or a "libertarian gene." The reasons people have the desires and interests and worldviews they do are immensely complex. There may be some biological contribution to those, but it will be small and indirect. For example, one of the Ganna et al. findings was that a gene linked with a tendency toward risk-taking was one of the five they found linked with subjects' reporting having had a same-gender sexual experience. The explanatory power of the gene was tiny--it explained less than 1% of why people reported having a same-gender experience. And I will bet you that the reason there is a linkage has nothing to do with whether people experience same-gender attraction, but with how likely they are to be willing to risk reporting it to a researcher, given that the British study subjects were all older people who grew up when homosexuality was criminalized in Great Britain.

That said, hypothetically, what would have happened if Ganna's group had found that five genes explained, not 1% or less of the variance each, but could collectively predict if a person had a same-sex encounter, say,  70% of the time? I know that Ganna's team worked with advocates to try to present the results in a manner that would be supportive of people with same-gender attractions. I'm sure they would have said, "Look! People are pretty much born this way! Therefore they deserve social respect and legal protection."

But I would ask Ganna's team: is having good intentions enough, given the evidence provided by intersex experience? Being known to be born this way means that the large majority of intersex people identified at birth are subjected to mutilating physical conversion therapies. Intersex people, indubitably born this way, are much more likely to be in the closet than endosex LGBT people. We live with crushing shame and secrecy, imposed by doctors and parents.

What would you have done, how would you have felt, if the result of your research was that same-gender-loving individuals experienced the same high levels of medical intervention that intersex suffer? If eugenic selective abortions became commonplace based on "gay genes," as they are today for genetic intersex statuses?

It's probable that the Ganna team would say this would never happen, because they were careful, and gay rights have progressed so far, and we will never go back. This is a hopeful but seriously naive position. LGBT rights are being eroded every day today, by state and federal actions.

Still, I expect Ganna's group would say, in the end, science requires us to understand the world, and we simply must know more about human identities and behaviors. But if a general desire for genetic knowledge is so strong, why are teams like Ganna's not looking for genetic causes of homophobia, or of a desire to police others' sex and gender variance? How about the genetic markers for people who seek simplistic explanations for complex human behavior? Those are phenomena that cause a great deal of social harm, and deserve at least as much scrutiny as why people experience same-gender attraction.

Perhaps I sound very cynical. But one of the fundamental lessons of intersex experience is that doctors and scientists will tell people they are acting in your best interests, while cutting up your genitals and lying to your face about what they did and why. That's why I may be a social scientist, but I am distrustful of scientists when they act in the realms of sex, gender identity, and sexuality.

Some LGBT people, particularly white, upper-middle-class ones, may not yet have had the bubble of privilege popped--the one that lets people believe that social institutions will always act to protect them. And they are still rooting for scientists to find a set of biological causes--genes, prenatal hormone exposures, physical anomalies--that will prove they were "born that way."

But intersex people know better.

What If We Treated White Femme Celebrities Like Caster Semenya?

South African track star Caster Semenya has been barred from competing in her races in the Olympics because her body naturally produces higher levels of testosterone than is considered typical for women. Oh, but this is not discrimination, says the International Association of Athletics Federations, because she is welcome to compete in the men's races instead!

I've written at length before about why policing women's naturally-produced testosterone levels and banning them for being intersex is both morally wrong and nonsensical. Testosterone is not a magic elixir of male superiority--that's a ridiculous myth. And even if we imagined that it were, all Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. Swimmer Michael Phelps, world recordholder of 28 Olympic medals, has been the subject of lots of reporting celebrating him as a "mutant." (He is double-jointed, with very unusual body proportions, huge lungs, and muscles that only produce half the amount of lactic acid when exercising than normal.)

But let's not go over all that again. I want to address another issue: that the women being singled out, tested, and excluded for having high testosterone are vastly disproportionately women of color from the global south who are perceived as "too masculine." And often, it is feminine white women competitors who have demanded that they be tested. "Experts" relied upon in Semeya's case have used explicitly racist imagery in their presentations of her as posing some sort of threat to "normal" feminine white women competitors.

It seems pretty glaring that the reason Caster Semenya is being policed so intensely is that she is a queer black woman who is strong and muscular, and not interesting in performing femininity with long hair or nails for the comfort of certain others. And by "certain others," I mean all those policing bodily binary sex and gender expectations: misogynists who deem athleticism in women to be unattractive, and bigots like homophobes, transphobes, and those who deem intersex bodies horrifying.

So let's think about the outcome in a different context. Instead of strong brown athletes, let's look at women who are white feminine celebrities. Let's imagine that before we let them take women's roles in movies or television shows, we tested their natural levels of testosterone.

All of the women I've shown here would fail, because they all have high testosterone caused by PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Each of them has spoken to the media about it. Emma Thompson has talked about her struggles with infertility related to PCOS; Sasha Pieterse has explained that PCOS caused her to gain weight; Daisy Ridley has shared with fans that she battles PCOS-related acne; and Jillian Michaels has talked about her path to adoption after years of attempting to conceive despite her PCOS.

Each of these celebrities has a natural testosterone level outside the norm for women. Why then do we not classify them as having "hyperandogenism," as we do women excluded from athletic competitions? Why, because they are paragons of white femininity in the public eye! Daisy Ridley did acquire a misogynist hate-following from men who were angry at her Star Wars character Rey. But they were angry because they didn't want a "girl" to be the hero Jedi, they wanted a masculine white man. Jillian Michaels might have gotten a backlash because she has a strong, muscular body--something we associate with high testosterone. But she performs the role of the feminine personal trainer, and spent years policing the bodies of fat people on The Biggest Loser, so she got a pass. Sasha Pieterse was widely mocked and trolled in social media about her body--but this was fat-shaming, not policing femininity. Like many people with higher levels of testosterone, she found out that what this made her was fat, not "buffed," and her curvy body never triggered the stereotypes that high testosterone must make you butch.

So, these celebrities with atypical hormones have not faced the testosterone police yet--but imagine if they did. Imagine if some group started challenging women celebrities, claiming that some were bad role models, or taking acting roles away from "real" women, because they had "male" levels of testosterone, which gave them an unfair advantage. Those making this claim could back it up with a wide array of empirical evidence: actors who are men are given more speaking parts in movies; they are paid more; directors are much more likely to be men. They could claim men have a natural advantage due to testosterone giving them more assertiveness and "drive," making them by nature more compelling actors, more competent directors, and naturally running the entertainment industry.

Yes, that would seem obviously bizarre and nonsensical. But people used to make just this argument; it's simply no longer accepted. We no longer buy the old scientific studies, controversial but widely believed in their day, that it is their high testosterone that causes men to dominate politics, business, academia and the arts.

So imagine that each of these celebrities were treated like Caster Semenya, or Duttee Chand, or Maximila Imali, or Evangeline Makena, and had the same experience as these strong brown athletes. They would be excluded due to naturally high levels of testosterone, shamed, and presented as "cheaters." They would be framed as not really women, despite having been assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and identifying as women today. And they would be highly unlikely to feel comforted by being told they were free to try out for men's roles.

If you think it would be nuts to tell Victoria Bechkam or Emma Thompson that they are not really women because they have high T, then you should think the same about Caster Semenya.