“Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y”
“Ah, but there’s a weasel word there: “normal”. And with sex chromosomes, perceptions of “normal” play a huge role — not only in what we think that they are and do, but in the very existence of the term “sex chromosomes”. This is the subject of Sarah Richardson’s revelatory book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, a history of the science of sex and the invention of the sex chromosome concept — one that Richardson argues we should reject entirely as a mistake that has led to bad science, societal prejudice and widespread misunderstanding of what sex really is…
In reality, there are extremely few sexual characteristics solely controlled by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome — and just as there are plenty of characteristics controlled by genes found on other chromosomes, the “sex” chromosomes also carry genes that determine traits that have nothing to do with sex…
some scientists became convinced that there was something in the body, and then the cell, and then the genome, that would literally be “sex itself” — the only thing that truly mattered for sex, the thing that was its true source and the thing that finally allowed for a simple, causational definition of sex…
Anne Fausto-Sterling and Jennifer Graves, in particular, as well as feminist science pressure groups like the Society for Women’s Health Research, are cited as important critics of the binary representation of biological or genetic sex — and critical to the post-2000 “conceptual shift” towards the complex model we know today, where the interplay of different genetic and environmental factors gives rise both to physical sex characteristics and aspects of the psychological feeling of gender identity.”
Related: Nature — Sex Redefined [Quoted in the article and totally worth reading in its entirety]; “The brains of men and women aren’t really that different, study finds”; A great article on the natural variability of male genitalia
