Surely everyone knows the difference between a boy and a girl? Turns out we may have had it wrong all along—males are males because they’re not females
It is as though our reproductive system’s cells can go from male to female at the flick of a switch—and the switch is a gene
In the 13th hour of the confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, someone asked the nominee to define a woman. It was a trick question, of course, to see whether Jackson had a soft spot for gay, lesbian, transgender people and others who questioned the gender they were assigned at birth.
Judge Jackson correctly punted the answer out of her court, saying she was not a biologist and therefore not qualified to define a woman. Scientists and philosophers applauded her answer but seriously doubted that even a competent biologist would be able to define a woman. Apparently there is no sufficient way to clearly spell out what makes someone a woman.
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By now you are scratching your head and might be showing early signs of brain fog. Why is this even a question, you’re wondering. Surely everyone knows the difference between a man and a woman? Men are born with a penis and identify as males; women are born with a vagina and identify as females. Isn’t it just that simple?
Not in today’s world where you, if a penis-owner, might need to walk a fine line and describe a woman as non-pregnant, cervix-having, vagina-owning person with mammary tissue. Walk with me and we’ll try to figure this out—because it turns out we may have had it wrong all along.
One problem is that men—that sex-obsessed, power-hungry, blundering species—have been doing all the defining over the centuries. Women’s bodies, according to men, were dangerous, immoral and needed to be tightly regulated (by men, of course). Never mind that even as of this century, most men are utterly baffled by women’s bodies, especially their lady bits.
The names reveal a lot about the men who came up with them.
For instance, vagina originally meant sheath—and carried the implication that it was created mainly to cover a man’s, erm, sword. Sometime during the middle ages, they came up with a potato-like word, pudendum, to describe external female sexual organs. The word is derived from the Latin word for ‘to be ashamed’, or pudere.
The word uterus comes to us from the Greek word for hysteria, and the uterus itself was believed to be unnervingly like the two horns of a devil. Hippocrates, father of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors must take, believed that the uterus wandered around a woman’s body like a lost puppy, causing insanity and that the cure was marital bliss or ‘paroxysms’—otherwise known as orgasms.
The clitoris, ladies and gentlemen, was supposedly never found in a woman of virtue. Suspected witches used to be strip-searched. If found to possess a clitoris, they would be tried for witchcraft.
Even today, few men—and many women—know that the correct name for the part they routinely call the vagina is vulva. Google it and learn something new.
Let’s go deeper. Some answers to the mysteries of how the body decides if a foetus will be a boy or a girl began to emerge when geneticists discovered X and Y chromosomes—threads made up of 200 or so genes. For a long time, it was believed that foetuses with two X chromosomes came out as girls, while having an X and a Y chromosome made you a boy.
But then they found athletic, all-male persons with XX chromosomes, as well as certified females with XY chromosomes.
Things got weirder. MIT biologists found that just a single gene in the chromosome—called the DMRT1 gene—did something odd. When this gene was removed from cells in a male testicle, those cells began producing oestrogen, a hormone that women’s ovaries produce. A similar gene removed from a female’s ovarian cells made them switch to producing testosterone, a male hormone.
It was as though our reproductive system’s cells can go from male to female at the flick of a switch—and the switch is a gene. You may be born male but you stay male because the DMRT1 gene is constantly at work, suppressing cells that start getting girly-like. You’d be female if that gene wasn’t keeping you male.
Where did we get this ability? Marine biologists in California believe it’s an evolutionary legacy. They found a remarkable gender-fluid fish called the bluehead, which hangs out near reefs in schools consisting of one male and a harem of females who spend their lives having sex. If a predator eats up the male, presto, one of the females in the school evolves into a male. And the sex goes on.
The gene that helped them switch gender was—no surprise—DMRT1.
Perhaps the correct answer to ‘what is a woman’ should be—“Damned if I know. I’m just a man.”
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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