Nature & Genetics of Gender
10.22.2013
When I have said in the past that transgendered people (two-spirited) are not mistakes and that we are exactly as Creator intended, I sometimes do not realize how wholly unsatisfying that explanation is to someone who does not have a spiritual tradition, or to an atheist or skeptic. It is like saying to a small child “because I said so:” not really an explanation at all! So, I have thought long and hard about this, since I recognize that we live in a world of twos—rational and spiritual both—and not everyone has the spiritual to go by. I, as a person on this Good Red Road, am incapable of separating the two. I am spiritual by nature; but I am also a scientist who dwells in the rational and factual. What can I say to the transgendered atheist to help them not feel like a mistake, or in the wrong body–a freak of nature?
Nature. Look at how nature is organized and gendered. Genetics. Cannot argue with genetic facts. They just are. And there is my answer: within our natural and genetic diversity. Does nature have just two genders throughout the entire animal and plant kingdoms? No! I can list many, many species that cross or choose genders as part of their genetic diversity (over 100 documented species covering all kingdoms and phyla). Among the swimmers, clown fish (think Disney’s Nemo) are all born one gender and differentiate later in life into male or female. Mud guppies chose their gender as needed, and change back and forth as reproductive conditions change. Among the creeper-crawlers, earth worms are intersexed or hermaphroditic: each worm has within its body both the ability to produce sperm and to give birth. When they copulate, each penetrates the other simultaneously, and both parents give birth to the young. In the tall people, the trees, Ohio buckeye and other Aesculus species have three genders of flowers on the same plant, regularly–spaced on the same limb: male, female, and bi-gendered (intersex). And some ground growers, like mosses and fungi are exclusively asexual—and fertilize themselves with spores without choosing a gender at all.
Are these plants and animals, then, just the “exception” to the natural rules of cis-gendered diversity? Are they “freaks of nature?” I do not think so. Certainly, they represent the minority of the diverse natural world, but they are not “freaks” or mistakes of natural selection. I say again: like transgendered human beings, they are the minority compared to the cis-gendered creatures; but not freaks. They are merely a difference among many diverse creatures and plants. Transgendered people may be a minority but they are just a natural variation of genes.
And genes, what are genes? They are the unit of natural selection and gene mutations (slight differences in genetic make-up) are the machinery of evolution. Genes are like computer language of animal and plant DNA. Like the 1’s and 0’s of the binary, genes are either “on” or “off” and are re-arranged with each successive generation. Transgendered people (though science has not yet caught up with the rational theory) are merely another expression of genes, a completely natural phenotype resulting from random changes in DNA. In other words, just as hair color and blood type are each inherited through the crossing of two parents’ genes, so also, do genes cross and produce other-gendered, transgendered, and cis-gendered offspring. It is only through social conditioning that we learn that transgressing genders is un-natural. But, gender expression is natural, as clearly as having blond hair or dark hair is a natural expression of human genetic diversity!
We may desire to change our hair color and use artificial dyes to make it all the colors of the rainbow, but at its root, the hair is the same color throughout our lives. Same with gender: we will change it and tailor it to fit us; but biologically and reproductively we are what we were born as: male or female and other. And until science catches up with natural selection, we can neither choose the color of our hair nor the gender we were born as. I am not saying that if a transgendered person was born X, they cannot become Y later in life. I am saying, maybe the transgendered person is born Z, or A, or B; and not X or Y at all. But, until genetics can discover the elusive “transgendered gene,” (If it exists? The human genome has yet to be mapped nor completely understood; and science is always in a state of discovery and flux.) we must expand our social definition of gender to include more than two binary genders—to encompass the great diversity of genetic and gender expression we see all around us in the natural world—A, B, and Z—and every letter in between.
(C)henry francis redhouse, 2013.
henry's home for wandering trees 