Mother Nature Is Never Binary

Bilaterally asymmetric gynandromorphs cardinal

Humans like to put things into nice little boxes but Mother Nature hates boxes and she likes to color outside the lines. This article was sent to me by Rhonda.

Gender Is Not Just Chromosomes and Genitals
Time
By Katy Steinmetz
February 23, 2016

The South Dakota 'bathroom bill' is out of step with science

A 17-year-old recently walked into the office of Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric specialist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. The high school student looked like a girl. She had external “girl parts.” She lived as a girl, dressed as a girl and had never had any question about being a girl. But her primary care doctor had become concerned because she hadn’t started developing breasts, something that happens to most girls by the age of 13. And a blood test the primary care doctor had given her revealed a clue as to why: this young woman had 46 XY chromosomes, the makeup usually associated with males. So off she went to Rosenthal, one of the nation’s leading experts on sex and gender.

This young woman, who has what is called an intersex trait, is not that rare. About 1 in 2000 babies are born with an uncommon permutation of the many things medical professionals typically look to—like anatomy, chromosomes and hormones—to establish a person’s physical sex. That’s the equivalent of about 10,000 babies born in the United States every year. For Rosenthal’s patient and her mother, this revelation was a source of great anxiety and insecurity. For everyone else, very private cases like hers are important examples to hear about and consider when lawmakers are attempting to decide who should use which bathrooms—as they have in legislation floated in states such as Arizona, Kentucky, Florida and Maryland in the last few years.
[…]
“So you would say every girl who goes into a bathroom has to not only pull down her pants and prove she has a vagina, but you also need to have a blood test and show you’ve got XX chromosomes?” says Rosenthal. “Well, that girl would have XY chromosomes. Which bathroom does she use?”

This is something that I have been saying these so called “Bathroom bills” are downright ignorant  when it comes to biology, they are based on 1950s science. We now know that gender is a lot more than what is between your legs.

You can’t throw a hall pass without hitting a medical professional or academic who will explain that sex and gender are distinct. “Sex is what’s between your legs and gender is what’s between your ears,” goes one quip. But even that is oversimplifying things, given that what’s “between your legs” could indicate that a person is male, while their chromosomes could indicate otherwise (a realization some 46-XX men come to after they’ve been having trouble having kids and they find out they have a low sperm count, leading their doctor to order chromosome tests).

The bill “assumes that there’s a clear-cut division between male and female,” says Elizabeth Reis, a professor of gender and bioethics at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. “And that if we only dig hard enough we could truly distinguish between the boys and the girls. Throughout American history people have been trying to make these distinctions, and the reason why it doesn’t work is because those distinctions aren’t there. We don’t have any bright line.” Reis points to the sports world as an example, where officials have repeatedly drawn and then erased lines determining who is allowed to compete as a man or woman in the Olympics.

These bills take a simplistic biblical view of biology and do not take into account that there are more factors that determine gender than chromosomes such as 5-alpha-reductase an enzyme that converts testosterone to 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT) or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) which is an X-linked recessive androgen receptor (AR) gene resulting in a failure of normal masculinization of the external genitalia in chromosomally male individuals.

You cannot legislate biology.