What Is A Woman?

 

They gave a lecture on "Testicular feminization" when I was in school that literally changed my life, reorganized my brain and opened my eyes. 

The first slides showed some naked women, who looked for all the world to be normal women, except, for some reason they didn't seem to have pubic hair. 

These women had XY (normal male) chromosomes and high levels of testosterone, and their internal gonads, which looked like ovaries were, in fact, under the microscope, testicles and they had no uterus or cervix. They had grown up thinking they were female, having sex with men through what they thought was a vagina, but they never got pregnant and, in fact, they never had menstrual periods.

So were they women? Of course, they were. Science cannot define what is a woman. These individuals defined themselves as women.

We had a ward where these women hung out, getting diagnosed and talking to students like me. 

At age twenty-four, these women were mind blowing for me.  In my world, there was nothing so fixed as the "fact" there are two sexes. This was the 1970's of course, when gender bending consisted of men dressing in drag, for reasons known only to God and possibly to the men in question.

Later, of course, I learned about fish who shifted sexes--there are a number of species which can do that. 

And moles! It's not easy being a mole.  A mole lives mostly underground and it digs all day and has to consume prodigious quantities of worms just to survive. During the heavy digging season, when it needs lots of testosterone for its muscles, its vagina seals shut and its ovao/testes, a gonad with both elements of ovary and testicle, shifts toward testosterone production. So the mole can go back and forth over the course of a year between male and female.

Then, there were the little girls who never really quite accepted the fact they were girls.

Some of these folks had biochemical deficits of enzymes which did not allow the assembly line which takes the cholesterol molecular down range to become testosterone to function properly. There were even those folks with 5 alpha reductase deficiency, who were discovered by medical students doing some field trip work in the Dominican Republic where mountain villages, where there was a lot of intermarriage, and they gave their kids gender neutral names because some of the girls born each year turned out to be boys when they hit puberty.

Beyond all those fascinating people, are people who have no identifiable enzyme or biochemical derangement who simply feel they've been assigned the wrong sex, that they are boys trapped in female bodies or vice versa and they go to Transgender Clinics. This group  is a tiny percentage of all Americans but to hear Senators Cruz and Hawley talk, you'd think they cause almost as much problem for the rest of us as all those human tidal waves washing across our southern borders. 

These estimable Senators seem to think any discussion of these differences from the norm, gender speaking, should never occur in schools, which are places, after all, where you would never want to expose children to things which are different or not normal.

In fact, the whole idea of presenting new ideas to young children should be as threatening as thinking about green eggs and ham.