I just told you about my brief history with the gaming community. I drifted away from it into something else, and that something else also shaped the way I think about these feminist issues. I became a scientist. And worst of all, my trajectory started with neuroscience, and led me into developmental biology and genetics, and then on to evolution, and I’ve got to tell you, those subjects…it’s almost as if they were designed to put you on a collision course with feminist concerns. Just think, I could have gone into physics or chemistry and avoided thinking about sex and gender altogether…until, of course, I noticed the humanity of my colleagues.
What brought this on is an excellent article on the history and genetics of the sex chromosomes. Two things leapt out at me, in part because they confirmed something I’ve been trying to teach my students for years.
-
The X and Y chromosomes are not girl chromosomes and boy chromosomes, respectively. There is a bizarrely essentialist approach to these concerns that even scientists sometimes take, and it’s infuriatingly wrong.
The X is dubbed the ‘female chromosome’, takes the feminine pronoun ‘she’, and has been described as the ‘big sister’ to ‘her derelict brother that is the Y’ and as the ‘sexy’ chromosome. The X is frequently associated with the mysteriousness and variability of the feminine, as in a 2005 Science article headlined ‘She Moves in Mysterious Ways’ and beginning, ‘The human X chromosome is a study in contradictions’. The X is also described in traditionally gendered terms as the more ‘sociable’, ‘controlling’, ‘conservative’, ‘monotonous’, and ‘motherly’ of the two sex chromosomes. Similarly, the Y is a ‘he’ and ascribed traditional masculine qualities – ‘macho’, ‘active’, ‘clever’, ‘wily’, ‘dominant’, and also ‘degenerate’, ‘lazy’, and ‘hyperactive’.”
None of that is true. The X and Y have different genetic properties and evolutionary histories, but they do not define the entirety of your sex. The Y has a little trigger on it that activates a cascade of gene activities on all the autosomes and also the X chromosome that generate ‘maleness’, whatever that is; ‘femaleness’ is likewise the product of complex patterns of gene activity that are spread throughout the entire genome. Sex is most definitely multigenic, and every gene that has differential sexual effects is wildly pleiotropic.
If you want to talk about genes and sex, you’ve got to be more informed than this cartoon version of men and women reduced to just whether they have an XX or XY chromosome set. It’s one of the things that enrages me about the ongoing abuse of science by politicians who think they have perfectly encapsulated all the complexity of sex and gender by trying to restrict bathroom use by what kind of sex chromosome a person has. Do they even realize that these chromosomes have next to nothing to do with the anatomy of the crotch, which requires the carefully choreographed interactions of thousands of genes? Or that the brain is even more indirectly influenced by these magic markers of gene organization? And worse, most of the population has no clue what their karyotype looks like anyway, so their logic reduces to “My sex is male/female. Males/females have XY/XX chromosomes. Therefore, I have XY/XX chromosomes.” That isn’t always true. And even when it is true, it’s not as crudely straightforward as they think it is.
-
There’s another thing that stunned me about the field I was studying. I’ve always been interested in history (developmental biologists should be: “everything is the way it is because of how it got that way,” as D’Arcy Thompson would say), and when you dig deep into how genetics, for instance, came to be, you discover these little neglected stories. The superficial history of genetics is a series of great Men: Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, for instance. There’s no denying their importance, but then you look at who was actually doing the work — this is a deep truth of science, that most often it’s teams of students who are laboring under the Great Man who are actually getting the job done in the lab — and there are all these women everywhere, largely uncredited, and working in careers that would never lead to positions of prominence, because institutions simply did not hire women for tenured professorial positions.
So then you have to grub around in the corners of the science to find acknowledgments of women contributing to genetics. And even then, their work is diminished, as happened to Nettie Stevens.
Between 1903 and 1906, Nettie Stevens at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania investigated this “X element”, and found that it wasn’t alone – there was a tiny Y chromosome hidden right next to it. Elsewhere, Wilson (he who first used the phrase “sex chromosomes”) also found the Y, and agreed with her that its presence seemed to influence the development of male sex characteristics. (Richardson takes some time to sardonically note the extraordinary achievements Stevens, who was never offered a full faculty post, made “in the face of few opportunities for women” – when she applied for post-doctoral funding from the Carnegie Institution in 1903, she “assembled stunning letters of recommendation” from America’s most prestigious cytologists, and “none failed to note her brilliance – for a woman”.)
There are lots of instances like that. William Bateson, another of those seminal early geneticists, was very influential for his work on homeotic genes and the translation of genetics into morphology. He was also notable for the fact that he took on large numbers of women to work in his lab. You could even argue that the person most responsible for the recognition of the importance of cell and tissue interactions in translating genes into form was Becky Saunders. Do you hear much about her? Not unless you read historical minutiae any more.
There is a lot in these stories that reminds me of creationism. There’s the fundamental wrongness of how they mangle the science, and there’s the coupling of bad science to the preservation of injustice in society.
It’s no wonder I’m kind of cranky all the time.
Oh, yeah, and don’t get me started on how science is tortured by racists.
Also: chromosomal essentialism is an abuse of science against men.
Probably not. The message of high school science class is clear: X and Y determine sex. That’s the source of my knowledge about genetics, and probably most folks in politics. Your description seems transparently obvious. So, I thank you for clarifying this in such simple terms. You should write a book for the lay audience on such misapprehensions about genetics and developmental biology.
This is something that I have tried to consider as I teach introductory genetics to my freshperson bio class. But I am guilty of tipping things the other way, just for fun, really, and I thought to share that here. I describe the X chromosome as this very large chromosome which carries about 2,000 genes and that many of these are essential for survival. Then I point out the Y chromosome, and I mention that it is puny and decidedly less important since it has only a few hundred genes and that we can survive without it. This usually gets a giggle, which was what I wanted.
Gah! Guilty. When I think the men in my life are being weird, I refer to them as ‘those Y-chromosome people’. Must stop. And probably need to read a book about how these X-Y chromosomes work.
But I’m wondering- when I say that I usually mean: I am giving this person a pass on doing something that makes me uncomfortable (aggressive speech, competitiveness, violent D&D story-telling, apparent obliviousness) or explaining why they might be interested in something that bores me (movie car chases, extended fight scenes) on the grounds that their brain works differently from mine. So I must (duh!) subconsciously have this idea, that I consciously reject, that the behavior appropriate to a man and the behavior appropriate to a woman are somewhat different things. Huh.
If I was going to uphold some standard-for-all-humans, what would I put in, I wonder?
People assign genders to chromosomes? That’s a variety of wrong I haven’t seen before.
Of course, even if it magically turned out that literally every person with a penis had an XY genotype and literally every person with a vagina had an XX genotype, it still wouldn’t justify the claim that there is any (meaningful) difference between the two. So the logic is invalid and the premises are false.
@5 Jake Harban
You’re saying you could just as easily have an exact match over several billion samples by pure accident?
It is also worth noting that this article is based on a book – Sex Itself – by Sarah Richardson, who is a historian and philosopher of science. We need all the positive PR we can get.
People like to be able to fit things into simple, discrete pigeonholes, when almost everything is highly overlapping bell curves. Often a multitude of layers of interdependent bell curves.
Things like sex/gender/cultural stereotypes are only useful if you had to place bets on what people are like before meeting them. Many stereotypes would help you shift the odds of winning your bets in a long-term statistical sense but they are pretty useless when you try to apply them to individuals. And to they extent that they are “true”, it usually says nothing about why they are “true” (nature/nurture). But many people (especially those who don’t understand statistics) just run with their confirmation bias and make sweeping pronouncements about the sexes; shoving individuals into their nice tidy pigeonholes.
I had a lot of conversations about those experiments a couple of years ago that “proved” that men’s and women’s brains are wired fundamentally differently. Those headlines even reached some of my daycare coworkers who don’t follow science at all. Thanks to PZ and other FTB’ers (I seem to recall at least Mano Singham & Stephanie Zvan) for a bunch of good articles putting that study in proper perspective.
Men are from Earth, women… also from Earth. (not even considering the impossibility of coming up with clean definitions of ‘men’ and ‘women’)
Dammit, I started my previous comment with about pigeonholes with a pigeonhole. “People like to” should be “People tend to like to”. I’m usually more careful about speaking in absolutes.
How many folks take any biology beyond what is necessary to get out of high school and move on to whatever else they are doing with their life. And my high school, which was a pretty nice place (go Bombers!) taught that fairly stripped down xx/xy dichotomy to anyone who wasn’t moving on to take anatomy senior year. Breaking the cycle of such black and white thinking needs to start a lot earlier than the training of biologists in college if we want to see wider acceptance of the complexities of gender.
@#8 & 9, Golgafrinchan Captain:
HOLY SHIT, STOP THE PRESSES!!!
In all seriousness, all the yes. To PZ and your commentators. This is the sort of stuff that concerns me, as a trans person, so I always appreciate it when you and your commentators can communicate on this topic in more accessible terms. I have a couple years of biology and genetics under my belt, so I understand enough to read about this but don’t always feel comfortable trying to reteach it.
The thing that annoys me most about the way some people tout the XX/XY system as the universal be-all and end-all of gender is that it’s not universal. Birds and some reptiles and insects use a WZ/ZZ system where it’s the male that has the ZZ chromosome pair and the female has the WZ pair. And don’t even get me started on that weird haplo-diploid system the social insects use… or on the notion that men are going to “disappear” because the Y-chromosome is shrinking… gah, I’m not even a biologist!
Arguing that sex chromosomes have next to nothing to do with human anatomy is as much of an exaggeration as arguing that they have everything to do with human behavior.
Lou@10 when I went to high school in Saskatchewan in the early ’80s you just needed credits in a science to graduate. So I took chemistry. Any involvement in biology I had was in grade school, and the only thing I specifically remember doing was looking at pre-dissected frogs at some point. I doubt genetics came up at all.
I am always so happy to see someone bringing up conversation about chromosomes and gender! As an XY female, it makes it easier to approach the topic with others and come to terms with it personally. Thanks PZ!
chris61@13:
Seriously, checking out Wikipedia’s entry on sex determination should be enough to disabuse yourself of the notion that sex chromosomes are the key to understanding the process. What happened historically was that researchers noticed that females had an XX karyotype and males had an XY karyotype, which led to the obvious inference that the karyotype determines sex. But that theory was worked out in 1905 — long before anyone knew the structure of DNA, and it isn’t so much outright wrong (most men have XY and most women gave XX so most of the time you can guess a person’s sex from their karyotype with reasonable predictive success) but it’s a causation/correlation error.
We now know that chromosomes are gigantic libraries of genetic material, and the library has NOT been organised thematically like a Dewey-decimal system. The reason the X/Y system works as a good simplification in humans is that the SRY gene is found on the Y chromosome, so it acts as a near-random sex switch by the process of chromosomal sorting in gametogenesis. But the cascade of processes the SRY gene activates that creates a male phenotype involves lots of other chromosomes, including some on the X chromosome, and occasionally the SRY gene migrates to the X chromosome which makes it entirely possible to be a male with an XX karyotype. And having a Y chromosome doesn’t always take one down the male reproductive path — you can be an XY female because the SRY gene is nonfunctional, or you can be an XY female with a functional SRY gene but a lack of androgen sensitivity (in this case, the change is NOT on the Y chromosome).
If you want to read an excellent, brief, clear explanation, check this out:
http://www.isna.org/faq/y_chromosome
The money quote:
As we know, the X chromosome is soft and frilly and in the right light has a pink hue, where the Y chromosome is hard, tough, and has never been observed to cry.
@16 chrislawson
It’s a strong correlation. 99% or more of the time you can predict anatomy from sex chromosome complement. Have a Y, you’ll likely have a male anatomy. Not have a Y and you won’t. Yes you can be an XX male or an XY female but those are very rare (being due to rare mutations) which is why arguing the sex chromosomes have next to nothing to do with anatomy is an exaggeration.
For further interesting details, philosophy of science and (trans)gender politics, see Dreger’s book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. A tangled tale, but worth the read.
@19
Or instead, don’t read it and stop supporting someone that spreads the claim that trans women are either “an advanced sort of male homosexual” or fetishists.
chris61:
Did you not read the rest of chrislawson’s comment @#16? This quote right here, for example:
Let me assume you’re not going to dispute facts like that. I take it that “have something to do with” doesn’t just mean there’s a “strong correlation” or just a positive correlation. So your argument doesn’t follow: you haven’t given a valid reason why it’s an exaggeration. If it has “next to nothing do with” them, that means those are not causally relevant to what realistically happens in the actual world. If you’re going to understand or explain how something really works, what it really is, how it’s related to other stuff, etc., then simply finding correlations isn’t sufficient.
For instance, if you want to know how global warming occurs, why it occurs, what effects it has or doesn’t have on anything else, etc., the global number of pirates has next to nothing to do with that. I don’t care how incredibly strong the correlation may be — you definitely don’t fucking grok something about the subject of global warming if you think pirates have something significant to do with it. This example seems a bit more perverse than yours, granted, but it’s meant to draw the distinction clearly.
So, you can’t coherently cite a correlation like this (whatever it may be, although I’m sure 99% is an invented statistic) as some kind of evidence against the notion that X and Y chromosomes aren’t especially important in how sexual development works in actual human beings (for “rare” people as much as anybody else). Simply put, people are talking about what goes on in the real world, not just your ability to predict things. It may be convenient for you that you can use something fictional to make fairly decent predictions, but it is still fictional. And if you recognize that you’re doing it and are satisfied with taking an instrumentalist sort of view, with having “knowledge” which is merely about what you think you can predict, then you have nothing to complain about regarding factual realistic claims like this, since instrumentalism isn’t the sort of position which even attempts to say anything useful about what is actually the case.
@19
Oh absent gods, no! That’s an absolute travesty of science written by someone with an axe to grind and an obsession bordering on the creepy with ‘proving’ trans women aren’t women.
Here. Zinnia refutes it with actual science, point by point: http://genderanalysis.net/2016/04/alice-dreger-autogynephilia-and-the-misrepresentation-of-trans-sexualities-book-review-galileos-middle-finger/
@21 consciousness razor
The sex ratio for humans at birth is ~1:1. It is ~1:1 because most of the time an X containing female gamete is fertilized by either an X containing or a Y containing male gamete. Most of the time those sperm are present in approximately equal proportions. XX gives rise to a female anatomy and XY to a male. It is not only a strong correlation but a mechanistic explanation. At a molecular level there are multiple other genes involved during development but it is only rare mutations in those genes that will alter sexual anatomy and the frequency of those mutations are too low to affect the sex ratio on a population level. Is that better?
@#23 chris61
Compare to:
As long as I’m understanding consciousness razor’s comments correctly, I think you’re still missing the point.
@24 Siobhan
No, I understand chrislawson and consciousness razor’s point. There are genes located on chromosomes other than the X and Y that play important roles in the development of male and female anatomy. There are in fact more, by sheer numbers, of important genes located on those other chromosomes than there are on the X and the Y. My point was those genes are only rarely mutated so most of the time sexual anatomy is determined by whether a person has two X or one X and one Y chromosome.
Think of it this way. HIV causes acquired immune deficiency and smoking causes lung cancer. There are multiple other causes of both acquired immune deficiency and lung cancer although most of them are pretty rare relative to the major causes. Would you say that HIV next to nothing to do with acquired immune deficiency or smoking has next to nothing to do with lung cancer?
Then, there are those of us who are, shall we say, “in touch with their feminine side”. Don’t know why, but simply have a strong draw toward feminine things. Always have been. But definitely a male in every way. Sex is definitely a fluid thing.