Philadelphia,
USA — Recent efforts to pass amendments that
define marriage as a union between a "man" and a "woman"
are going to run into more than just political
opposition.
Scientists are contending
there's no clear definition of the gender
divide.
There are at least seven
definitions, but not everyone qualifies as male or female
across the board, says Galdino Pranzarone, a psychologist
at Roanoke College <http://web.roanoke.edu/>
who has argued against marriage amendments on the
editorial pages of the Roanoke Times.
Some people are born with
a mix of male and female characteristics. The incidence
of intersex births is between one in 1,000 to one in
2,500, says Pranzarone. "That's a lot of
people.
Alice Dreger, part of the
medical humanities and bioethics faculty at Northwestern
University <http://www.northwestern.edu/>,
has also written on the flaws of the "one man and one
woman" equation.
You could define the
sexes by their sex organs, Dreger says, but those are
vulnerable to birth defects, accidents or cancer. Not to
mention that some people have an organ whose size fits
somewhere between a small penis and a large
clitoris.
You might think you could
get out a microscope and use chromosomes, defining men as
having an X and a Y, women as having two X's. It's simple
enough except some people have just a single X, or XXY,
or XYY. There are XX men, XY women, and people with a
"mosaic" of genetically male and female cells.
As an activist for the
intersex community, Dreger often gets asked for advice
and recently heard from a 19-year-old man whose medical
workup revealed he had two X chromosomes and
ovaries.
His situation was due to
congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a hormonal disorder
that often causes women to become masculinized. Once in a
while it will cause a genetic female to become outwardly
male. Dreger said this young man wanted to know what to
tell his parents and girlfriend and whether he should
have surgery to become a woman. He felt like a man and
liked being a man, so she advised him to stay a
man.
And as Cindy Stone
learned, women can sometimes get a Y chromosome. For her,
it was Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). A
faulty gene on her X chromosome makes it impossible for
her body to respond to her male hormones, so though she
has male genetics, she developed along a female
pattern.
Stone, who teaches gender
studies at Indiana University, said her genitalia look
female on the outside, so she didn't suspect anything
until she failed to menstruate. When she was 17 her
doctors told her she had a birth defect and would never
have children.
But when she reached her
30s, she went to another doctor who had a more complete
explanation. She not only had a Y chromosome, she had
testicles inside her body and no ovaries or
uterus.
And yet, she always
wanted to be female, felt female and looked female. In
some ways she's more "feminine" than ordinary women,
whose bodies make and respond to small amounts of
testosterone. Stone has never had a zit, she says, and
grows almost no body hair.
She says like many
intersex people, she submitted to surgery she now
regrets. Doctors removed her testicles, she said, after
which she lost much of her sex drive. Testicles secrete
some female hormones, so once hers were gone she had to
go on hormone replacement.
Other intersex people got
surgery at infancy before they could let anyone know
whether they felt more like girls or boys, says
Stone.
As for marriage reform,
she wonders who her politicians think she should marry.
"I have testicles and a vagina. I have an F on my birth
certificate but my bloodwork says my cells are all
XY."
Twenty states have
already passed constitutional amendments to restrict
marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and eight
more will be voting on it this November, according to the
National Conference of State Legislatures. But Pranzarone
predicts that once lawyers start representing intersex
cases, these laws will fall apart.
