The 70-Year-Old Man With a Secret Womb, and Other Reasons Our Conception of Sex Is Changing
There's a lot more going on here than most people realize.
Usually when we talk about gender and sex, the context is political, part of the ongoing culture wars over gay and transgender rights. The physical realities of how all this stuff works in individual bodies gets a lot less attention, and a fascinating new article by Claire Ainsworthin Natureattempts to fill in this gap. The key takeaway? When you take a close look at the latest research into the biology underlying sex, the idea of two sexes starts to immediately teeter.
It's really worth reading in full Ainsworth's main point is that there are all sorts of limitations to the "XX = female, XY = male" understanding of sex drilled into most of us. The article starts with the story of a 46-year-old pregnant woman whose body, doctors discovered,
was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male.
Much of the piece focuses on DSDs, or differencesor disorders of sex development:
Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. Biologically, it's a spectrum, says Vilain.
...
Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children. [footnote replaced with link]
For other people, though, DSDs lead to various ways in which the hidden or sometimes not-so-hidden parts of their anatomy don't "match" the sex implied by their outward appearance. And things only get more muddled when you factor in that many people feela way about their gender that may have little or no correspondence to their anatomy.
Going back to the political thing: There are obvious ramifications here as society continues to debate or maybe evolve away from our standard ways of looking at sex and gender. Simple categories can only get us so far.
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The 70-Year-Old Man With a Secret Womb, and Other Reasons Our Conception of Sex Is Changing