The Philosophical Questions about Genetics and Intersex

By Sophia Siedlberg

© August 26, 2008

It is a common practice to read in an article addressing the subject of intersex variations, "What makes a boy or a girl?" There is a problem with this approach however. In listing what makes a boy or a girl, most writers have reduced people to little more than bits of flesh or perhaps even more unsettling to specific DNA molecules. Anyone who says "XX and XY chromosomes" is actually reducing others to the probability of there being certain DNA molecules in a library of DNA molecules: "Well, that bookshelf says blue, not pink, because there is a blue covered book in it!" (This incidentally is not always true).

There is however a broader philosophical debate going on here. It is about the human need for certainty, and here is where there is a rather amusing irony. Many people who hold to the idea that human behavior is regulated by genes would perhaps find that the truth about physical sex differentiation from a genetic viewpoint is perhaps harder to define than a genetically programmed instinct that seeks certainty.

Most articles that discuss intersex variations usually go into a sort of "AB and C of sex genetics" (usually discussing chromosomes) but the truth is the genes of sex differentiation are spread across all 23 pairs of chromosome, not just the 23rd pair. I am going to constantly say this in the hope that this part at least sinks in and people start to look at the real reason people discuss chromosomes.

The one message that often (but not always) gets relayed by these articles is that people cannot be certain about what makes a man or a woman. This is indeed true but no one says bluntly why this is the case. Hopefully, as I have just given a very simple and honest answer that most people will understand, people will be able to move on from chromosomes and start accepting the fact that life is simply uncertain. And is that such a bad thing? I mean that uncertainty is actually very important in how life itself actually works. Life would be rather meaningless if you knew what was going to happen in say 20 years time, if you knew the time you were going to die for example. This would be a state of absolute certainty. You would not have to worry because you would know when you were going to die. But I bet in such a state someone would say, "Oh, I have only 10 years left to live." How many people would be comfortable with the prospect of knowing their child would suffer a fatal accident at the age of three or four? And no matter what you did, you could not prevent it. Most people would spend so much time fretting about it in some way or another that it would be a very unsettling way of "living", always preparing for death.

This is the philosophical question stripped bare really. Is uncertainty such a bad thing? People live life more by living it rather than knowing more precise details about the inevitable and pretending to live it. Which brings me back to genetics and intersex. You see a "common" understanding of genetics has often given people the misleading impression that they can go off to a clinic, get a test, and somehow find out what forms of illness they are prone to. In fact you will be led to believe they can read about who will die of what, presented with a cold certainty that would (we are led to believe) make a medical insurer very rich. Until the insurer realizes that all the people who know what they will die of and when are also thinking that it is pointless taking out medical insurance. And therein lies the problem with certainty. Even industries that appear to rely on certainties would be rendered useless if there was absolute certainty.

Thankfully your genome will not be able to tell you what you will die of and when. In fact your genome has a few tricks up its sleeve that you probably don't know about. In your body there are B cells and T cells that between them produce antibodies and what they do is produce different antibodies by shuffling bits of genetic material around (it is a process known as V(D)J recombination) and "trying" the resulting antibodies out on any of the proteins of any virus or scary strain of bacteria  that happens to infect your body. In fact your immune system relies on nucleotides (molecules of DNA and RNA, etc.) being uncertain, changing all the time, in order to prevent you from dying of the common cold.

This is how invaluable uncertainty is to life itself. So why do people want to reduce intersex people (and themselves) to molecules and bits of flesh? If everything was known, that is, if everyone was born absolutely male or absolutely female, and everyone was certified as such and there were no intersex people, what would that achieve? More harm than good. That's for sure. Genetically speaking if all men were the same and all women were the same, it would be a disaster. You would get what geneticists call "Double Recessives" appearing, and guess what? Some intersex variations (such as the one I was born with) are as a result of that. The specific condition I have is actually quite rare, and this is because the world is not a monoculture of absolute men and absolute women. If it were, then the paradox is that there would be more intersex people. Does that make me disordered? As it happens, no. I just happened to be born with an intersex variation. That is all. That is what I inherited. The only way it really intrudes in my life is through the actions of those who seem to think that the world can only be populated by "genetically pure" men and women and that I am a problem. But if the world was like that, then inevitably (take note of that word "inevitably") there would be more like me around to the despair of those who think that the world should be populated by pure men and women. Not all intersex variations are as a result of "double recessives". (And no, double recessives are not always caused by inbreeding, just genetic similarity).

Nature is not fatalistic and while you may think nature is messy at times, without nature being messy you would probably never have been born. Life would probably never have happened in the first place (even in the biblical sense). You see nature works like this. The more you seek to define and diminish (by reducing yourself and others to bits of flesh or molecules) the more nature says: "I am not having that!" And the "messier" nature becomes.

That is life. I am just as much a part of nature as anyone else. As a human being, I have just as much right as any other human being to exist. I am also made in the image of G-d if you want to see it that way. I am not a "freak of nature", just another variation within it.

Organisation Intersex International

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