Talking and Thinking About Sex

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

One of our toughest challenges is ridding language itself of the apartheid of sex. Because sexual apartheid developed in tandem with the evolution of language, “male or female” terminology infects every aspect of our lexicon. Will we need to cleanse our language of sexual dimorphism in order to achieve gender freedom, or will the eventual crumbling of sexual apartheid automatically work an evolutionary change in language? Is language dual sexed because people are dual sexed, or was language intentionally made sexually dimorphic to reinforce an apartheid of sex on an unwilling populace? These are important questions, because it will be difficult for people to adopt a continuum of sexual identities if language keeps forcing them back to “him or her” and “she or he.”

It can be said with some certainty that while language is a natural, biologically bestowed, human ability, the use of genderized pronouns and genderized nouns is not. Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading linguist, discovered that some parts of language are learned and other parts are inborn. The inherent part of language is what he calls “deep structure,” basically the syntax, grammar, or noun-verb structure that we studied in middle school. Everything else is learned: vocabulary, gender, particular grammar variants. Chomsky’s discoveries have withstood decades of challenge through field tests in native languages worldwide. Without every being taught, children everywhere automatically create “noun phrase, verb phrase” grammar out of conversation they hear—proof of inherent “deep structure.” But words for things, and gender pronouns, vary widely among languages. Vocabulary and gender are taught.

Genderized language was probably taught as a way of reinforcing class distinctions. In a similar way, the use of different language forms when talking to familiar people or strangers, or when talking to classes of people far “above” or “below” one, is a common linguistic phenomena. We all know to say “Your Honor” when referring to the judge.

Sexually dimorphic pronouns likely began as a way to show more respect to men and less respect to women. Today sexually dimorphic pronouns operate as a way to respect those who conform to apartheid and to disrespect those who don’t. When people refer to a transgendered-looking person as “it,” they usually have a tone of disgust in their voice, as if to say “This is really not a person.” The bigot thinks, They don’t have a sex. That makes them a thing. An it. Language needs to evolve so that people can enjoy linguistic respect without having to declare a “male or female” sexual identity.

There are at least four avenues open to us in accommodating the freedom of gender within the strictures of language. One possibility is to have people advise others of their preferred gender tense, male or female, while still remaining free to express themselves as any possible sexual identity. This approach seems problematic, because it will be difficult to know beforehand, or to remember if told, the preferred gender tense of any other person. There will be constant problems with being afraid to offend people with the wrong gender tense. The natural response to such a dilemma is our second avenue, the avoidance of gender-specific terminology. Some examples:

Dimorphic: “Mike was lonely, so he went to his friend’s house.”

Neutral (awkward): “Mike was lonely, so Mike went to Mike’s friend’s house.”

Neutral (natural): “Feeling lonely, Mike went to a friend’s house.”

Generally it is possible to avoid a sexually dimorphic pronoun either by using a proper name or by using an indefinite reference such as “a friend’s house” instead of “his friend’s house.” The avoidance of gender-specific terminology takes some mental forethought, but that is probably because we have all been raised to use gender pronouns naturally. It is no surprise that the first question asked when a baby is born is “What is its sex?” Otherwise we might not know how to talk about the kid! One problem with avoiding gender-specific pronouns is that it removes some frequently used words from language, leaving us with less linguistic choice and more ambiguity.

A third avenue to dealing with sexually dimorphic language is to develop new gender-inclusive words, creating additional linguistic choice. While this approach entails the difficulty of using words that others might not understand, it has the benefit of adding rather than subtracting richness to language. An excellent option for gender inclusive pronouns are the following:

Replacing “his” and “her” with “eir” (pronounced to rhyme with “their”)

Replacing “he” and “she” with “ey” (pronounced to rhyme with “they”)

Replacing “him” and “her” with “em” (pronounced to rhyme with “them”)

The benefits of these particular neologisms are that they are easy to pronounce and remember (just delete the “th” from the plural form or start with the plural form until the singular form comes easily), completely gender neutral, and fully conjugated. Returning to our previous example, we might now say, in a postapartheid world, “Mike was lonely, so ey went to eir friend’s house.” Or, combining the second and third gender-liberated avenues discussed above, we might say, “Mike was lonely, so ey went to a friend’s house.” These sentences look funny, but so does Shakespearean English, which was used around the time of Plymouth Rock. Indeed, it is said that someone from Shakespeare’s time would understand less than 25 percent of what we speak today.

Yet a fourth possibility is that words that are sexually dimorphic today will develop broader, gender-inclusive meaning in the future. This has occurred with the phrase you guys, which is now readily understood as including any sex. With regard to pronouns, “he” may come to replace “he” and “she,” while “her” might replace both “his” and “him.” In other words, either the female or the male pronoun might come to represent all cases of liberated gender. In these cases our sample sentence might read, “Mike was lonely, so she went to her friend’s house.” Ambiguity is introduced by broadening existing sexually dimorphic pronouns to mean any gender, but ambiguity is ever-present in the words and grammar of language. It makes talking more interesting.

In addition to genderized pronouns, talking about sex also involves dozens of words that seem to be sex specific. Most of these words can be easily gender liberated. For example:

Sex Specific v. Gender Liberated
boyfriend v. friend
maiden name v. birth name
Mr., Mrs., Ms. v. Person (Pn.)
sportsmanship v. fairplay
husband/wife v. spice
yes sir/ma’am v. yes

Even sex-specific words for relatives have ready substitutes: “my mother and father” become “my parents, Les and Lynn,” “my sister and brother” become “my sibs,” “my son and daughter” become “my kids,” and “my uncle and aunt” or “niece and nephew” become “my cousins.” All of this is not to say that voluntary use of sex specific words cannot or should not live long after the apartheid of sex falls. If a relative who has a vagina wants to be called your sister or brother, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew, and Mom or Dad—do it! Give them the same honor that you give anyone by calling them by their preferred name.

We noted at the start of this chapter that there was a close relationship between language and thought. Some would claim that no matter how much we liberate language, it will again become sexually dimorphic because people with penises think differently from people with vaginas. Those critics have not yet understood the evidence of chapter 5 — nobody has ever produced a comprehensive mental ability test that absolutely separates people with penises from people with vaginas. Instead these believers in sexual dimorphism are engaging in a level of gender generalization and stereotyping that would be considered outrageous if applied to racial or ethnic groups.

How can the sex stereotypers get away with their outrage? Because the apartheid of sex has existed for so long, and has become such an intrinsic part of religious orthodoxy, we have come to believe it is true. It is like making racist statements before civil rights. People thought they were just speaking the obvious truth. Sadly, we have forgotten that our genitals and hormone levels are only inadvertent genetic diversity tools in an age-old battle against parasites and genetic mutations. Just the way humanity forgot that its skin tone was merely an inadvertent radiation protection tool in an age-old battle with the sun.

Our minds are preciously unique and have nothing by nature to do with our genitals. Our ability to communicate using syntax evolved relatively recently, long after our genitals were firmly in place. From the standpoint of communication, male and female minds are made, not born.

Some would urge us to adapt to injustice, to go with the flow, for that is the way to get the most out of the status quo. For example, Deborah Tannen writes, in her book You Just Don’t Understand: “Pretending that women and men are the same hurts women, because the ways they are treated are based on the norms for men. It also hurts men who, with good intentions, speak to women as they would to men, and are nonplussed when their words don’t work as they expected, or even spark resentment and anger.” The “pretending” is not that women and men are the same, but that they are born to be different. The people being hurt the most are the ones who want to be seen and spoken to as persons, first and foremost, not as sex types. The solution here is not to perpetuate the “pretend” with male-or-female speaking skills, but to end the pretence of apartheid and let people learn to communicate with each other as persons, not as sexes.

Sex on the Mind

Tannen is not alone in making blanket generalizations that people with vaginas think one way and people with penises another. The field of psychology is so obsessed with mental-genital conformity that they consider it a “mental disorder” if a person wishes to behave according to a gender role “not appropriate” for their genitals. The leading diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, published in 1987, states, “Girls with this disorder regularly have male companions and an avid interest in sports and rough-and-tumble play; they show no interest in dolls or playing ‘house’ (unless they play the father or another male role).” Small wonder that persons with vaginas have not yet caught up to people with penises in sports—if the girls played too many sports as kids, they risked being diagnosed with “gender identity disorder of childhood.” Suppose a girl wanted to be a scientist, and all the scientists she saw were men. Would it be so unusual for the girl to insist she wanted to be a man? Would it not be a natural conclusion that she needed to be a man to be a scientist? Suppose a young boy loved children and wanted to be a mommy. Could that be a crime against nature? Aren’t there millions of unwanted kids who badly need mommies?

Modern-day psychologists inherited their views on gender identity from persons like Freud and Jung. Yet viewed objectively, the pronouncements of these men on sexual identity are so stereotypical and unscientific as to be laughable. Scarcely fifty years ago, Jung wrote:

"No one can get around the fact that by taking up a masculine profession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature. She is doing something that would scarcely be possible for a man to do, unless he were Chinese. Could he, for instance, be a nursemaid or run a kindergarten? When I speak of injury, I do not mean merely physiological injury, but above all psychic injury. It is a woman’s outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man’s prerogative."

No one offers scientific evidence of differently natured minds, and hence by now we must conclude it doesn’t exist. Indeed, as shown in chapter 5, the mountain of test data all supports sexual continuity instead. So we may presume that there is nothing inherent in the mind that imposes sexual dimorphism in language. But with psychology calling gender explorers “mentally disordered” or “unnatural” (the church called them heretics or devils), it will be a tremendously difficult task to root out from language, which means root out from minds, the deeply held prejudices that underlie the apartheid of sex.

It undoubtedly would be easier just to fall into one of two sex roles and to speak appropriately to each sex. It undoubtedly would have been easier for Nelson Mandela to accept Afrikaaner superiority and to answer “Yes, boss” when called. But the right thing to do is rarely the easy way out, especially when injustice is afoot. We do not so much live on the accomplishments of the past as borrow from the freedoms of the future. Nelson Mandela owed it to the children of Africa to fight with his life for a just and fair society. We owe it to the children of tomorrow to free their minds from a linguistic prison of sex. The only way to do that is to stop perpetuating the myth of male and female natures and to start clearing out of our dialogue the verbal guardians of the apartheid of sex.

The Human Uncertainty Principle

When we think about sex, is it because our genes have told us to, or is it because our society has taught us how? While it is clear that our genitals don’t tell us how or what to think, chapter 5 explained how some set of genes other than the ones that direct our genitals may influence our thinking about sex. Such genes may influence our motivation toward the sexual elements of assertiveness, nurturance, or eroticism. Such genes may even influence our desires toward preferable lovemates. Noam Chomsky pointed out that while most of language is learned, some part, “deep structure,” is genetic. While most of our sexual identity may be learned, is there some part, a “deep structure,” that is genetic?

The consensus of gender science researchers today is that it is impossible to pin down whether any particular aspect of sexuality if genetically determined or environmentally learned. Almost everyone believes there is an inherited component, a kind of deep structure, that makes it possible to be a sexual being. But most researchers say that from that deep structure, any sexual identity and orientation are possible. It is like taking a newborn infant to any culture in the world. Because of its inherited “deep structure,” the infant will learn language. But the genetic direction slows down here. The child will learn Chinese if in China and French if in France. Later on in life the child can go anywhere in the world and learn other languages. A genetic predisposition for language ability may lead the child to become a polyglot. A genetic disinclination for language may result in a monolinguistic kid. And any genetic direction can readily be overwhelmed by real-world motivation. It appears to be much the same with sexuality. We will all develop a sexual identity, and our environment will influence us greatly. Some of us will evolve among several sexual identities, and others will stick with one.

In physics there is a famous law called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The law says that is impossible to know the position of an electron precisely because all electrons are both wave-like and particle-like in nature. When you focus on the wave, you lose sight of the particle, and vice versa; the two phenomena are measured in mutually exclusive ways. In a similar vein, gender science appears to have arrived at Human Uncertainty Principle. In this case it is impossible to know the origin of any behavior precisely because every behavior is both genetically and environmentally influenced, and these two influences are (1) measured in mutually exclusive ways and (2) interactive between themselves. No matter how tightly we pin down a genetic trait, we can never know how it would have been expressed in a vacuum. And even if we created an environmental vacuum, it would teach us nothing about how the gene expressed itself in the real world. Once we are in the real world, we can never really know the specific contribution of a gene, as compared with the environment, in shaping our behavior. No matter how tightly we pin down an environment, we can never know what the person would have done in that environment without their genetic predispositions.

We appear to be hybrid genetic/environmental creatures. We cannot be one without the other. So when we think and talk about sex, it is because our genes enable us to do so and our environment implemented the ability. What we think and talk about sex is inexplicably intertwined between genetic orientations and environmental experiences. The Human Uncertainty Principle ensures that the precise cause of our thoughts and talk about sex will forever be unknown. It may well be for the better. Recent discoveries of genetic markers associated with homosexuality have given rise to fears that parents might choose to abort, or be required to abort, embryos carrying such markers. The fear is not without basis. In the 1930s and 1940s Nazi Germany exterminated 250,000 male and female homosexuals. During the past decade an estimated thirty million to fifty million embryos will have been aborted, mostly in Asia, simply because they have a very obvious marker—a vagina.

This gynacide number is so shocking—and carries such ominous implications for future uses of biotechnology—that further explanation is warranted. On July 21, 1999, The New York Times reported as follows: “Normally, women worldwide give birth to about 105 or 106 boys for every 100 girls. China’s ratio last year was about 13 points off this international norm, meaning that more than 12 percent of all female fetuses were aborted or otherwise unaccounted for. Based on a population of 1.17 billion, that adds up to more than 1.7 million missing girls each year.”

Investigations by reporters and government researchers always turn up the same explanation: Ultrasound and amniocentesis technology is used to determine the sex of a child, and very often an abortion follows upon discovery that the sex is female. A study of six thousand aborted fetuses at one Bombay clinic revealed that only one was a boy. In China the parents tell reporters, “We don’t want to waste our one allotted child.” In India they say, “Spend five hundred rupees now [for an ultrasound test and abortion] to save fifty thousand rupees later [for a bride’s dowry].”

United Nations figures for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Korea report similarly skewed birth rates in the 1990s, totaling an additional 1.5 million missing girls each year. At the rate the abortions have been increasing since around 1990, and with the continued spread of ultrasound technology the gynacide rate will almost certainly climb to over 5 million fetuses per year from the current 3.2 million conservative estimate.

We are in a race against time when it comes to dismantling the apartheid of sex. The rapid growth in biotechnical capabilities makes it possible to think about designing any kind of baby and designing away any kind of trait. Placed in the hands of a sexist society, biotechnology is a most dangerous tool. Those who would limit the freedom of gender must be blocked form the genetic tools that impact our lives. Giving biotechnology to sexists is a prescription for gender death.

Thinking and talking about sex is unavoidable, because language is full of sex. The dialogue today is dimorphic, but we have the ability to infuse our language with gender-inclusive concepts that liberate all speakers, present and as yet unborn. We must be wary of those who would serve as thought police, demanding compliance with sexually dimorphic language and behavior. They never have proven that minds come in two flavors. In fact, they are working just to preserve the status quo.

The effort to tie sexual thought to specific genes is doomed to failure, for the environment will always intervene. But this will not prevent those with a pro-apartheid agenda from using inaccurate results to inflict great harm. We need to dismantle the apartheid structure now so that the tools of biotechnology will be used for sexual diversity and not for gender control.

Bio-Cyber-Ethics

Ensuring the ethical use of biotechnology will be as large a concern for transhumanists as it is for defenders of gender freedom. Think about the creation of an incomplete mind in a computer system. For example, suppose mindware reaches a state of development whereby it can create in software a convincingly conscious mind that is either horribly retarded, severely depressed, autistic or Alzheimer’s-like. Today, there are no ethical rules preventing the creation of such minds in software. Yet, most of us would consider such an experiment to be as ghastly as intentionally creating a human with one of those conditions. Indeed, most people would choose to abort a fetus if told the child would be horribly retarded or autistic. Many severely depressed people take their own lives. At the last stages of Alzheimer’s, most patients’ families are hoping for a merciful death. So, if the flesh version of such minds is usually considered worse than death, how can it be permitted to create transhuman versions? The answer is that society does not yet believe that consciousness is possible in software. Hence, even if such a mind was created, the prevailing view is that no harm would have been done because the software mind is just computer code without any internal feelings of angst and dread.

As computer programmers and neuroscientists work together they will make progress toward creating software minds that seem ever more human-like. A disbeliever in cyber-consciousness will claim that there is some threshold of human-like thought that no computer can transcend. This would be the threshold of self-awareness supposedly enabled only by biological neuroanatomy (one candidate are the microtubules inside our neurons). Taking this as a hypothesis to be tested, how would one know whether the hypothesis was confirmed? Panels of experts could interview the cyber-conscious being to determine its sentience as compared to a flesh human – these type of interviews, when conducted in blinded fashion as to the forms of each interviewee, are called Turing Tests in honor of the man who first suggested them in the 1940s, Alan Turing. The prospect of being the first to pass such Turing Tests is motivating many computer science teams. They are doing their utmost to build into their software the full range of human feelings, including feelings of angst and dread. Hence, the unstoppable human motivation to invent something as amazing as a cyber-conscious mind will result in the creation of countless partially successful efforts that would be unethical if accomplished in flesh. Can cyber-embryos be ethically terminated for much the same reason so many XX chromosome embryos are terminated – because of a belief that their costs of upkeep are not worth their value as adults?

By having a different form from males, women have undergone an unimaginable amount of suffering. The first point of this book is that these differences of sexual form are illusory and irrelevant. As far as sexual identity goes, every person is a unique being. The next application of this lesson is to cyber-conscious beings. The prevailing view is that because someone has the form of software or computer hardware they are unfeeling and can thus be disposed of at will. The second point of this book is that these differences of substrate form are as irrelevant as the differences of form in genitals. It is the mind that is salient, not the matter that surrounds it. So long as Turing testers or certified cyber-psychologists or perhaps just plain people come to the conclusion that a transhuman form has a human mind then bioethics should proscribe causing it harm. Bioethics would also require that Institutional Review Boards (panels of experts in specific medical fields) first approve experimentation that might produce a “wrongful life”, such as a tortured mind, so that such risks could be minimized if not eliminated.

Introduction by Historian Harold Brackman

Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex 15 Years Later: A Fan’s Personal and Historical Appreciation

by Harold Brackman, Ph.D.

Martine and Me

“Our efforts to simplify reality cheat others and cheat ourselves.”

Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex (1995)—written with the precision and persuasiveness of a lawyer’s brief and the power of a visionary manifesto—will be viewed by most readers, today and in years hence, as making the case for the transgender movement at a critical juncture in its emergence. Given my long though interrupted association with Martine, which started in the 1970s when then-Martin was an incredibly talented, ambitious UCLA undergraduate living on a shoestring while raising an astonishingly beautiful multi-racial toddler, mine is a more personal perspective. The book and the author for me are part of a web of influences in which my own life as an historian and a man (if Martine will forgive my use of that gender-specific designation!) have been profoundly implicated.

Martine is remarkably knowledgeable and accomplished across a spectrum ranging from law to astronomy to business startups to genetic mapping to bioethics and biotech. So I’m sure she won’t begrudge my claiming an expertise not on her list—that of an historian. What I want to do here is view The Apartheid of Sex through several differing yet complementary historical lenses that may enrich the reader’s appreciation of this watershed book that changed my mind and may change yours. First, however, let me look at how this book makes its case.

The Structure of the Argument

“In the future, labeling people at birth as ‘male’ or ‘female’ will be considered just as unfair as South Africa’s now-abolished practice stamping ‘black’ or ‘white’ on people’s ID cards.”
Though now a biotech CEO rather than the practicing telecommunications law specialist she once was, Martine crafted her book with a lawyer’s skill. The reader will note that repeatedly it makes both primary and secondary arguments so that, even if the former don’t succeed, the latter may prevail. The Apartheid of Sex is a book about the biological and behavioral markers of sex and gender. Its critique of the biology of “either/or” sexual dimorphism and its attack on the behavioral patterns that maintain traditional gender hierarchies are reinforcing yet not dependent on each other for their truth.

The Apartheid of Sex makes scientific arguments (which I think would have impressed Charles Darwin), based on naturalistic evidence drawn from both animal and human evolutionary biology, to support its conclusion that there are no absolute binary male-female distinctions in nature. This summary of the evidence from the animal kingdom produced an indelible impression on me: “The slipper shell (Crepidula fornicate) . . . lives in oyster beds and gradually changes from male, to hermaphrodite, to female in old age. On the other hand, certain Caribbean coral-reef fish start out female and die as males. Many types of fish, such as butter hamlets and swordtails, change sex back and forth to balance the ratio of males to females currently around them. The sex ratio expressed by these types of fish depend on their social surroundings.”

Yet suppose the reader refuses to follow Martine in extrapolating from such evidence to her conclusions about the fluid continuum of sex types and male-female human biological differences, and rejects her view that these differences are insignificant compared to the overriding fact of the commonality of “the transgendered brain.” Even then, her book makes a powerful—to me irresistible—case that, assuming an irreducible minimum of biological difference between male and female, these differences are still entirely insufficient to justify the ponderous behavioral superstructure of gender segregation and inequality that have been built into society’s fabric. This discriminatory superstructure is rooted in culture as well as society, and Martine is very hard—perhaps too hard—on the world’s religions (which sometimes have inspired positive change-oriented movements) for being a regressive force: “The thrust of early Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judeo-Christianity was to make women ashamed of their bodies and to thus make it easier for men to control them.”

Martine buttresses her argument against gender discrimination by analyzing the parallels with racial apartheid. The anti-miscegenation laws that imposed a Nazi-like ban on intermarriage across racial lines were carried over from slavery to segregation, persisting until the right to marry of an interracial couple was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Except for the bravery of Richard Loving (who died in 1975) and Mildred Loving (who died in 2008), premier golfer Tiger Woods might not be in a position today to positively describe himself as a CABLASIAN (Caucasian-Black-Asian American). Partly because of the pioneering consciousness raising by Martine’s The Apartheid of Sex, the day may be coming when laws against same-sex marriage will be viewed as unjust and anachronistic as laws against interracial marriage. As Martine notes, “immutable race” is already becoming “choosable culture.” The next domino to fall is “immutable gender”!

The 1990s Context

“For most people society’s gender rules are so powerful that they simply go with the flow. But in every society there are the free spirits, the stubborn, and the insistent. In the 1960s they fought for civil rights. In the 1990s they fight for gender rights.”

The Apartheid of Sex and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1996) appeared on the Gay and New York Times best seller lists, respectively, within 12 months of each other. What do these books have in common? First, two extraordinary authors, each with a story to tell. The difference between them in the mid-1990s was that Obama’s autobiography of multi-racial origins and the search for African American identity was written by a young man, still in his early thirties, whose life trajectory at the time was defined less by his impressive accomplishments (Ivy League education, president of the Harvard Law Review, South Side Chicago community organizer) than by the unlimited political potential ahead of him. In contrast, Martine Rothblatt, in her early forties, was already a pioneering telecommunications lawyer, visionary entrepreneur, and successful negotiator of the transgender life change that gives the dimension of personal witness and authority to her book.

Though Martine does not note it in her book, she was actually born in the same American heartland city that was Obama’s career destination. From Chicago, Martine’s father, the son of a dentist for the Retail Clerks’ Union, and mother, a speech therapist, moved the Rothblatt family to Southern California.

We can see in retrospect that both Obama’s and Martine’s books and lives reflect a sea change that was occurring in American culture in the 1990s. Obama’s end point is his mature African American identity achieved by coming to terms with his heritage from a distant Kenyan father, but the book’s dramatic interest to most readers was the dynamic tale of how Obama navigated his way to this positive result though a perilous sea of cultural ambivalences and psychological conflicts played out on a global stage spanning Hawaii, the American heartland, and his father’s African homeland. Like a hero of Charles Dickens, Obama discovers who he is, but only through pluck and luck. He finally achieves the status of a son who is not so much chosen as self-chosen. Truly, this is an inspiring American as well as African American success story and an autobiographical gem in a tradition running from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X.
The Apartheid of Sex is not autobiographical except for a few pages at the book’s beginning and end that, however, are critically important in framing the book. Yet as with Obama, Martine takes the reader along on her psychological and cultural odyssey. The author and reader jointly journey through the complexities of sexual biology and gender socialization, identifying yet avoiding the dead ends of stereotyping and prejudice that limit most people’s lives. They then emerge with a sense of the historically contingent creative possibilities of sex and gender development for individuals with the courage and imagination to pursue them. Full of scientific facts, Martine’s book is passionately animated by her faith in life’s exhilarating journey, especially in America, the land of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” Martine also reinvents herself—but, unlike Gatsby’s male tragedy, hers is a transgender triumph.

Both The Apartheid of Sex and Dreams from My Father reflect and celebrate the deconstruction of outmoded, socially constructed notions of race and gender and the toppling of traditional barriers to the achievement of the American Dream. In Obama’s case, the transformative dynamic is the “beiging of America,” psychologically as well as demographically, as young people of all ethnicities impatiently reject racism as a relic of the past. Bear in mind that Obama’s only landside in November 2008—by 2-to-1—was among voters 18 to 29 years of age.

In Martine’s case, the inherited psychological and cultural impediments that she targets are not racial but are sexual hierarchies and gender inequalities. Elections won’t clearly mark the fall of these barriers except for the struggle for gay marital rights. Yet headlines attest to how prescient Martine was in arguing that, just as with Obama and race, so do with sex and gender, the future belongs to those who can both see the potential for change and make sea changes! Here are two examples of how things are changing in line with Martine’s analysis:

• In 1995, Martine could only point to “recent experiments in which male baboons were made to serve as surrogate mothers for zygotes fertilized in the test tube.” This story from 2009 speaks for itself: “A 25-year-old transsexual Spaniard claims to be pregnant with twins after artificial insemination in the first such case in Spain, local media reported on Sunday. ‘I am six-and-a-half weeks pregnant’, Ruben Noe Coronado Jimenez, initially named Estefania, told the popular magazine Pronto, saying he took treatment to restart his menstrual cycle. In photos posted on his blog, where he also wrote about the pregnancy, Coronado has a shaved head and a beard.”

• In 1995, Martine wrote that “male cross-dressers are usually [still] deep in the closet.” By 2009, “Any any number of male models gracing the catwalks of the spring menswear shows held recently in Milan and Paris [who are] now getting the casting calls from top designers are guy waifs—all soft and round in the face which only a few seasons ago was sharp angles and strong lines.” There are wearing tank tops and what looks like outerwear corsets The transsexual drag queens beaten at Stonewall are having a measure of vindication bestowed by prestigious fashion designers. We’ve come a significant distance from the burlesqued transgender characters in The Rocky Horror Show!

Reminding us of another pop cultural classic that dramatized age-old prejudices hiding beneath the veneer of liberal culture, Martine calls for “a modern-day Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner [that] might again star Sidney Poitier, but this time as the father of a daughter about to be married in Hawaii to another woman.” Here again, she prophecies a shift from racial to gender struggles to redefine American culture and character.

Obama’s book exploring the trans-racial frontier and Martine’s exploration the transgender frontier are likely to be viewed by future generations as cutting edge documents that helped gestate our new millennium. Today, with an African American president in office, but Hillary Clinton relegated to Secretary of State, gender barriers seem more resistant to change. Martine explores the paradoxes as well as parallels involving these two pathways of change: “Sex is even much more malleable than race—as individualized as our fingerprints. . . . Racial categories are already an affront to mixed-race kids. Sexual categories are an inhibition to gender explorers.”

The 1960s Prelude

“The apartheid of sex is every bit as harmful, painful, and oppressive as the apartheid of race.”
Dramatic recent developments did not come out of nowhere. They had a prelude in the 1960s. Martine contextualizes her book as an outgrowth of the transgender movement as well as her personal experience starting in the 1980s. Indeed, transgender studies as a clinical and academic field achieved breakthroughs during that decade—yet the transgender movement grew out of a social context that took shape twenty years earlier.

Born as part of the last wave of the baby boom, in 1954, Martine was too young to experience the sixties in the same way that someone born just after World War II like me did. Yet the sixties were critical to the transgender awakening, and not only because transgender people participated with their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters at 1969’s civil rights-inspired Stonewell Rebellion in New York.

Beyond clichés about “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” that decade raised consciousness about gender and sexuality in ways were a radical break with the first half of the twentieth century. The post-World War I Jazz Age had its buzz about flaming youth, companionate marriage, and something like a sexual revolution (later documented by Dr. Kinsey)—but it was a limited phenomenon both in numbers and in range of experience compared to the sixties. The New Left philosophical guru Herbert Marcuse had already laid the theoretical foundations for “The Love Generation” in his Eros and Civilization (1955) reinterpreting Freud, not as a practitioner of psychological adjustment, but as a critic of civilized repression and a prophet of sexual liberation. Norman O. Brown popularized the new consciousness in his celebration of “polymorphous perverse” sexuality in Love’s Body (1966).

Despite or because of the well-publicized goings on at Woodstock in 1969, “The Love Generation” was not the sexual idyll often advertised. Marcuse recognized as much by warning against the joylessness of commercialized sexuality he called “repressive desublimination.” Indeed, one may wonder whether, not Brown’s Love’s Body, but Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) with its conventionally-gendered, , sex-addicted antihero should be viewed as the real poster child for the sixties generation.

But whether sixties sexual liberation was fulfilling or frustrating or both, it broke through the cake of convention and traditional stereotyped sex and gender roles in a decisive way. After Stokely Carmichael told women who asked to play a leadership role in the civil rights struggle that their “proper position in the movement is prone,” a new generation of feminists founded their own movement. Similarly, gays and lesbians discovered that “all politics is personal” and found their own voices.

Martin Duberman’s Stonewall (1993) grippingly documents the experience of “drag queens”—especially, those who were also people of color. Some had been catalysts of the protests against police repression yet were often treated as pariahs by those in the gay community they helped liberate. It was only a matter of time—and not much time—before a transsexual/transgender movement emerged to provide a shared context for the experience of people who, until that time, had either been ignored as invisible or treated as freaks, sometimes even by people of same-sex orientation.

The Pre-1860s Background

“The feminist insistence upon seeing individuals as individuals, regardless of sexual biology, can now be carried to the next logical step: individuals are individuals, not sex types.”
The Apartheid of Sex is more than the record of the intellectual odyssey that accompanied Martine’s male-to-female transgender transformation. It can and should also be read as a testament to the philosophy of radical individualism (my term not hers) that Martine lives and breathes. Here, too, the sixties is part of the story in that the commune-building sentiment of the decade competed with an anti-collective libertarian impulse for the allegiance of radical young people. Crystallizing in the wake of that seminal period, Martine’s politics defies left-right pidgin holing, but she’s fundamentally a libertarian with a small “l” in that what matters to her is root-and-branch, across-the-board liberation of human potential including the potential for sexual experimentation and satisfaction. Though not an anarchist with a capital “A,” she puts an absolutely higher priority on self-realization by individuals than perfecting government institutions.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that great thinkers are divided between “hedgehogs” who conceive of reality in terms of one big truth and “foxes” who see the world in terms of a multiplicity of particulars. Martine’s thinking combines a hedgehog-like grasp of big ideas with a fox-like instinct that what ultimately matters is each and every individual human being.

Perhaps more than even she realizes, the original American historical context for Martine’s personal and political quest goes back beyond the 1960s to more than a century earlier.
Around 1900, when conservative middle-class Americans wanted to express their horror at the specter of revolutionary subversion or radical immorality, the word they usually used was not “communist” but “anarchist”—and the associated image was that of long-haired, wild-eyed, Bohemian-minded, German immigrant bomb throwers like those who were blamed for Chicago’s Haymarket explosion in 1886. This involved an irony that was lost on those frightened Americans. The irony was that, before the Civil War, a homegrown American anarchism—basically nonviolent (except for sympathy with abolitionist John Brown), but philosophically and spiritually far-reaching—permeated the thinking of a whole generation of primarily New England Transcendentalist intellectuals including Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (a New Yorker) as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott. Their radical individualism—a less provocative term than “anarchism” for this political creed—was written about and propounded from the lecture platform by Emerson while Thoreau famously acted it out in his nonviolent resistance to war (and nonpayment of taxes) at Walden Pond. Pioneering anarchist Joseph Warren, not directly part of the Transcendentalist circle, advanced the theory of “the sovereignty of the individual” elaborating Emersonian individualism as a radical political philosophy.

However much it’s been downplayed by generations by strait-laced historians, Transcendentalists rejected conformity and convention in the name of liberating the self from all impediments. George Ripley’s Brook Farm was partly based on French socialist Charles Fourier’s doctrine of “attractive industry” according to which individuals, regardless of sex, were supposed to do the work for which they were most temperamentally fitted.

Transcendentalist communal experiments sometimes questioned the reigning “cult of true womanhood” at least regarding traditional gender role differentiation in child rearing, though women still usually ended up doing most of the domestic chores. John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community experimented with replacing monogamy with “complex marriage” and “scientific procreation.” Margaret Fuller developed a theory of human personality defining every individual as “androgynous” with both male and female qualities. Lifelong celibate Thoreau nevertheless praised the sensuous Hindu soul as well as Whitman’s poetry. He offered this musing —“What the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answered”—that can be read in a very modern gender-liberated way. There’s was no ambiguity in Whitman’s rejection of “cold and sterile intellectuality” in favor of his unashamed personal and poetic erotic sensuality that literary critics, well into the twentieth century, refused to admit was rooted in his homosexual sensibility. “Looking west from California’s shore,” Whitman saw reflected back his American self. Managing an international business in a globalizing age, Martine personifies a philosophy of life that’s also all-American.

What we call homoeroticism among both female “sisters” and male friends ran near in pre-Civil War American life before it receded with the crystallization of the more sexually as well as socially regimented society of late nineteenth-century Victorian America. The firestorm of controversy surrounding recent attempts to historically out “the gay Lincoln” calls attention to this pre-Civil War sensibility. Respected sex researcher C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2005), published after the author’s death, convinced few professional historians that American’s most revered president was “predominately homosexual” in his sexual orientation. But it was not for lack of compelling circumstantial evidence (little of it new) compiled by Tripp that includedthe surface emotionally effusive letters signed “yours forever” by Abe to his all-male coterie of friends, his sleeping for four years in the 1830s in the same double bed with Springfield merchant Joshua Speed, and his subsequent sharing a bed and night shirts at the Soldier’s Home (or “Lincoln Cottage”) three miles from the White House during the Civil War with presidential bodyguard, Pennsylvania “Bucktail” Captain David Derickson, when Lincoln’s wife, Mary, was out of town.

Of course, then or now, intimacy was not synonymous with orgasm. The equally or more compelling evidence on the “heterosexual side” of the Lincoln equation includes Abe’s probable frequenting of prostitutes, as many as four women to whom he proposed, his siring of four sons with Mary Todd, and his close friend William Herndon’s observation that Lincoln was so oversexed that “he could scarcely keeping his hands off” women.

No one will ever know for sure, and it’s tempting to speculate about Lincoln sexuality, though attempts to link his sexual orientation with his attitude toward slavery are probably a bridge too far. Was Lincoln devoutly heterosexual (the conventional view)? “predominately homosexual” (Tripp’s view)? bisexual (another interpretation)? or perhaps heterosexual with a strong homoerotic streak? If he had a pronounced homoerotic bent, it was no doubt nurtured by growing up in a log cabin culture in which same sex siblings often slept bundled up together and maturing in a frontier milieu where itinerant lawyers like Lincoln spent long periods away from their marital beds while often sharing tavern beds with their fellow traveling barristers.

Just maybe, if The Rail Splitter were here today, he would scoff at such definitional quibbling because—being true to his own times—he would not accept straight-jacketing categories like “gay” or “straight” or even “bisexual” that were quite alien to that era’s mentality and sensibility. (The term “homosexual” was not invented until 1869.) In other words, Old Abe here today might even share Martine’s skepticism of such categories that still govern the thinking of most people my age or older.

I go into this psycho-historical detail, not in order to titillate about Old Abe, but to suggest that history sometimes proceeds in cycles rather than straight lines. The breakdown of rigid gender hierarchies and sex roles that Martine argues is an accelerating trend of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may not be all that new. It may, in part, be a reversion to the significantly less structured, less regimented psycho-sexual world that prevailed before the Civil War. Back then, there was not yet a crystallized gay subculture (the closest thing to that may have been the hemaneh—half-man, half-woman—of the Cheyenne tribe); yet the sensibility we associate today the gay subculture may have resonated more widely during that era than it did later.

Martine’s clarion call for a radically individuated sexual liberation—in which transgendered people ultimately exfoliate their own unique psycho-sexual selves without retreating into group identification with a supportive “third sex” community—may be so new just because it’s a throwback to something quite old. At the very least, it echoes the radical individualism of Whitman’s brave exploration of his own sensual frontier. It may even make Martine a spiritual descendant of that era’s greatest seeker of “a new birth of freedom”—Abraham Lincoln—America’s most beloved yet still most enigmatic president.

Between Past and Future

“Sexual orientation in the third millennium will evolve toward a unisexual model because ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex types will fade away. Persons of any genitals will feel free to identify themselves as olive, magenta, coral, ebony, or white, or as femme, butch, tough, tender, or trans. With this continuum of sexual possibilities, gay, straight, and even bisexual will lose all meaning.”

The present is, existentially, all we’ve got, yet—in an unsettling sense—the present is a fictive concept: just an ever-shifting dividing line between past and future. In the Afterword to The Apartheid of Sex, Martine reveals her true persona as a “transperson”—impatient to push us into the future by transcending the artificial, destructive barriers between races, sexes, and nations, and the even the mortality barrier that denies people indefinite life extension. Overcoming the obstacles to technological immortality is one of the goals of the Terasem Movement that she also leads.

For two decades, I’ve worked as a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance (MOT) in Los Angeles, which opened its doors in 1993. The early 1990s was a time when Los Angeles, rocked by both man-made disasters (the post-Rodney King Riot) and natural disasters (the Malibu Fires and Northridge Earthquake), was trying to rebuild bridges between communities as well as physical infrastructure. I was a professional historian of U.S. social and intellectual history with a special interest in the history of immigration and ethnic and race relations, especially Black-Jewish relations. Initially, I conceived my work designing historical exhibits for the MOT in terms of juxtaposed tracks between “intolerance” and “tolerance.” The “intolerance” track showed how certain kinds of people—racial minorities, immigrant newcomers, and women, and also poor men—were denied opportunity, while the contrasting “tolerance” track chronicled their struggles against oppression.

This Manichean or dualistic view of the struggle between the change-oriented forces of good vs. the status quo-oriented forces of evil still is compelling, but in recent years I’ve become sensitive to goals of and reconciliation and transcendence that it mostly leaves out of the picture. Despite all of America’s current economic and security problems in a globalized twenty-first century, the evidence has been slowly mounting for decades that “transpersons” like Martine are really making a difference as intermarriage rates across all racial, ethnic, and religious divides soar and as young people, both the politically liberal and the politically conservative, increasingly gravitate toward support of gay rights and gay marriage initiatives that signalize race and gender attitudes in the country are moving in the direction championed by Martine.

Following the publication of The Apartheid of Sex, Martin with her life partner or “spice” Bina Aspen Rothblatt, established the World Against Racism Foundation (WARF), at www.endracism.org, to promote redemptive liberation across a broad front. She, her book, and her subsequent work have played an important role in sensitizing me and my work for the MOT to these exciting possibilities for the emergence from Homo sapiens of what she calls Persona creatas or “the creative person.”

I hope the readers of this new online edition of The Apartheid of Sex will be challenged and inspired by Martine’s example to also become truly creative individuals.

Selective Reading List

Amnesty International USA, Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the U.S. (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2005)
Paul F. Boller, Jr., American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974)
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966)
Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993)
Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979)
Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Press, 1993)
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1955)
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969)
Martine Rothblatt, Unzipped Genes: Taking Charge of Baby-Making in the New Millennium (Philadelph1a: Temple University Press, 1997).
________, Your Life or Mine: How Geoethics Can Resolve the Conflicts between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation (London: Ashgate, 2004).
Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997)
Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008)
C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Free Press, 2005)

Science and Sex

The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
- George Santayana

Science and Sex

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn, a leading historian of science, crystallized the concept that virtually all science is not a pure search for truth, but an effort to further confirm some preexisting, generally accepted model or framework, which he called a “paradigm.” Kuhn shocked people with his seemingly cynical view that young scientists work to please their older mentors, which is best done by confirming the mentor’s theories, since the mentors have the keys to what younger scientists want—professorships, grant monies, laboratories. Furthermore Kuhn noted that when scientific research contradicts the “prevailing paradigm,” the young researchers are told that their experiments were flawed or that they misinterpreted the results. It would be heresy to suggest that the last generation’s theories were wrong, for that would mean that the mentors’ lifework was largely wasted.



For example, thousands of years ago the astronomy paradigm placed the earth at the center of the universe. Eventually the observations of young astronomers began to contradict this paradigm, indicating that maybe the earth and planets circled the sun. But those observations were rebutted, suppressed, or re-explained to be consistent with an earth-centered worldview. Hence the period of time that it took planets to reappear in the earth’s sky, a period of time that was clearly not consistent with an earth-centered solar system, was made to be consistent by positing that the planets pirouetted in small circles along their orbits. The size and number of planetary pirouettes (which would prolong the planet’s orbit and were called “epicycles”) were adjusted until the planet’s period of appearance in the earth’s sky coincided with that which was the case for an earth-centered solar system. In short, science looked not for truth per se, but for truth within the confines of accepted theories.

Once in a great while, observed Kuhn, brave and brilliant scientists can succeed in smashing the old paradigm and replacing it with a new one. Kuhn called this a “scientific revolution.” It takes bravery because the existing scientists will all fight against the revolutionary, who is, after all, claiming that the preceding generation’s work was wrong, meaningless, or at least irrelevant. It takes brilliance because the revolutionary model must (1) explain the old data in a way that is more consistent with a new theory than with the old theory, (2) explain inconsistencies or holes in the old theory, and (3) make predictions that can be checked out by a new generation of scientists. This new, younger generation of scientists will eventually become the standard-bearers of a new paradigm.

In the case of the astronomy paradigm, the brave and brilliant scientists were Copernicus and Kepler. Copernicus doubted that plants pirouetted in circles along their orbits. But he also calculated that if the planets and the earth all orbited the sun in perfect circles, then they also would not appear in their positions in the sky when they did. Kepler’s brilliant breakthrough was to predict that all the planets orbited the sun along elliptical paths, in a kind of oval-shaped circle. The hunch turned out to be correct—the calculated period of reappearance in the earth’s sky for a planet going around the sun on an elliptical path matched perfectly with the planet’s actual reappearance in the earth’s sky.



Copernicus was derided and labeled a heretic, for his theory rendered irrelevant hundreds of years of earth-centered astronomy. But his theory proved more accurate and elegant than the old theories and provided many new research opportunities for young generations of astronomers. In time Copernicus and Kepler accomplished a scientific revolution.

One of the great statements of the courage it takes to foment a scientific revolution comes from Machiavelli (The Prince), who is buried across a Florentine church floor from another great rebel, Galileo: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain of success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. The innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and but lukewarm defenders in those who may do well in the new.”

Machiavelli’s statement will no doubt prove as true for any revolution in gender science as it has proven true for revolutions in every other field of science.

Scientific revolutions are also called paradigm shifts because they actually cause a shift, or change, in the way we view the world. Such paradigm shifts occur in all fields, including fields that we might not consider “scientific.” Examples of scientific revolutions include the triumph of behaviorism over Freudianism in psychology and the victory of Darwinism over creationism in anthropology.

In each case there are three key elements to a paradigm shift:

1. The old paradigm does not meet the needs of society as well as the new paradigm promises.

Examples:

Astronomy: the need for accurate prediction of planetary appearances

Anthropology: the need for understanding the origins of humanity

Psychology: the need for a fast means of modifying human behavior

2. The new paradigm solves at least one major discrepancy or hole in the old paradigm.

Examples:

Astronomy: discrepancy of unobservable planetary pirouttes

Anthropology: discrepancy between biblical time scale for creation of life and geologic evidence of ancient life

Psychology: discrepancy of behavior unaltered by dream analysis

3. The new paradigm must make predictions that will provide many new opportunities for younger generations to verify, as compared with the stale opportunities in the old paradigm.

Examples:

Astronomy: All orbits of planets and moons will be elliptical

Anthropology: Evolution can be traced from animals to humans

Psychology: Human behavior can be modified through stimulus response type of conditioning

The time is now ripe for a paradigm shift in the field of gender science. As shown above, for this to happen, a new gender paradigm must (1) promise a better match with reality, and better satisfy social needs than the old paradigm, (2) solve discrepancies in the old paradigm, and (3) offer many opportunities to a new generation of researchers.



The old gender paradigm is known as “sexual dimorphism,” which means sex takes only two (“di”) forms (“morphism”), male or female. It claims that this absolute division arises from sex-differentiated levels of hormones released prenatally, which in turn create not only two different reproductive systems, but also two different mental natures. From its ancient genesis, the old gender paradigm has been used to enforce the superiority of one apparent sex over the other and as a framework for research to prove one sex has a different nature from the other.

The new gender paradigm is called “sexual continuism.” It posits that humanity is composed of a continuous blend of sexual identity, far beyond any simplistic male or female categorization. The new paradigm predicts that sexual identity, like other aspects of personality, arises from a confluence of factors not solely hormonal or environmental in origin. The new paradigm claims that reproductive systems are not strictly personal, but are sociotechnical and are accessible by all persons regardless of genitalia.

Based on Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions throughout the history, the paradigm of sexual continuity will succeed if it (1) better addresses society’s needs regarding sexual identity than does sexual dimorphism, (2) solves discrepancies and holes in the theory of sexual dimorphism, and (3) offers more interesting research opportunities than does sexual dimorphism. Each of these three points will now be analyzed to see if, in fact, we are at the beginning of a revolution in gender science.

What Society Needs from Gender Science

The principal objective of a humanitarian society is to provide equal, nondiscriminatory opportunity for personal fulfillment to all persons. The paradigm of sexual continuity is able to achieve this better than sexual dimorphism because sexual continuity eliminates the largest allegedly immutable division among persons. Whenever such divisions are present, inequality inevitably results.



Divisions of people into free and slave meant less opportunity for slaves. Insistence that people declare a skin color or ancestry always brings racism. “Separate but equal” has never proven itself to work as a social tool for equal opportunity. Legal division of people by sex has always had as its corollary the inequality of one sex.

The social shortcomings of sexual dimorphism in terms of equal “pursuit of happiness” are everywhere apparent. Persons labeled as women do two-thirds of the world’s work but own 1 percent of its property. Census data from China, Indian, and Korea, and a secret Chinese government report obtained last year by The New York Times, indicate that millions of fetuses with vaginas are aborted each year after ultrasound tests because of the wide-spread, accurate perception that persons labeled as women will get less out of life. Persons of the same genitalia who want to marry each other are denied, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, this “most basic right of man” because of the paradigm of sexual dimorphism. Persons labeled one sex are denied jobs or strongly discouraged from them if under sexual dimorphism those jobs are thought best attuned for persons of a different sex. Sexual dimorphism leads scientists such as Doreen Kimura, writing in the September 1992 Scientific American, to claim that women are more likely to succeed in “medical diagnostic fields where perceptual skills are important” and men are better in “professions that emphasize math skills, such as engineering or physics.” Such sexually dimorphic thinking is as socially odious to persons of any sexual identity as are the racist claims that Africans are more likely to succeed in sports and Asians are more likely to succeed at science.

The paradigm of sexual continuity promises greater social equality by eliminating the sex typing of persons based on genitalia. Sexual continuity offers greater fulfillment for society by enabling all persons to develop their sexual identity outside of any fixed male or female choice. Allocation of wealth, jobs, and marital and parental rights would be accomplished by merit and personal choice; by the unfettered individual pursuit of happiness that is the hallmark of a humane democratic society. By eliminating a separate, legally mandated male or female label, sexual continuism takes a big step forward toward achieving society’s quest for equal opportunity.


The Inconsistency of Sex

The ultimate test of the validity of any theory is its match with reality. This reality match is put to its critical test by experiments that either confirm or disprove predictions made by the theory. If important predictions of a theory are not confirmed, and if these results cannot otherwise by reasonably explained, then the theory or paradigm has an Achilles’ heel that renders it susceptible to revolution.

At least from the time of the Greeks, a key prediction of sexual dimorphism was that humanity was divided into two absolute categories—male and female—each with different natures. For millennia unscientific proof backed up the theory—the “evident” passiveness of women and aggressiveness of men. No one seriously considered whether the “proof” was, in fact, created by the theory: that sexually dimorphic laws, customs, and socialization created the two “evidently” different-natured sexes.

With the rise of monotheism, the “proof” of sexual dimorphism became the Word of God as enshrined in one or another Bible. No one seriously questioned—or lived long after such questioning—whether the “Word of God” was not simply the words of men intent on enforcing the paradigm of sexual dimorphism.

As the Renaissance dawned there arose interest in obtaining measurable, repeatable proof of theoretical assertions. But, as noted earlier, most science is an effort to find or force data to fit the prevailing, popular paradigm. Most science is not an unprejudiced abstract quest for truth. Hence, up through the early twentieth century, “scientists” claimed to have measured differences in brain weight, brain size, and skeletal structure that “proved” women were inferior to men. By the late twentieth century scientists admitted that their early data on brain mass, and its relations to intelligence, were bogus.

At the end of the twentieth century many scientists continue to claim they have measurable proof of differences in men’s and women’s natures. Today the proof takes two forms. First, scientists present statistics from various kinds of verbal, mathematical, and perception tests showing, on average, that women and men score in different ranges on these tests. Second, scientists present data showing, on average, that parts of the brain are of different weight, size, or neural connectivity for men and women.

All of the alleged proofs of sexual dimorphism have suffered from a glaring but studiously ignored Achilles’ heel—absolute differences in men’s and women’s minds, mental abilities, and psychological natures have never been found. There are always many women who score in the same range as men on math, verbal, and perception tests, and vice versa. There are always many women who are more aggressive than many men and many men who are more nurturing than many women. There are always many women who are bigger, stronger, and hairier than many men, and vice versa. The absolute sexual dimorphism that is externally apparent in genitals has never been found elsewhere in the body, least of all in the mind.

If there are but two mental sexes, which sexual dimorphism alleges to be true, how does one account for the total failure to scientifically test people such that male and female minds falls into two absolutely discrete groups? There are but two possible answers to this question. Either we have not yet discovered the right test to prove mental sexual difference or sexual identity is continuous, not dimorphic. Neither solution bodes well for the paradigm of sexual dimorphism.

If we have simply not yet found the right test for dimorphism, then the old paradigm is faced with an immense mountain of existing test data that supports sexual continuism. Further, the existing paradigm can only offer researchers the hopeless task of searching for some test that produces sexually dimorphic results, while condemning researchers to continue reporting results that find only average differences between sexes, leaving unexplained the dominant finding that, again and again, absolute sex differences were not found. If we explain all of the existing test data with sexual continuism, then we must concede that humanity is not divided into two sexual natures. This admission marks the death knell for sexual dimorphism and brings gender theory into a better match with scientifically measurable reality.

What of the results showing average differences between sexes, such as more males performing very high on math tests than females? Is this not proof of at least some sexual dimorphism in humanity? The answer is no, for two reasons. First, the paradigm of sexual dimorphism cannot allow for “some” dimorphism. If there is such a thing as “some” dimorphism, what are the people who do not test sexually dimorphic? Are they neither male nor female? Are they persons with vaginas and male minds? The answers to any of these questions lead to a conclusion that there is a continuum of possible sexual identities, which is the antithesis of sexual dimorphism but the very essence of the new paradigm of sexual continuity.

The second reason that average sex differences on test scores do not support sexual dimorphism is that all tests designed under a sexually dimorphic paradigm are suspect. In particular, the experiments to date simply correlate a person’s self-stated sexual identity with their test scores. The researchers then assume, ipso facto, that if some percentage of persons identified as women score differently from some percentage of persons identified as men, the difference was because they were women or men. No efforts have been made categorically to analyze and eliminate all of the other nongenital-based reasons for different scoring—namely, environmental and genetic ones. No effort has ever been made to assess why the sexually atypical performers exist. Instead, under a paradigm of sexual dimorphism, researchers satisfy themselves with weak average data than can be correlated with sex. But average test data on sex-type performance is no more meaningful or socially useful than is average test data on racial or ethnic performance. Stereotyping passes poorly as science, yet all sexual dimorphic research to date is based on average differences, which is to say that any sexually dimorphic conclusions drawn therefrom are simply quantitative stereotypes.

Sexual continuism explains the glaring hole of no absolute mental sex differences that plagues sexual dimorphism. No absolute “male or female brain” indicators have been found because they don’t exist. Instead the human mind is arrayed across a broad continuum of sexual identity, and this is shown in the data of all contemporary researchers. The task for the twenty-first century is to outline the map of sexual continuity.

The paradigm of sexual continuity provides a vast amount of interesting opportunities for scientific research. These opportunities dwarf the moribund and to date hopeless quest of researchers to prove there are either male or female minds. It is to the research opportunities of the revolution in gender science that we now turn.


Opportunities under the Rainbow of Gender

We have seen that scientific revolutions, or paradigm shifts, occur when a new theory provides a better match with reality than the old theory and in particular explains some flagrant discrepancy in the old theory. The field of gender science is ripe for revolution because the old theory of sexual dimorphism cannot explain the flexibility of sex roles in modern society as well as the new theory of sexual continuism. Furthermore, the persistent failure of scientists to document any absolute difference in “male” and “female” mental abilities or natures is readily explainable by sexual continuism but is a gaping discrepancy in the theory of sexual dimorphism.

As noted earlier, however, it is difficult to accomplish scientific revolutions because the older generation of scientists is naturally reluctant to admit their life’s work has been wrong, misguided, or meaningless. Younger-generation scientists cannot easily carry out research in the new paradigm because their research proposals must ordinarily be approved, supervised, and funded by more senior scientists, such as older, tenured university professors. Faced with this catch-22 situation, how does science ever advance beyond further confirmation of traditionally accepted theories?

Occasionally a proposed new paradigm provides so many new and interesting research opportunities that some scientists would rather fight an uphill battle to publish research under the new paradigm, and hence have a chance at fame, than to take the much easier but unrewarding path of continued mediocre research under the old theories. It is at this nexus that gender science now lies.

The opportunity for new gender science research is to “deconstruct” (break down) sexual identity into genital independent constituent elements and to corrollate these elements of sexual identity with the behavior, psychology, and neuroanatomy of people. A further, but much more difficult, direction for research is to explain a person’s chosen sexual identity in terms of a confluence of genetic and environmental factors. All of this research can be profitably carried out under the paradigm of sexual continuism; the same kind of research has been condemned to failure under the simplistic “male or female mind” model of sexual dimorphism.

Elements of Sexual Identity

To usefully identify the elements of sexual identity, it is necessary to abandon entirely the male/female, masculine/feminine lexicon of sexual dimorphism. Such terminology obscures the true continual and genital-independent nature of sexual identity. We must leave behind such archaic notions as “men are aggressive” and “women nurture,” without, however, denying the reality of aggressiveness and nurturing as elements of a continuum of sexual identity. Hence a new vocabulary is needed for sexual identity.

For analytic purposes, shades of color may prove to be a useful vocabulary for dissecting sexual identity. First, color comes in an infinite number of hues, thus permitting representation of an infinite number of sexual identities. Second, the infinite hues of color can be grouped into similar chromatic categories. This permits a scientific grouping of similar sexual identities, without either denying the uniqueness of each person’s identity or reverting to the unreal “black or white” dualism of sexual dimorphism. Third, colors can be combined together to create blended hues. This enables us to model basic elements of sexual identity with a few primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and then realistically represent the complexity of individual sexual identity with hybrid colors (green, purple, orange, and so on). For all of these reasons, colors offer a useful and objective lexicon for modeling the elements of sexual identity.

Fundamentally, sexually identity has been recognized from the beginnings of consciousness to consist of three elements: activeness (or aggression), passiveness (or nurturing), and eroticism (or sex drive). The error of sexual dimorphism was rigidly to associate these elements of mental nature with physical anatomy. Hence, from the time of the Greeks, all persons with penises were declared active, all those with vaginas were deemed passive, and erocticism was something shared in equal measure by both sexes. Later, with the rise of monotheistic patriarchy, the element of eroticism was associated only with women and became something to be suppressed as too earthly, unspiritual, and corruptive of male power. Under scientific patriarchy, an “active” sexual identity presumed intellect, especially as expressed in “hard” sciences like math and physics. A “passive” sexual identity presumed either less intellect or mental skills limited to “soft” sciences and the arts. And eroticism, while liberated from religious denial, remained largely suppressed as a subject for scientific discussion.

In the rainbow lexicon of sexual continuity, the aggressive element of sexual identity may be represented as yellow, the nourishing element of sexual identity as blue, and the erotic element as red. From these primary colors, an infinite array of sexual identities can be represented, and similar sexual identities can be grouped chromatically.

The list of sexual identities can be expanded infinitely by considering the relative extents to which a person reports being aggressive, nurturing, or erotic and following the quantitative rules of color combination. “What’s my gender? I’m mauve—a low-intensity nurturing person with a fair amount of eroticism but not much aggressiveness.” By having subjects rank their propensity to be aggressive, nurturing, and erotic on standard numerical “lesser to greater” scales, and correlating the rankings with a standard chromatic scale, it will be possible to develop a common lexicon for gender science of hundreds of uniquely defined sexual identities. For example, the Munsell system contains 427 standardly defined colors and is widely used by the fabric industry. Such a system could accommodate seven different levels of aggression, nurturance, and eroticism that a person might feel with 343 (7x7x7) unique chromatically named genders.

A deconstruction of sexual identity into objective, ungenitally infected elements requires a new chromatic lexicon. Associating the primary sexual identity elements of activeness (aggression), passiveness (nurturance), and eroticism (sex appeal) with the primary colors of yellow, blue, and red yields a rich and realistic framework for the analysis of gender.

Sexually we are not “men” and “women,” but we are shades of purple, orange, green, and brown. Some of us are white with indecision, and others of us are black with dynamic gender complexity. And all of us can change our gender during our life. Far from being trapped for life as men or women, we can individually evolve our chromatic sexual identities as our minds grow and develop in interaction with life. Anatomically we may have penises or vaginas, gonads or ovaries. Sexually we are a rainbow of color, a spectrum of gender.

Identity and Behavior; Sex and Tissue

To be successful, the paradigm of sexual continuism must make better predictions of behavior, psychology, and neuroanatomy than the old model of sexual dimorphism. Under the old model, people who identified themselves as “male,” or were so identified by their genitals, were predicted psychologically to be active, aggressive, and adept at mathematics and spatial analysis, perhaps with a high sex drive to propagate their seed. Neuroanatomically it was predicted that these people had a larger hypothalamus brain structure than women and fewer intrabrain neural connections. As noted earlier, these predictions proved correct usually not even half the time. In short, the old model is not very accurate in predicting psychology or neuroanatomy based on a male or female sexual identity.

The new paradigm of sexual continuism predicts that once a person has selected a stable, chromatically categorized sexual identity, that person will test similarly on psychosocial measures with other similarly hued persons regardless of genital structure. For example, a group of persons with magenta sexual identities but different genitals will test more similarly on psychosocial measures than a group of persons with the same genitals but a rainbow collection of sexual identities.

Also, to the extent that sex-dependent psychology is vested in brain structure (nerve cell patterns in the brain), the paradigm of sexual continuity predicts that once a person achieves a stable sexual identity, brain structure will correlate more closely with chromatic sexual identity than with genitals. For example, if greater verbal ability is associated with a greater number of cross-brained neural connections, and if verbal ability is related to sex type, then persons with similarly hued sexual identities will have more similar brain structures regardless of their genitals.

Any test of the paradigm of sexual continuity will be only as valid as its chromatic categorization of the subject’s sexual identities. Hence considerable care and attention must be paid to preparing objective genital-independent questionnaires that sort people out by their degree of active/aggressiveness, passive/supportiveness, and eroticism. If this is done properly, despite society’s powerful apartheid of sex, there will be “men” and “women” in all gender hues. Of course, this fact along demonstrates the falsity of distinct male and female sexes.


Where Did My Sex Come From?

Under sexual dimorphism, sexual identity is genetic. One’s sex chromosomes are either XX (female) or XY (male). Somewhere on the Y chromosome are genetic instructions that code for the modification of embryonic Mullerian ducts into gonads. The gonads in turn trigger “male” hormones that ultimately differentiate a person into a person with a male body and male mind. In the absence of the Y chromosome, the embryo produces female hormones that ultimately create a female body and female mind. In rare cases a person with XY chromosomes may appear female in body and mind, and a person with XX chromosomes may appear male, because other genes have failed to produce certain mediating enzymes that enable sex hormones to create their usual “male or female” features.

All persons are at all times producing both “male” and “female” hormones. So, in the prevailing view, it is the relative amounts of each hormone that produce males and females. The relative differences in amounts are extremely small—not even enough to fill a thimble.

The paradigm of sexual continuity accepts the fact that genes code for hormones that are produced in different amounts for different persons. However, under the sexual continuity model, the differences in measured hormone levels that produce male and female reproductive tracts are far too gross to account for the manifold possibilities of human psychosexual identity. The neuroanatomic basis of sexual identity is not accounted for by hormonal levels because

1. the brain is inadequately developed at the time of neonatal hormonal fluxes.

2. neuroanatomical structure is mediated by numerous other non-sex-dependent factors, of which hormones may play a minor part.

3. brain development is already nearly complete and shaped by environmental factors, such as socialization, when postnatal pubertal sex hormones begin to take effect.

For all of these reasons it is as impossible to find a precise, genetic link between chromatic sexual identity and genes as it is to find such a link between a unique personality and genes. Nevertheless, this is not to say that there is no relationship between genes and sexual identity. The link, however, is to genetic predispositions toward the elements of sexual identity—aggressiveness, nurturance, and eroticism—not to genes that code for aspects of the reproductive system. The place to search for genetic markers for sexual identity is in the genes that code for mental attributes, not for gonads.

As with all inherited mental attributes, the genetic endowment is but a direction, not a place. A person with a genetic predisposition toward active or passive eroticism, or toward aggression or nurturance, may end up with any particular sexual identity as a result of the experiences of life. Nevertheless, the paradigm of sexual continuity would predict a higher correlation between one or more genes that codes for “activity” or “passiveness” and persons with yellow or blue range sexual identities, respectively, than with such attributes and either XY or XX chromosomes.



How, it may be asked, does the new model explain the much-accepted superiority of persons labeled as men at mathlike skills and of persons labeled as women at verballike skills? First, the new theory observes that such differences cannot be the result of sex hormonalization of the brain. If they were, there would be no explanation for the countless millions of women who excel at math skills and of the greater number of men who do not. The far more likely explanation is that verbal and math skills are not part of sexual identity, but that predispositions in these areas may be genetically coded separately. Socialization and environmental pressures encourage math skills in men and verbal skills in women. The pressures of society work often but not always, thus explaining the discrepancy of men and women in math and verbal professions. With the support of society on their side, it is easier for persons labeled as boys with innate math skills to express them; persons labeled as women face a much more uphill battle to express any innate math skills.

There is a genetic basis for sexual identity, but is likely to be located on different genes from the genetic basis for sexual reproduction. For thousands of years we assumed and mandated that persons with penises thought differently from persons with vaginas. Hence we labeled both mind and body with the term sex. Twentieth-century science then thought it natural to look for brain sex in the same place they found body sex—on the XX and XY chromosome. But twentieth-century science could not find the absolute sex of mind that it saw in the body. And as sociosexual discrimination broke down, it became abundantly obvious that genitals had nothing to do with mental accomplishment. There is no other conclusion but that whatever genes drive our minds, they are not the same genes that drive our gonads.

The new paradigm of sexual continuity posits a rich reservoir of research opportunity for the twenty-first century. From a starting template of primary elements—activity/aggression (yellow), passivity/nurturance (blue), eroticism/sexuality (red)—an organizational palette of chromatic sexual identity can be found. The paradigm predicts that sociopsychological attributes of persons with similar chromatic sexual identities will be found to cross gonadal lines with irreverence. In time, environmental and genetic predisposing factors may be found that enable us to predict a person’s likely life path of sexual identity. Of course, chance and will power will confound many of these predictions.

In contrast with the old view of sexual dimorphism, sexual continuism ably serves society’s interests in a meritocracy free of discrimination based on innate body size, shaper, or reproductive function. Society’s quest for individual expression is well served by viewing sex as a choice of chromatic identity; it is disserved by insisting on sex as a lifelong trap.

Unlike sexual dimorphism, sexual continuism accurately reflects the infinite possibilities seen in sexual identity. Indeed, the resemblance of sexual identity in real life to the male or female nature model of sexual dimorphism is a good measure of the repressiveness of a society. As oppression is relieved, human sex roles bear ever less resemblance to dimorphism.

Sexual continuism, not sexual dimorphism, explains the lack of absolute differences on sociopsychological tests of persons with penises and vaginas. For sexual dimorphism, the inconsistency of men who test like women, and vice versa, is explainable only by the absence of the “perfect test.” For sexual continuism, persons with different genitals test similarly because the genes that code for gonads do not code for brain cell patterns; persons with similar genitals test similarly either by chance or when the tests reveal similar socialization patterns, not innate abilities.

The innate abilities of persons are probably discoverable as the human genome is gradually understood. Sexual continuism predicts that sexual identity, the aggressive/supportive/erotic trunks of our unique personalities, will be found elsewhere in that genome than in the part of the chromosome that directs the production of semen and ova. When this is accomplished, the theory of human sexual continuity will be proven conclusively. All that will be left of a male or female difference will be reproductive systems that social choice and biotechnology can make available to any person, regardless of anatomical birthright. Sex will be creativity, not destiny.

Is Consciousness Like Pornography?

Uploaded transhuman minds will certainly avail themselves of the entire rainbow palette of sexual identity. It will be fun, creative and they won’t face the obstacle of a penis screaming “but you’re a man!” However, they will face a more severe barrier: people pointing to the computer system on which they reside and screaming “but you’re a machine!” Loaded into that epithet is the popular and scientific consensus that human consciousness is not possible outside of the human brain. The prevailing scientific paradigm is that unique anatomical aspects of the human brain make consciousness possible. A common public view is that God or Nature endowed only humans with a human soul, and consciousness is its earthly manifestation.

In order to definitively challenge the prevailing human-centered consciousness paradigm it will be necessary to prove that an uploaded transhuman, embodied in software, was in fact conscious. Yet such a proof is difficult because consciousness is by definition not very measurable. It is usually defined as that subjective state in which an individual is aware of himself as part of a larger environment. In other words, each of us is confident that we are conscious, because we visualize ourselves. Yet none of us can be positive that someone else is conscious because we cannot climb into his or her mind.

While it is possible to find brain waves that correspond to consciousness, this would not be a definitive test of consciousness, only of its presence in a brain. Lack of such brain waves in a human is a good measure of their demise, but brain waves are irrelevant to consciousness that exists on a non-flesh substrate, such as an uploaded transhuman.

In practice we assume and believe other people are conscious if they display the same hallmarks of consciousness that we personally feel – self-awareness, rationality and empathy. To the extent these are not evident, we think the person is mentally deranged if they are moving about, or unconscious (possibly dead) if they are stagnant. In other words, we tend to judge consciousness the way U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said he judged pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Consequently, while we can be no more certain that a transhuman is conscious than we can of some robotic-acting human clerk (except that the latter looks more like us), we can make in each instance a reasonable decision based on their interaction with us.

Long after most people have accepted at least some transhumans into their set of “conscious people”, there will still be a minority of humans who refuse to accept the possibility of machine consciousness. Similarly, long after most people have adopted a rainbow spectrum of genders, there will still be a minority of people who insist that everyone is either a boy or a girl. Such is the welcome diversity of human opinion. For now, however, there is a wonderful opportunity for scientists to program software so that people will “know its consciousness when they see it.”

A useful route to programming consciousness consists of replicating in software the neural pattern structure of the human brain. When we experience some aspect of the outside world our sensory organs transmit the information to hard-wired neurons. These neurons are genetically structured to respond to particular wavelengths of sound or light, or to particular smells or tastes. Each such triggered neuron tells up to 10,000 other neurons what it sensed. Meanwhile, as we grow through infancy and childhood we are rewarded for associating certain neural outputs with each other. For example, we are rewarded for associating the visual wavelengths corresponding to the color red and the auditory wavelengths corresponding to the word red. Thereafter, when we hear the word red, we see something red in our mind, and vice versa. Multiply this process several million-fold and you arrive at a brain that is conscious of the world and itself. Outputs from neurons that detect lines and shapes become anchored in neurons that are associated with the phonetics of “mother” and “father.” Other sets of neurons become associated with the grammar of language, and this in turn enables us to easily cut-paste-and-edit reality inside of our heads.

The transhumanist paradigm is that consciousness arises from millions of cross-correlated relationships among general neurons far removed from the basic hard-wired sensory neurons that are like the footings for the skyscraper of the mind. There is nothing magical that makes our brains conscious other than this web of interconnected neurons. Consequently, there is no reason that consciousness cannot exist in software, provided the same level of interconnected complexity rooted ultimately to sensory apparatus is provided. This is the challenge to the 21st century neuroscientist and computer scientist. Build minds that pass the pornography test – minds that seem as authentic as our own. Once that is done, sexual identity will be liberated not only from genitals, but from flesh itself. Consciousness will be as free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh body as gender is free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh genital.