What A Long Slippery Slope Part 2

Sometime after I post a blog I find another news article that I could have used in the blog, well that happened yesterday, in the evening I came across another article on the topic.

Yesterday I wrong about the Republicans wanted to define a woman with biology and gender is a binary. I wrote that sex is much more than chromosomes, well today’s post backs that up.

Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That’s Good for Humanity
Evidence from various sciences reveals that there are diverse ways of being male, female, or both. An anthropologist argues that embracing these truths will help humans flourish.
Sapiens
By Agustín Fuentes
11 MAY 2022


At the recent U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn triggered controversy when she asked Jackson to define the word “woman.” After Jackson declined, several Republican congresspeople chimed in with definitions for “woman” that ranged from dubious to shocking, including “the weaker sex,” “someone who has a uterus,” and “X chromosomes, no tallywhacker.”

Such notions haven’t evolved much since 1871, when naturalist Charles Darwin told the world that “man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than women, and has more inventive genius.” Most 19th- and 20th-century evolutionary theories (and theorists) asserted that evolution created two kinds of creatures—male and female—and individuals’ behavior and nature reflected this biological binary.

[…]

These assertions and beliefs are wrong. In addition, the commitment to a simple binary view creates a fictitious template for a “battle of the sexes” that manifests in miseducation about basic biology, the denigration of women’s rights, the justifications of incel and “men’s rights” violence, and the creation of anti-transgender laws.

Science has moved beyond that and now realized that gender is much more complicated and we realize that Mother Nature is very complex.

Starting at the most basic level of animal biology, there are multitudes of ways to be female or male or both. The oceans are filled with species of fish that change from one sex to another midlife, and some who change back again. There are invertebrate hermaphrodites and ladies-only lizards who reproduce by recombining their own chromosomes. In some mammals, females are brimming with testosterone and have large “penises.” In various fish and mammals, males do all the caretaking of infants. And in a variety of species, females are authoritarian, promiscuous, and—yes, Darwin—pugnacious.

But the Republicans cling to the binary because they don’t like things that gives them headaches. They like to live in a “Father Knows Best” world where everything knows their place.  From the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English dictionary…

A US television programme made in the 1950s, whose characters were considered to be a perfect happy family with typical American values. The father went to work and always knew how to solve his children's problems, the mother stayed at home with the children and was caring and kind, and the children were good and respected their parents.

It was a world where Blacks “knew their place” gays were in the closet and trans people were none existent.

The article goes on to say,

Biologically, there is no simple dichotomy between female and male. As I demonstrate in my book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, brains are no more “sexed” at birth than are kidneys and livers. Rather, brains are “mosaics” of characteristically female and male features.

Did you know that males have milk glands?

Well they do. I know because when I first started taking hormones I lactated. I was at the Monday morning staff meeting at work when I notice two wet spots over my nipples on my shirt. After the meeting I went to bathroom and look at where the wetness was coming from, there was white liquid coming from my nipples and there were a number of what looked like puss filled zits on the nipples… Whoa! What the hell is that?

A quick call to my endo, when I called him he said, “Oh, it is nothing you are just producing milk from the hormones.” He told me if it gets too painful soak your nipples in warm water. After I hung I thought, “How the hell do you soak your chest in warm water?”

So, instead of listening to people who are misogynistic, sexist, or homo/transphobic; incels; or politicians who base their ideologies on a biological sex binary and myths about its evolution, we can and should be open to a serious understanding of biology and its better options for human flourishing. The simple male/female binary does not effectively express the normal range of being human. Understanding this and incorporating it into our education, lives, and laws offers better possibilities, greater equity, and more joy for human society.

But that is too complicated for the Republicans it disrupts their little orderly world.