I’ve been thinking about sex for some time.
In fact, I’ve been thinking about sex for about 11 years, and even more so
recently (which I am attributing to the long-term effects of someone –who-shall-not-be-named
giving me ant-flavoured hot beverages at the weekend), but that’s not what I’m
referring to. It’s not even the same meaning, which is apt, as the meanings of sex
is what this piece is about.
I’d always considered sex and
gender the same thing, basically thinking the latter was a more formal and
euphemistic synonym of the former. However, as I’ve now discovered, when you
hang around psychologists, that bird don’t fly no more. Sex and gender become two
different things; sex takes on a biological and deterministic meaning, while
gender forms a more abstract, personal psychological concept, with inherent
ties to the concept of self, and other such grandiose ideas that tend to send
me scurrying for cover. It is this idea that drives the acceptance of
transsexualism and gender-queerness, that such characteristics are indicative
of conflict between one’s sex and one’s gender.
But my coffee-fuelled mind raises
a couple of objections, or at least modifications, to this new idea. Firstly, sex
isn’t deterministic. I don’t think it’s a bell curve as such, but rather two
overlapping distributions forming a bimodal-like distribution, which I’ve
described below:
Genetics define the two distributions;
you are male if you possess a Y chromosome, and female if you do not. But it
isn’t as simple as that. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s syndrome, for example, are
XXY; they are phenotypically male, but textbook cases present with feminised
features and often fertility problems. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s would fall in
the cleavage of my graph (huh-huh it looks like tits), on the male side.
However, maleness and femaleness needn’t be typified by conditions; there is
probably a normal distribution across the whole population. If gene expression
varies between individuals (which it almost certainly does), it stands to
reason that some people may exhibit very high levels of one set of sex
hormones, and very little of the others, and may fall at the edges of my graph,
whereas those with more balanced levels (who may be more androgynous) would be
in the middle. This androgyny would be separate to hermaphroditism, in that
androgynes would be genitally one sex, but there degree of maleness or
femaleness would be similarly low; the runner Caster Semenya comes to mind as
an example of a very masculinised female. This complicates the sex-gender
conflict; not only gender, but also sex, is a variable concept. Ms Semenya
presumably identifies very strongly as a woman, which probably made her biologically
ambiguous sex all the more distressing. This isn’t an abstract or philosophical
argument either; fertility medicine must be concerned with a patient’s position
on the sex dimension, regardless as to whether they identify as male, female,
or transsexual.
That last word bugs me. I have nothing
against transsexuals (I’m not Julie Burchill), although if I know one personally
I am unaware of it. My qualm is with the word (still not Julie Burchill, don’t
worry). I would much rather it were transgender, as it then lies on a gender
continuum:
The word transsexual confuses
gender with sexuality. The two are definitely linked, and are also linked with
sex in a three-way (obvious innuendo fully intended) interaction. However, being
transgender does not preclude one from being heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual…
hang on, there’s loads of these: this one’ll be a really FUN graph…
So, yeah. Those are my thoughts
on that. You’d never guess I have real work that I’m supposed to be doing,
would you?
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