As teenagers, these young men developed an interest in tabletop war games, in which players build and paint fantasy armies and engage in battles based on a complicated set of rules and strategies. I can testify that in my many visits to the Games Workshop, where the armies are purchased and the tournaments played, I have never seen a female player or a female employee—only other mothers like me, anxiously clutching Christmas and birthday lists. Is there a gene for War-Hammer? Doubtful, but there is something—and I don’t think the something is culturally inscribed—that causes males to be drawn to ritualized combat, whether in sport, in games, or on film. Yet, after years of watching violent movies, playing violent video games, and directing the clash of armies on plywood battlefields, my son and his friends eagerly participated in the marches against the war in Iraq and were bitterly and vocally opposed to the conflict.
My daughters were completely uninterested in the peace movement or the war itself; for them the political was not at all personal. They are intensely interested in the lives of acquaintances and celebrities, however, and have prodigious memories for who has dated, married, and dumped whom and whose career is foundering because of what ill-advised choices. Their baffled brother finds their interest in the personal lives of strangers incomprehensible: “You don’t
I grew up in a time when increasing numbers of people believed that the differences between males and females were socially constructed, and that if children were raised to understand that there were no essential differences between being born in a male body and being born in a female body, we would all be “free to be”—free of all gender-based boundaries and limitations, free of social stereotypes based on genital distinctions. Boys could cry, and girls could compete; boys could be nurses, homemakers, and teachers (the nurturing professions), and girls could be fighter pilots, police officers, and firefighters (the warrior professions). I am happy to live in a society that has struggled to eradicate limiting beliefs and practices that have kept both men and women from realizing their full potential as human beings. But I have largely abandoned the belief that all the differences we note between men and women are purely a matter of social custom. Some differences run much deeper than custom, the primary one being the deeply felt and ineradicable sense that one is male or female—or neither.
Let’s talk about the distinction between gender and sex.
Virginia (nee Charles) Prince, founder of
But gender differences cannot be rooted in culture alone, because my body (what’s below my neck) and my brain (what’s above my neck) are not divided by some kind of biological Berlin Wall. The body and the brain are an open city, built on the constant exchange of information. Just after my mother’s egg and my father’s sperm united, each contributing an X chromosome to my female genotype, skeins of DNA began to uncoil and replicate. Messages traveled between the rapidly multiplying cells that had not yet differentiated into specific organs and tissues, switching genes on and off under instructions from the master template, guiding my development. In the sixth week of pregnancy, the process of sexual differentiation began. The androgynous embryo, which possesses both mullerian and wolffian ducts and thus has the potential to develop either a male or a female reproductive anatomy, accepted its genetic fate, and an exquisitely choreographed dance began, performed by a company of steroid hormones. Because I am an XX person, midway through the second month of pregnancy, the primordial gonad developed into egg-bearing ovaries. My nascent wolffian ducts began to wither away, and the mullerian ducts differentiated into the gothic architecture of the female reproductive system—fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, vagina. Within a few weeks, ultrasound images revealed a recognizably female external anatomy. Evidence suggests that my brain was prenatally “sexed” as well, though the mechanism by which this process is carried out is less clearly understood. Animal research has provided ample evidence of the organizing effects of hormones on the sexual differentiation of the brain, but the extent to which the animal data can be extrapolated to human development remains hotly contested. The sexual differentiation of the brain is completed after birth, as I learn what sorts of attitudes, behavior, and role my culture expects of me as a female.
In an XY fetus, a different set of chemical messages begins circulating in the second month of pregnancy, based on instructions encoded in the Y chromosome. “Male!” the Y chromosome shouts, and a gene called SRY directs the primitive gonad to form testicles, rather than ovaries. The testicles soon begin to produce androgens, which will masculinize both genitalia and brain. One of the chemical messengers produced by the testicles, mullerian-inhibiting substance (MIS), begins circulating throughout the rapidly dividing cells, barking out orders to arrest the development of a female reproductive anatomy. Testosterone and MIS ensure that the fissure that would otherwise develop into a vagina fuses together to form a scrotum, and that the primary instrument of sexual pleasure (glans penis) develops outside the fleshy mound of the pubis, rather than hidden within it (glans clitoridis). In males, the hormone-driven sexing of the brain is known to continue into the weeks immediately following birth, when the testicles pump out a flood of testosterone at levels that will not be matched until puberty. By that time, the male child will have learned what behaviors and attitudes his family and culture expect him to display; these are based on the presence of male genitals.
The process of prenatal sexual differentiation is complex and multi-faceted. An embryo needs more than a Y chromosome to become male; it also needs an androgen receptor gene on the X chromosome to enable it to respond to the androgens its testes are producing. If the androgen receptor gene isn’t functioning, the XY fetus will develop female genitalia. Moreover, testosterone (the so-called male hormone) is transformed into estrogen in the brain by an enzyme called aromatase. As researcher Lindsey Berkson has pointed out, “one cheeky irony of life is that how masculine a man is as an adult may be partly the result of his having had optimal amounts of estrogen in his brain at a certain time during his stay in the womb. Amazingly minute differences—parts per trillion or parts per billion of a few sex hormones—literally affect the making of men or women.” More often than most people suspect, the “script” of sexual differentiation is altered during pregnancy, producing variation.
Yet we continue to wonder how much of gender performance is cultural and how much is biological. That’s the heart of the riddle, the part that really baffles us. And it’s that part of the riddle that gender-variant people may ultimately help resolve. My conversations with transgendered, transsexual, and intersexual people over the past few years have helped me understand a number of facts that I had not recognized previously. First, despite the social changes initiated by the second wave of feminism, we as a society still maintain some fairly inflexible strategies for policing the boundaries between the sexes. Each time you relieve yourself in a public place, for example, you implicitly accept the idea that Door Number 1 (women) and Door Number 2 (men) are the only options, and that each person will know precisely to which category he or she belongs, and use the “appropriate” toilet. To most of us, the choice may not seem quite as oppressive as that between the “White” and “Colored” bathrooms that were contested by the civil rights movement, but the significance is the same. A ritual boundary is being enforced, as the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment recognized when they claimed that the ERA would result in a promiscuous mingling of the sexes in bathrooms.
Similarly, many people pay lip service to the idea that males and females have both a “feminine” and a “masculine” side, and as I finish the final draft of this book, a great deal of attention is being devoted to the rise of the “metrosexual,” an urban feminized man. Yet a male-bodied person who expresses his femininity by wearing dresses quickly discovers the limits of social tolerance. Women have more freedom to dress as they please, as I discovered on a rainy night in Washington, D.C., when I attended a support group meeting for cross-dressers. As I sat in the meeting in my sweatshirt and jeans—the only female-bodied person in the room and the only person wearing pants—I realized that little more than a century ago, I would have been just as freakishly attired as the
