Category error

One of the last events in which I participated before CoViD and my retirement from The Institute was a workshop on gender and sexuality. It was really useful for de-fuzzifying my language and understanding in that arena.  It is a category error to confuse sexuality [who does what to whom] from gender [how those involved self-identify]. 

As a society there's a whole bunch of things we don't do well. In Ireland I think we have a good line in Death - especially The Afters. Wakes are good, open coffins are good, expediting the transition from bed to grave is good; shouldering the coffin is good; the month's mind mass is good. In England, none of these are normal practice which delays closure and derails the process of grieving. Your Ukrainian Mileage May Vary. 

Sex maybe not so much? Because a) we don't usually talk about those things [so] b) people are confused and can persist in just being wrong about stuff. And also quite unkind. It is not a good look when "gay" is a term of casual abuse among schoolboys. Although I will say that acceptance of actual gays and gender-queer is pretty good among the friends of my ~30ish y.o. daughters. There are more trans-people in their rather tight friend-group than I encountered at all at all in my whole generation. - and that includes the travel writer James→Jan Morris [whom prev]. It's kinda pathetic when JK Rowling and others in the TERF-bund make such a song and dance about whether trans-women can use 'their' bathrooms. And if someone wants to be known as Jan or 'they' why not go along with that?

That's a bit of preamble to note that I had a couple of hours listening to Alice Dreger recently. Interviewed by Sean Carroll on his Mindscapes podcast and then giving a TED talk.  Dreger is famous for taking evidence-based positions on the diversity of human sexuality and gender. She made herself very unpopular for refusing to accept that the norms of her society should be accepted by all its members even when those norms and just wrong for a minority.

It would be fine and dandy if men were men and women were women and there were no edge cases. But biology is not binary, it's complicated in (inter many alia) androgen insensitivity syndrome AIS and Congenital adrenal hyperplasia CAH. 

• AIS is when the developing embryo, possessing a Y chromosome, starts belting out testosterone but [ooops] there are insufficient androgen receptors in the cells of the primordial genital ridge. These proto-genital cells divide and divide as if the testosterone level was low and a clitoris develops instead of a penis; and maybe [it's a spectrum] labia majora rather than scrotum.
• Contrariwise CAH can lead to so much circulating testosterone that, despite all the cells being XX, the external genitalia develop looking like a boy's. A quite glance at the neonatal groin will have the staff go M [✓] and the parents will order up blue babygros despite two X chromosomes and two ovaries. Things can go pear-shaped come puberty.

When presented with such edge case, us normals often freak out. Patriarchal pediatric surgeons go snip, nip and tuck to make the down there bits a better fit for a binary gender universe. The implication / assumption is "you'll thank me when you grow up". errr no! what happened to informed consent?

Who we become is a complex process of hormones, growth factors, receptors for both classes of chemical; feedback loops; psychology; family dynamics, societal norms, religious practice, culturalization. Dreger knows all this - because she made it her business (as a historian!) to find out. She has said that, in some cases, coming out as trans is driven by confusion about sexuality rather than gender and that raised a shit-storm of 'social' media invective and cancelling.

You'll have to listen to Mindscapes to fill in the details. Here's another thread in my recent reading in which it is discussed whether Oscar Wilde was gay or bi. Couldn't care less? Me neither. But it seems that True Gays and Real Lesbians regard bisexuals as not part of The Movement and must be cancelled, erased and/or have their epaulets ripped off prior to expulsion from homosexual Eden. The fact that St Oscar fathered two kids on his wife Constance doesn't necessarily tarnish the author's true gay credentials.