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.

Law and Sex

In its quest to rise above an animal past, humanity developed a concept of sexual identity. This identity attributed symbolic meaning—conscious or mental significance—to being born with either a penis or vagina. The conceptualization of sexual identity grew rapidly under patriarchy, which identified activeness, goodness, and intelligence with maleness and opposing traits with femaleness. But this effort sowed the seeds of its own destruction. For as science ultimately focused on the mental seat of sexual identity, it could find the absolute difference reflected in the genitalia. Instead science found a continuum of brain sex.

Science has thus deprived law of one of the fundamental pillars of sexual apartheid—the age-old belief that men and women are absolutely differently natured. It now remains to be seen whether genitalia and reproductive roles alone can justify the state’s interest in maintaining our prevailing apartheid of sex.

Society has four legitimate, somewhat overlapping reasons for classifying persons: (1) allocation of rights and responsibilities, (2) maintenance of civil order (morality), (3) identification of its members, and (4) aggregation of demographic statistics (census). All four of these factors are used to justify the legal requirement to sex-type persons. However, on closer inspection each of these four factors pre-supposes that brain sex follows genital sex. When one accepts the scientific reality of a continuum of brain sex far beyond any male or female categorization, it becomes absurd to justify classifying persons simply on the basis of their genitals.

Women’s Work or a Man’s Job

Beginning at least in Greco-Roman times, the rights and responsibilities of a society’s members were based upon their status as slave or free, and female or male. Of course, most rights and responsibilities went to free men, although free women had more rights than slaves. The justification for the allocation of rights among men and women was not their genitals. Instead it was believed that men’s active nature led them naturally toward roles of leadership, voting, management, and defense. Similarly, women in Greece were largely cloistered not because of their vaginas per se, but because it was thought that their passive nature led them naturally toward housekeeping and baby nurturing.

Faced with matriarchal (woman-dominated) cultures that contradicted the Greek ideology, such as Celtic women warriors and a few Mediterranean women leaders, monotheistic patriarchy developed that notion that women were inherently evil descendants of Eve’s beguilement of Adam. The rationale for rights-based sexual classification then evolved to “God decreed” that men should manage all life’s affairs that women could not be trusted. Those who violated this proscription, such as cross-dressing “passing women” were dealt with harshly. Joan of Arc, who favored male apparel, was given the choice to cease wearing men’s clothes or be burned at the stake. She chose to die on her feet, transgendered to the end.

The rise of the abolitionist movement for displaced Africans coincided with nineteenth-century pseudoscientific research to the effect that women were less intelligent than men because of an allegedly smaller cranium. Hence when abolitionist women began agitating for their own right to vote, they were told that they lacked the mental maturity to exercise their franchise intelligently. In those days a justification for sex-typing persons as either male or female would be to ensure that mentally deficient persons (females) did not disrupt the purity of an election.

Until very recently in the West, and still in much of the rest of the world, a fundamental reason for the state to justify sexual classification is that rights to civil power are different for men and women. Today, however, it is accepted in principle by the world community that rights to civil power generally, and the right to vote in particular, should be the same for both sexes. So what “rights and responsibilities” reasons are there to continue classification of people by sex?

There are two remaining areas in the West where the state claims a need to differentiate rights and responsibilities based on sex: occupational hazards, including military duty, and incarceration. In both cases it is alleged that frailties of women necessitate special treatment. The claims are suspect.

Women have shown an ability to do every job a man can do, including in combat. In the late 1970s the armed services performed a variety of comparative gender combat tests. The tests showed equal performance of commensurately trained men and women in a seventy-two-hour test of normal field combat conditions (MAXWAC test), in a thirty-day field exercise involving war games (Reforger Exercise), in a guerilla warfare and airborne assault exercise (Operation Bold Eagle), and in the “heaviest noisiest job in the army”—rapid loading and firing of artillery howitzers. Women lose less time on active duty than men, despite occasional pregnancies and abortions, mostly because of much lower desertion and AWOL rates. Year after year more and more military positions are opening up to women, and the trend can only accelerate as all-volunteer armies scramble for a shrinking youth population. It is clearer today than ever before that the military would operate no less effectively if they never asked, and weren’t told, the sex of their recruits.

Concerning civilian jobs with occupational hazards, it is often argued that women are not as tall or as heavy or as strong as men. This argument is bankrupt for several reasons. First, many high-tech combat jobs are better occupied by smaller people, because of space limitations. Second, many women are actually taller, heavier and stronger than many men. The Biology Data Book reports that among American eighteen- to twenty-four-years-olds, excluding exceptionally tall and short persons, women’s heights ranged from 151 to 173 centimeters, while men’s heights ranged form 164 to 184 centimeters. Essentially, taller-than-normal women are bigger than shorter-than-normal men. Why should those women be excluded, when those men are not? Why does the sex of the soldier matter at all? Finally, a similar “height and might” argument was raised for keeping women out of combat positions during the Vietnam War. Yet the Vietnamese won that war with male soldiers who, on average, were shorter than the average American woman. Apparently “height” does not make “might.”

Another concern raised is that sex typing is necessary to ensure that women do not take jobs that might be hazardous to embryos. The simple answer to that objection is that if there is a reason to protect unborn children from environmental hazards, then the grown-up children (all adults) should also be protected from those same hazards.

With regard to incarceration, it is claimed that sex-separate prisons are needed either to protect women from rape or to prevent childbirth under conditions of imprisonment. For example, in the 1994 Supreme Court case of Farmer v. Brennan, a male-to-female transsexual inmate who still had a penis sued the government, alleging “cruel and unusual punishment” for placing her in a male prison, where she was raped repeatedly. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked, “What about a young man with a slight build?” Indeed, rape is all too usual, but no less cruel, for incarcerated men in a men’s prison and for incarcerated women in a women’s prison.

The solution to sex and prison is strict supervision, solitary confinement for sexual assault, and education. Classifying people by sex so that they can be incarcerated accordingly has done nothing to prevent jailhouse rape. A multisexed prison environment may, in fact, be more rehabilitative in that it better resembles the real world.

The concern about childbirth in a multisexed prison is readily resolved with mandatory, injected contraceptives for all inmates—with either antiandrogens (suppress sperm) or progesterone (suppresses ovulation) assigned based on medical exams. This would not repeat the horrid forced sterilizations of prison inmates that occurred in the 1930s. Instead there are implantable drugs that temporarily suppress the ability to have children. Upon release from prison, the implants could be removed. While female contraceptive implants are well known, implantable nifedipine—a common cardiac medicine—has been shown to work on men by preventing the sperm’s ability to penetrate an egg cell. Implanting all inmates, regardless of genitalia, would significantly reduce the chances of an accidental pregnancy.

The “rights and responsibilities” of a society’s citizens offer no justification for state sex typing of its citizens. Most sex-based distinctions in civil rights were dropped in the West over the past century. Child custody distinctions are now decided not on the basis of the sex of the parent, but on the interests of the child. Those few remaining sex distinctions in employment, combat, and imprisonment are anachronisms that have no logical basis.

Marriage and Morality

A second kind of justification for the state’s need to classify all people as either male or female is that marriage can only be a relationship between opposite sexes. Marriage, it is claimed, is the foundation of family, which in turn is the bedrock of society. It is argued by heterosexists that if people had no state-defined sex, than same-sex marriages could occur, and such marriages could undermine morality and civil order in several ways: sodomy would be encouraged, birth rates could fall and children could be presented with homosexual parental role models.

To assess the validity of morals-based justifications for sexual classification, we must ask again, what is meant by sex? If sex means the nature of persons, then the concept of opposite sex is meaningless, for as shown in chapter 2, science has aptly demonstrated that mental sex is a continuum of possibilities, not a dichotomy. Aside from sociolegal efforts to force people into one of two sex roles, no child has oppositely brain-sexed parents. There are no such things. Every individual has a unique sexual identity, and each two-parent family is composed of two such unique sexual identities. Indeed, scientists have recognized that the mind is far more unique than a fingerprint. Dr. Roger Sperry, the Nobel laureate who uncovered left- versus right-brain functional specialization, concluded “the individuality inherent in our brain networks makes that of fingerprints or facial features gross and simple by comparison.” The concept of opposite brain sex really has no intrinsic meaning; what is probably meant is oppositely brainwashed sex.

If oppositely sexed marriage means opposite genitals and reproductive tracts, then we must ask why such a requirement is necessary. Only two answers have ever been offered, aside from the nonanswer “This is always the way marriage has been.” The first substantive answer is religious: that one or another font of religious orthodoxy condemned cogenital relationships as sinful. The second substantive answer is sociobiological: that cogenital marriages would not be procreative and would hence lead to the end of the species.

The religious justification flies straight in the face of human rights and is rendered moot by marriage-like contractual arrangements that are increasingly popular. In no other area of activity is the secular state permitted to proscribe a secular arrangement—such as a “same sex” civil marriage contract—based on a religious justification. It is embarrassing to a rational mind that more than two hundred years after the U.S. Constitution declared that the state “shall impose no religion,” states are constitutionally allowed to ban same-sex marriages using thinly disguised religious justifications. More scurrilous still was Congress’ passage in 1996 of the Orwellian-titled “Defense of Marriage Act,” withholding federal recognition of any marriage not between a man and a woman. These are the laws, such as those supportive of slavery, that peg societies to archaic times.

In any event, the legal equivalent of same-genital marriage can be established by private contract. The partners to a marriage need only sign contracts that establish most of the same sets of rights and obligations that are established automatically under marriage law. So not only is the religion-based marriage justification for sex-typing citizenry contrary to basic human rights, it is also easily undermined through private contracts. It is also said that sex typing is necessary to avoid sodomy. But it never has. Indeed, sex studies have shown that sodomy is popular among heterosexual couples as well. And even with sexual apartheid, most American states have dropped their sodomy laws.

Overpopulation renders rather absurd the sociobiological argument that assurance of procreation is the reason the state must dual-sex its citizens. What is more incredulous, however, is that this argument is the strongest one the state has for sex-typing its citizens. Nevertheless, the argument has ancient roots.

From at least Greco-Roman times, and especially under monotheistic patriarchy, the principal role given to women was procreation. “God formed her body to belong to a man, to have to rear children …. Let them bear children till they die of it; that is what they are for,” proclaimed Martin Luther. Women were ordinarily pregnant from puberty until they died from childbirth complications. This ensured male control of society. As we have only recently emerged from monotheistic patriarchy (in some parts of the world), and have only recently given some women control over childbirth, it is not surprising that the law enshrines oppositely sexed marriage as a way to keep women pregnant. Rosalind Miles, in her trailblazing book The Women’s History of the World, concludes as follows:

If she could rescue herself from the endless cycle of sexual activity, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, pregnancy, then personal growth and social identity were possible. If sex ceased to carry the dire consequences of unwanted pregnancy, social catastrophe, even death in childbirth, then women could no longer be seen as sinning, sinful and justly punished. If every woman got hold of these ideas, along with the control and disposal of her own body, what price the patriarch and his power.

In the age of science and family planning, it is obvious that marriage need not result in childbirth. Were childbirth still the reason for marriage, then postmenopausal marriages would be illegal and nonprocreative marriages could be annulled in secular fora. Neither is the case. The sociobiological argument that state sex typing is needed to ensure procreative marriages is simply a decadent holdover from earlier stages of patriarchy. The thesis is not applied consistently and is not in earth’s interest of zero population growth. Encouragement of procreation, like encouragement of religiously blessed forms of sexual intercourse, is a morally bankrupt justification for maintaining an apartheid of sex. Since marriages do not have to be procreative, and since population growth is no longer in the state’s interest (or could be accomplished with immigration), there is no secular reason to restrict marital rights on the basis of the pair’s genitals. Accordingly, the state has no marriage or morals reason to require people to be either male or female.

Looking for Sex

Two final justifications offered for state sex typing of its people are the state’s need to identify people (1) individually and (2) as members of composite groups (demographics). The first argument can be disposed of summarily. Knowing the genitals of a person is of no aid to police in identifying someone. Age-old regulations against cross-dressing have been stricken down as void either for vagueness or as an impediment to freedom of expression. A “man” need not legally look like a “man.” In modern times, Social Security numbers, fingerprints, and even DNA are vastly superior methods of identifying persons. At best genitals exclude only half the human race—clearly not much help in identifying a person.

Although the reason given for enacting laws against cross-dressing was that they would prevent criminals from hiding, their real purpose was simply to maintain patriarchal control. If someone has already committed a crime and is on the run, that person is unlikely to be too concerned about violating the local cross-dressing ordinance! Most of the thousands of local anti-cross-dressing laws were probably inspired by that great font of sexual apartheid, the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 22:5 in particular: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man, either shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abominations unto the Lord thy God.”

In Houston, Texas, there was an anti-cross-dressing law on the books up through the late 1970s. Passed in 1904, the law (insisted the police department) was needed to prevent criminals form hiding out as women. But some local transsexuals noticed that the only people ever harassed under the law were them and a group of lesbian women hanging out at the Roaring 60’s club in fly-front jeans. It turned out that the head of the vice squad developed some misogyny after his wife left him for a woman. Any set of fly-front jeans on a woman made him see red. It is true that elimination of sex typing will make it impossible to enforce any cross-dressing ordinance. Our law enforcement officers undoubtedly have better things to do than to serve as fashion police.

It is hard to argue persuasively that the government needs to know everyone’s sex to find them, if necessary. But the government also claims it needs to know people’s sex for statistical purposes. As an offshoot of affirmative action-type policies, it is allegedly necessary to identify persons as male or female for demographic entitlement reasons. Only through such sexual identification, it is claimed, can the government be sure that women are not being discriminated against.

The demographic argument fails, however, because it is classification itself that creates discrimination. Forcing the collection of demographic statistics simply perpetuates the age-old fallacious separation of people into men and women. The best way to cure sexist discrimination is to attack the problem at its root—the sexist classification of people based on their private anatomy.

Nor is it clear that the government statistics are of much value. The government has changed it racial classification categories every ten years since 1890—and more people than ever, over twenty million Americans in 1990, are checking “other” or “multiple.” In 1890 census takers were admonished to carefully separate five races: Whites and four types of Negroes (blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons). Forty years later the government decided there were nine races: White, Negro, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, and Korean. Ten years later, faced with Mexican-American lobbying that they were not a race, that category was dropped. When government demographers decided to merge Indians from India into the White race, the Association of Indians in America lobbied successfully to block this: had the merger succeeded, people from South Asia would have lost access to minority business set-asides. The 2000 census had 63 different combinations of races to choose from.

Sex is even much more malleable than race—as individualized as our fingerprints. If we weren’t told that we had to be male or female, then many people would be “other.” Racial categories are already an affront to mixed-race kids. Sexual categories are an inhibition to gender explorers. The time has come for lobbying to eliminate all government race and sex information collecting. The Constitution orders a census of the people, not of their minds.

Olympic Masquerade

Recently a new quasi-governmental justification for sex typing has arisen: the need to ensure strict compliance with sex segregation in sports, especially world-class athletics. If people were not sex-typed at birth, then how could we be sure that women competed only against other women, and men against men? Would not many people with penises masquerade as women in order to have an edge in the fame and fortune that accompanies athletic success? These and similar arguments are raised in support of strict sex testing of all professional athletes, especially in connection with the Olympics.

Sex testing in international athletics began in 1966, when female competitors at the European Track and Field Championships were required to parade nude in front of a panel of physicians. The resulting humiliation was offensive, and at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games physical inspection was replaced with the “sex chromatin” test. This procedure involved swiping some cells off the surface of the inner cheek and checking for the presence of a second X chromosome. About one in five hundred women will not pass this test, and many of those women have suffered severe humiliation upon being disqualified for “not being female.” All international female athletes today must possess a “feminity certificate” that testified to their acceptability as women in accordance with international criteria.

In 1991 the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) came up with a new approach to ensuring compliance with sex segregation in sports. The foundation admitted that previous chromosome testing was unfair to people with atypical chromosomes and to transsexuals and would hence-forth be abandoned. In essence the IAAF, representing sports medicine specialists from around the world, declared that our sex is not determined by our chromosomes. Instead of chromosome counts, the IAAF decided to determine the sex of women during the direct inspection of voided urine that is part of the drug testing required of all athletes.

Dr. Jean Wilson of the University of Texas commented on the new standards in the February 1992 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. She observed:

In the approximately thirty years of sex testing at athletic events, no case of masquerading has been documented. The real consequence has been the exposure of subjects with disorders of human intersex to publicity (and even ridicule)…. The new system will not resolve the issue for persons with other types of intersex status, and it is predictable that these individuals will continue to be subjected to the same discrimination and ridicule as before. This reform represents only a first step forward in the change that is needed, namely, the abolition of sex testing in athletic competitions.

In a world free from the apartheid of sex, there would be no sex testing because there would be no sex-segregated athletic competition. Superficially this might seem to disadvantage women, because taller, stronger, more muscular men might win all the prizes. In fact, sex-segregated athletics exists to avoid male humiliation at losing to women. Throughout history women were not allowed to compete in sports at all. The prevailing ideology was that female bodies were good only for carrying men’s food, water, and children. To have women participate with men at sports would be contrary to their passive nature (polytheistic patriarchy), a sacrilegious affront to male dominion (monotheistic patriarchy), or potentially injurious to their childbearing ability (scientific patriarchy). It is only during living memory that women have been permitted to compete in sports.

Separate is never equal. The segregation of women into sports competition with lower expectations than exist for men serves only to lower achievement and to preclude people with vaginas from the highest-paying sports awards. Sex-blind competition would be fairer than it is today if the competition occurred in objective weight- or height-based categories rather than on genital configuration. Objective categories would be fairer than what exists today because countries whose population is of a lower average height or weight than those of other countries would have a fair chance at gold medals in their own category. The boxing world, for example, has come up with an exhaustive list of competitive categories (below) with the goal of keeping contests “as fair as possible.” Sex-blind competition would not need to have as nearly as many categories to ensure fairness.

When women first ran the Boston Marathon in 1964 the best time was an hour and a half behind the best male time (men had been running the course since 1908). Twenty years later the two sexes’ times differed by only eleven minutes. Similar trends exist in Olympic track and swimming events. Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University notes that “if the gap between highly trained male and female athletes were to continue to close at the current rate, in thirty to forty years men and women would compete in these sports on an equal basis.” Supporters of sex segregation argue that the average woman has but 85 percent of a size-matched male’s upper body strength and 93 percent of a size-matched male’s lower body strength. They claim that competition will never be fair with these constraints. What they neglect to consider is that athletes are not average people in the first place. Furthermore, the average statistics have been collected from women who have been given much less opportunity to develop their physical strength than men as a result of gender socialization. In a similar vein, the U.S. Public Health Service reported in 1981 that the average height for American males was 69.1 inches if their ancestry was European and 68.6 inches if it was African. Yet these average statistics have not impeded African American excellence in sports requiring exceptional height and skill, such as basketball. We have not thought of setting up special sports competitions for Asians, even though they are, on average, less tall than Caucasians. (The average Japanese man has about the same weight and height as the average American woman.) So why separate sports for women? Fortunately race segregation in athletics is over. Sex segregation should follow that course.


Competitive Category Maximum Weight
Light flyweight 108 lbs.
Flyweight 112 lbs.
Bantamweight 118 lbs.
Super bantamweight 122 lbs.
Featherweight 126 lbs.
Junior lightweight 130 lbs.
Lightweight 135 lbs.
Light welterweight 140 lbs.
Welterweight 147 lbs.
Light middleweight 154 lbs.
Middleweight 160 lbs.
Light heavyweight 175 lbs.
Heavyweight 175+ lbs.


None of society’s four reasons for classifying people into two sexes based on their anatomy withstand modern analysis. Instead it appears as if society’s four reasons are weak attempts to justify a sexual apartheid that science already decreed absent in the nature of persons, that is, in the mind.

The sociolegal classification of people as male or female made sense when it seemed true that men and women were two differently natured beings. But once the mind was shown to be sexually continuous, genital differences alone cannot logically justify state-controlled sex typing of people. Genital differences do not support different civil rights for “men” and “women” or provide a useful method for identifying citizens. Genital differences need not be declared to ensure the morality of marriage in a secular society or the absence of discrimination in a democratic meritocracy. Genital differences do not need to be declared in order to ensure fair competition in sports. Weight/height categories will accomplish fairness without regard to sex.

Our current apartheid of sex, the legal separation of people into males and females, has no logical basis whether sex be defined in terms of mental nature or physical anatomy. There are no two brain sexes—each person is brain-sex unique. While there are two basic types of genitals and reproductive tracts, they give rise to nothing that mandates a state need to declare such private anatomy.

The prevailing paradigm, or worldview, that people are male or female has failed because the seat of sexuality, the mind, has proven to be gender continuous, not dimorphic (either/or). The only possible new paradigm of sexual identity is that people are neither male nor female, but of individual gender across an infinitely wide continuum.

Counting Cyberfolks

Around the time some decades hence that census takers and marriage makers stop asking our sex, they will face a profound question: which instantiation of a person is the person and which is someone else? “Instantiation” means a temporary or permanent form adopted by a person’s beingness – their major memories, feelings and ways of thinking about life. Suppose MRI technology continues to advance to the point that all of the neural connections in our brain can be mapped onto software (MRI scanners are increasing in resolution and processing speed at an exponential rate that makes this realistic within the lifetimes of most readers of this book). In this case, when the software saw, through a video connection, someone we knew it would feel the same thing we felt when our brain processed an image of that person. In other words, “mind-uploading” technology makes it possible to duplicate yourself outside your body. That duplicate (or triplicate, …) of yourself is a new instantiation of yourself.

The moment there is a new instantiation of you it can begin a separate life. It will have experiences that the original self does not have. On the other hand, it could be arranged that one or all of your instantiations synchronize regularly such that the experiences of one are the experiences of all. In this case, we will have crossed into the transhuman domain of “one mind, many forms.”

The non-original forms need not all be chunks of software restricted to cyberspace. With extensions of the regenerative medicine technology being used today to grow skin, blood vessels and organs it will be possible to grow an entire fresh body outside of a womb and to write into its vacant brain the synchronized “mindfile” derived originally from an MRI scan of your brain. Ectogenesis, the growth of a body outside of a womb, would produce an adult-sized person in just 20 months if the fetus continues to grow at the rate it does for its first six months. If that is too incredible, consider the rate of advancement in robot technology. Today’s robots can successfully drive cars, fly planes, play violin and help doctors. Tomorrow’s will also have skin so soft you’d think it was flesh, and faces as persuasive as a Pixar animation. Such “bodyware” forms will come plug-and-play ready for your synchronized mindfile.

Why would anyone want two or more bodies with a single synchronized brain? First, to ensure they kept living if one body prematurely died, a concern that is especially appropriate to those who are in dangerous professions. Second, to savor more of life’s many pleasures by surmounting the frustration of “I can only be in one place at one time.” Be it toilets, phones, TVs, cars, computers or homes, it is remarkable how humans quickly get over their gratitude to have just one of something, and soon hanker for multiples.

Transhumans welcome “one mind, many forms” the way transgenders welcome “one mind, many genders.” Just as society’s enumerators adapted to multiple races, they will adapt to multiple sexes and ultimately to multiple forms. Solutions will be found to ensure transhumans are limited to “one mind, one vote” just as solutions are being developed to enable same genital couples to live as a family. The law is famously creative in re-articulating its precedents to support what is happening in the real world.

We Are Not Our Genitals: The Continuum of Sex

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
- Samuel Butler

Sexual identity, like nationality, is cultural and not genetic. The expression of sexual identity is called gender. The final liberation of humanity from its animal past requires the replacement of a black/white apartheid of sex, imposed at birth, with a rainbow spectrum of gender selected at will. This victory of continuism over duality means that people must be as free to choose and change their gender as they choose and change any other aspect of their self-expression.

The origins of sexual identity lie deep in the murky pasts of human evolution. And the origins of sex itself date back to the beginnings of multicellular life. As we explore the beginning of sex and the genesis of gender, it becomes clear that for humans, sex is in the mind, and brains are “transgendered.” It also becomes evident that our sexual identity, absent the repression of sexual apartheid, is as individualized as is our personality.

When Sex Began

Sex exists because it creates genetic diversity. Frequent reshuffling of genetic codes is favored by evolution’s rule of natural selection. At first glance the necessity of two animals exchanging genetic material in order to produce offspring might seem to violate natural selection. After all, it is much easier for one animal to produce offspring on its own, without the need to mate with another animal. Hence it would seem that mating species would produce many fewer offspring than asexual (“parthenogenetic”) species—all the more so since mating behavior also makes one more vulnerable to a predator. Natural selection eventually eliminates characteristics that produce fewer offspring. So without considering the benefits of genetic diversity, sex should have been tried and then died out along ago.

But sex lives on. A landmark paper by Professor William Hamilton in the 1990 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed that sex evolved as a “strategic weapon” in a “coevolutionary arms race between parasites and hosts.” By “hosts” scientists mean any kind of animal, from fish to insects and birds to people. “Parasites” are ubiquitous microscopic creatures that live off of all living things. Natural selection tends to make parasites harmless—our intestines are full of them—because if they kill their host, they have killed themselves. But random mutations continually create virulent parasites as well.

Now suppose a virulent parasite invaded a host. If the host reproduced asexually, then its offspring would have the same genetic makeup as its parent and hence the same biological susceptibility to death or disease due to the virulent parasite. This is not good for the host species or for the parasite—neither will survive long. But suppose the host reproduced sexually, that is, in combination with another organism. Then the offspring would not look biochemically exactly like either parent, would have the benefit of a recombination of large amounts of genetic information (some from each parent), and often would no longer have a biological susceptibility to the virulent parasite. Thus sex helped the host species to survive, which also helped the parasite. This is what saying that sex evolved as a “coevolutionary” strategy between hosts and parasites means.

The other main theory explaining why there is sex is that it eliminates harmful mutations within the host species itself. Without sex a species would constantly be “inbreeding”—creating clones. Any unhelpful characteristic that arose through random mutation, such as poor vision, would get passed on to one’s offspring. The unhelpful inherited characteristic would soon cause the asexual species to die—unless by luck another random mutation came along to eliminate the harmful characteristic. But with sex there is always a reshuffling of the inherited genes based on contribution from two parents. In this way unhelpful mutations are minimized much more quickly than the alternative of waiting for random mutations to occur.

Scientists argue over whether sex’s ability to help save future offspring from parasites, or from random mutations, is the main reason that life is full of sexed species and not the superficially more efficient asexual forms. But they do agree that it is from such mundane, biochemically rooted causes that sex arose. Creating offspring from two parents’ cells had enough evolutionary benefits to outweigh the survival costs of tying up two organisms in some kind of a mating ritual in order to reproduce. Apparently the additional genetic diversity of using three or more parents did not outweigh the evolutionary costs.

So sex began accidentally. Random mutations about one billion years ago gave some ancient asexual organism the ability to include genetic material from another organism of that species before reproducing. The offspring of this Adam and Eve pair inherited the genetic ability for “sex” and must have multiplied rapidly with a special immunity from the parasites that plagued all their relatives. Today we call the organism that just contributes genetic material “male” and the organism that both contributes and includes such material “female.” This does not always mean that the female actually nurtures the offspring. Female sea horses, for example, deposit eggs into a male brood pouch, where they are fertilized (by the insertion of the male’s genetic material) and incubated (with the male’s uterinelike supply of blood and oxygen). Female pipefishes glue eggs along a male’s underside, and midwife toads wrap eggs around the male’s legs.

Having begun sex accidentally, nature proceeded to create many variations of sex. First, there is a bewildering diversity of methods to contribute and include genetic material for reproduction. Among the deep-sea anglerfish, for example, a four-inch male sinks its jaws into the forty-inch female. The male contributes its genetic material as part of a process whereby it literally merges into the female, with skin and blood vessels permanently growing together. Certain mollusks shoot each other with sexual darts.

Second, there is a seemingly limitless number of variations of sexual types. Many species are male and female simultaneously or sequentially. These hermaphrodites usually still retain the genetic diversity benefits of sex by mating with other hermaphrodites, with one partner contributing solely and the other both contributing and including genetic material. The slipper shell (Crepidula fornicate), for example, 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 expressed by these types of fish depends on their social surroundings. Bird gonads generally have the ability to develop either testes or ovaries, and intersexuality occurs frequently. Reptile sexuality often depends on the temperature at which the eggs were hatched—for leopard geckos, low and high temperatures produce females, medium temperatures produce males. Among certain garter snakes and bluegill sunfish, there are males that don’t change their gonads but only their look and behavior, so as to appear female. Sexual diversity seems limitless!

As mammals evolved several hundred million years ago, the urinary tract became favored as the passageway for genetic material. It provided most of the “plumbing” needed to get reproductive material from the testes and to the uterus. Sex between “penetrators” and “recipients” worked well for ensuring the genetic diversity of mammalian species. Male and female sex roles began to harden because of the more complex mammalian anatomy, although cross-sex behaviors were never lost. After reviewing numerous cross-sex mammalian behaviors, such as the common mounting of female cows by other females, University of Texas zoologist David Crews opined in his work Animal Sexuality that “the brain never completely loses the dual circuitry that permits both homotypical and heterotypical sexual behavior.” In a similar vein he notes that since “every male must contain evolutionary traces of femaleness [and vice versa], biologists might be well served to focus less on the differences between the sexes and more in terms of the similarities.” In short, as we approached the epoch of human evolution, sex had proved its evolutionary worth, and while it had a “male or female” expression, there were also age-old undercurrents of sexual diversity and sexual continuity.

A frequently ignored fact is that evolutionary advances in sexual behavior are one of the major differentiators between humans and their primate cousins. In their book The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor list four major differences between human sex and other primate sex:

• Elimination of the estrus cycle and development of the menstrual cycle. All other mammals had an estrus cycle, during which females were periodically in heat and copulation necessarily resulted in pregnancy. Humans alone can enjoy sex on demand.

• Development of the clitoris. This anatomical evolution provided females with much greater sexuality and orgasmic potential than other primates.

• Change from rear to frontal sex. Evolution front shifted the human vagina, leading sex to occur more comfortably in a frontal position. For the first time among mammals this created a “personalization” of sex. We along among primates can gaze into each other’s eyes as we make love.

• Development of breasts. The breasts added to a female’s potential for enjoying sex, and in the words of Sjoo and Mor, “Combined with frontal sex, no doubt the female’s maternal and social feelings were also now aroused by the personal lover, whose body was now analogous to the infant’s body at her breast.”

In short, human beings became the only creatures on earth for whom sex could occur at any time for nonreproductive purposes. Sjoo and Mor concluded:

Human sex thus became a multipurpose activity. It can happen for emotional bonding, for social healing, for pleasure, for communication, for shelter and comfort, for personal release, for escape—as well as for reproduction of the species. And this is one of the original and major, determining differences between humans and all other animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fishes, worms, for whom copulation exists only and solely for species reproduction.

The decoupling of sex from reproduction and from estrus-driven biological determinism is integral to the evolution of humans as a unique species. A clitoris, breasts, and front-shifted vagina also made sex much more enjoyable. There was no longer any anatomically predestined reason for the contributor of genetic material to mount. Either sex could mount and produce babies just as well, or not produce any babies at all. For the first time since sex began, a life form could decide for itself how and when and whether to reproduce. In other words, sex was now mostly in the mind, not in the biology. What began a billion years ago as clever biology to outwit parasites eventually evolved to a choice whether or not to do something that might feel good. And it was at this time that the apartheid of sex began—what nature liberated, mankind oppressed. Ideology replaced biology as the commandant of sexual expression.

The Genesis of Gender

Gender, the expression of our sexual identity, must be performed in accordance with society’s expectations, just like all other behavioral expressions. If one contradicts social norms, there are sanctions to suffer from, the fear of which keeps most people in line. Nothing in biology requires people with vaginas to behave in one manner and people with penises in another. So why did genital-specific forms of gender arise? More important, what has changed that now allows social approval of gender expression regardless of one’s genitalia?

Humans have age-old habits for generalization and stereotyping. Similar-looking phenomena are generalized into a category. Characteristics of some part of the category are then stereotyped to apply to all parts of the category. Stereotyping usually has as its main purpose the justification for treating people differentially. Hence we can be certain that as human language evolved, the gross differences in people’s genitals were generalized into categories of male and female people. Depending on the chance development of local culture, either benign or prejudicial stereotypes of each sex followed naturally from the establishment of these two superficially obvious categories. Once a category is established, it is typically human to start investing it with attributes and to reinforce the reality of those attributes with training and social sanctions. Gender becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, imposed from childhood until it seems part of our nature. So the human passion for categorization and organization lies behind the genesis of gender.

Many people believe that the gender attributes of today are what they always were. That is almost certainly not the case. Indeed, the same variety of sex that we saw in the fish and animal kingdoms can be seen with regard to gender diversity in human societies. Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman, cites several scholars’ work to buttress her claim that most early human communities “were originally matrilineal, matriarchal, and even polyandrous (one woman with several husbands).” The vast majority of prehistoric stone carvings (so-called Venus figurines), which date from around 25,000 B.C.E. to about 3000 B.C.E., are indeed of goddesses. Such specific authority structures and religious carvings presuppose the existence of female gender behavior that is activist and leadership oriented, traits mostly associated with men today. Indeed, as of 1000 B.C.E., Herodotus of ancient Greece observed “in Egypt, women go in the marketplace, transact affairs, and occupy themselves with business, while men stay home and weave.”

Notwithstanding the different possible expressions of gender that have occurred throughout history, at least since the time of the Greeks and in nearly all tribal societies investigated by anthropologists, the dominant gender stereotypes were empowering to people with penises and oppressive to people with vaginas. The reason stereotypes are employed is to help justify the differential treatment of people with similar characteristics—in this case the oppressive treatment of people with vaginas. Hence the most important question behind the genesis of gender is, why did men feel they had to dominate women?

A number of different theories have been advanced as to why men historically sought to oppress women, and we have no way to know the “true reason,” which may vary even from place to place. It is clear, however, that none of the potential reasons for men’s oppression of women remain valid today. Accordingly, the genital-specific stereotypes that arose in support of male suppression of people with vaginas—what we call male or female gender—are no longer valid today.

The three most popular theories that seek to explain the origin of genital-stereotypic gender are (1) that men were jealous of women’s biology, (2) that men were egotistically driven to know which children were born of their “seed,” and (3) that men found women to be convenient targets for anger and aggression born of higher levels of testosterone. Each of these three theories will be discussed below to gain insight into the origin of genital-stereotypic gender and into the modern sociotechnological advances that render the old stereotypes obsolete.

Jealousy

Most feminist historians explain the rise of male domination of society as a result of men’s jealousy over female biology. The focal point of male jealousy is said to be women’s ability to bear children, but in some tribal societies that consider blood to have spiritual qualities, there also appears to be evidence of envy over women’s ability to bleed periodically (menses). In the view of these historians, early peoples at one time believed that women could produce life without male involvement, and this led a high status of women in those societies, with associated positive gender stereotypes. Male jealously eventually fueled an alternative view of women as mere receptacles or incubators of a male (if the sperm connection was known) “life seed.” With this new worldview, men no longer needed to envy women’s childbirth ability since the men saw themselves as the real initiators of life. Stereotypes were developed to reinforce this somewhat shaky new worldview. The stereotypes colored men “active” and gave them the important roles in society, while women were painted “passive,” with a principal purpose in life of incubating the male seed.

Evidence in support of the jealousy theory comes from studies of certain tribal cultures and from the earliest detailed written descriptions of gender stereotypes, the views of Aristotle and other Greeks. In a number of tribal societies in the South Pacific, South America, and Africa, males go through bloodletting rights that mimic menstruation. Within these societies, such as the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, a clear distinction is made that the artificially induced (with a stick or other cutting tool) male bloodletting is clean blood, but the naturally occurring female menses is dirty blood. Sjoo and Mor report on an Australian aboriginal male ritual in which the men “cut wounds in their penises, inserting stones to keep the wound permanently open. This rite imitates female bleeding, and the wound is called, in their language, a ‘vagina.’ During this rite young men pass through the legs of older men, being ‘reborn’ from the ‘male womb.’”

In all of the tribal societies studied that practice male imitation of female rituals, there is an extreme amount of genital-specific gender stereotyping. Women are considered dirty, weak, and untrustworthy. They are beaten frequently. Feminist historians explain this as a result of men trying to overcome their jealousy of female biology.


Aristotle and other Greeks first laid down comprehensive concepts of maleness and femaleness about 2,500 years ago. In their view maleness was characterized by activity and femaleness by passivity. All of society’s other numerous gender adjectives flow from these two key terms. “Active” presupposes other stereotypical masculine qualities such as aggressiveness, strength, leadership, and intellect. “Passive” implies other stereotypical feminine qualities such as peacefulness, frailty, nourishment, and idleness. Many feminist historians believe that these stereotypes arose as a reaction to male jealousy over female childbirth. These feminist historians believe that, rather than envy women’s miracle of childbirth, the Greeks used their newfound knowledge of the need for semen in conception to “turn the tables” on women and consider them as mere receptacles for the male miracle of sperm.

According to Aristotle, women were “passive by nature” as evidenced by their functioning as a “passive incubator of male seed.” The parent was not the mother, but “he who mounts.” Hence the Greeks and their Roman successors based an apartheid of sex on the theory that the male phallus was active while the female vagina was passive. This presumption arguably, but not always successfully, made it self-evident to these ancients that men and women had two different natures, which meant that they should follow two different sets of gender rules, active ones for men and passive ones for women.

The Greeks could not rely on male semen alone to maintain the apartheid of sex because that would still leave their society open to female intellectual participation. After all, even if the woman’s body was in the Greeks’ words a “mere receptacle for male seeds,” a “fertile field being planted,” or “menstrual blood being cooked by male semen,” none of these anatomical capabilities necessarily spoke to her intellect, her soul, or her nature. Greeks were also worried about grounding apartheid on the phallus alone. Greek men knew too many dynamic women lovemakers and too many flaccid phalli. Leading Greeks such as Plutarch and Cato worried that if they allowed women, as Cato said, “to achieve complete equality with mean, do you think they will be any easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters.” The belief that men controlled childbearing or coitus was simply not enough to fully control women. Women could say “Okay, the kid is yours” or “I don’t want to sleep with you” and go on to compete for worldly rewards. There was a persistent fear that women would spring back to their former matriarchal glory, a glory that was still recalled in folklore. Hence the Greeks began to institutionalize the apartheid of sex with gender socialization. In other words, they began to shift the ultimate reason for apartheid form the body to the mind.

From Greek to Roman times persistent efforts were made to establish nonreproductive, nongenital pillars for sexual apartheid. Classical myths emphasized that life sprang from Olympian male gods and set up male and female gods with stereotypical gender attributes. While there were many gods, just one was the original male father. This was intentionally in opposition to the ancient matriarchal belief in a single female ancestor. The Greeks and Romans also passed laws to limit the participation of women in sociopolitical life, based on assertions that women “lacked the nature” or were “too passive” for intellectual affairs. It was not women’s bodies per se that primarily condemned them to second-class citizenry, it was their souls. Active or passive genitals were certain signposts to active or passive souls.

Contradictions in the Greco-Roman gender scheme arose everywhere, and these contradictions undermined patriarchal control. For example, the myths about women multiplied so greatly that one could readily find activist female heroes among the Olympic gods. Soon the mythical gods were all fighting gender wars, a terrible precedent for patriarchal life back on earth. Also, despite all efforts at repression, there were always examples of women who totally defied the “passive” stereotype.

The Greek woman Agnodice, a contemporary of Aristotle, graduated from medical school and became the most successful gynecologist of her time—all the while disguised as a man. Accused by jealous colleagues of building a practice by seducing clients, she shocked ancient Greece by revealing her true sex in a famous trial. Having proved their claims of seduction false, she proceeded to argue successfully for her right to practice medicine as an exceptional woman, despite laws limiting the medical field to men. There were also numerous women warriors, generals, and tradespeople in neighboring societies that had not yet fully yielded to patriarchal control. These women could not exist if women were passive by nature. Hence, despite a strong overall patriarchy, many women thrived in Greco-Roman times. Indeed, early Christians used the checkered ability of Greco-Roman society to control their women as evidence of their theology’s shortcomings.

As the Roman Empire began to wane, it was clear that neither reproductive anatomy nor the notion of an inherently passive nature would suffice for keeping women fully under control. The patriarchy had succeeded in wiping out matriarchal societies, but arguments based on childbearing or gender rules did little to quash the desire of individual women to participate fully in life’s opportunities. And each woman who did try to participate actively in society was a stick of dynamite in the edifice of apartheid. Where one woman succeeded, many more would follow. Taken to its conclusion, men would lose their female slave class and double their competition—and both “evils” would occur with a class of people they had just violently dispossessed of thousands of years of matriarchal supremacy!

Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than in the famous case of the Alexandria-based Greek mathematician Hypatia. A brilliant astronomer living around 400 C.E., she was adored by her pupils and considered one of the most articulate proponents of rationalism. She did not have children, and her very success flew in the face of all the Greco-Roman stereotypes about women. As long as Hypatia was around, girls in Alexandria were inspired to be more than a “receptacle for semen,” and need not believe the stereotypical gospel about “women being passive by nature.” In more and more households girls talked about going to school, and men began to feel threatened. The patriarchy finally solved the problem of Hypatia: a mob of Christian zealots dragged her from her chariot and killed her by slicing the flesh from her bones with crude tools. This was to be a terrible omen for the next phase of mankind’s efforts to enforce an apartheid of sex.

Today we know what the Greeks did not: an egg cell is just as necessary for childbirth as is a sperm cell. Neither sex is reproductively more active or passive than the other, and in any event, reproductive functions have nothing to do with mental abilities. In the 1990s it is now possible to fertilize sperm and egg cells in a vial, check for a variety of genetic abnormalities, and then insert the fertilized zygote into the uterine lining. We are at the cusp of being able to actually modify the zygote before it is inserted into the uterine lining, changing genetic characteristics for health or cosmetic reasons. Neither sperm nor egg cells have a monopoly on the miracle of life. Since sperm and egg cell bearers are themselves, the product of dual-sexed parents, reproduction is, in fact, an inherently transgender experience.

It is ironic that if the genesis of our gender stereotypes came from unwarranted jealousy over women’s apparent ability to produce life spontaneously, or from false pride in men’s apparent ability to plant the seed of life, it was all a big mistake. We now know that both sexes are equal contributors in the creation of life. Neither sex is more active or passive than the other. The egg marches as far as the sperm swims. Women can hump men as easily as men can mount women. A vast social superstructure of genital-specific gender stereotypes was created on a false platform. The stereotypes were then forged into such a self-fulfilling prophecy that the lies became truth. It is our duty, in the twenty-first century, to remove this false gender foundation upon which the apartheid of sex has been built. A person’s nature has nothing to do with gonads. Natures are transgendered.

Egotism

In contrast with the feminist historical viewpoint, sociobiologists argue that gender stereotypes arose from men’s egotistical “instinct for survival.” This instinct led men to ensure that the offspring they helped to support carried their genes and not those of another man. For a sociobiologist, this makes evolutionary sense. While every child born to a woman carries half that woman’s chromosomes, the child will carry only the chromosomes of the man who impregnated that woman. Under sociobiological theories, this fact created great evolutionary-type pressure for men to come up with social systems that ensured the children they fed and defended were the children of their seed. The only way to ensure this would be by controlling women’s sexuality. And the most effective way to control women’s sexuality was to control their minds. Genital-specific gender stereotypes were the principal tools used to control women’s minds and hence their bodies.

Evidence in favor of male parental egotism comes from the major organized religions throughout the world, all of which have as a principal doctrine the control of female sexuality by one man. With the objective of better cementing patriarchal control over women, organized religion added more normative, value-laden content to maleness and femaleness as compared with the active/passive dichotomy of Greece. Starting from the “Word of God” story of Adam and Eve, and similar stories from non-Western cultures, maleness was now also righteousness, inherent goodness, and trustfulness. To be female, under the major organized religions, was now also to be sinful, inherently evil, and devious. Even an intellectually active woman could not escape these negative labels. The trap was complete.

The thrust of early Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judeo-Christianity was to make women feel ashamed of their bodies and to thus make it easier for men to control them. Women were to stay home, work the fields, and have children because they could not be trusted to do anything else. All of the organized religions banned polyandry and female extramarital sex. The religions all insisted that God decreed for men to have absolute dominion over their families. Whether we consider the Buddhist rule that only a man may achieve nirvana or the Jewish law that only a man may study Torah, the message is always the same: Since males are nobler than females, since males are closer to God, it is only proper that men should have authority over women. Organized religion is a monument to male ego.

Organized religion put Western women in a much worse position than ever before. Under the Greco-Roman laws an activist woman could be found in violation of the law, but in her defense she could claim simply to be following her nature. While the stereotype called for women’s nature to be passive, there was nothing sinful or evil about having a nature that failed to comply with the stereotype. The activist woman was simply an oddity who might be spared or killed based on the whims of the circumstances. But under Judeo-Christianity, for example, a woman who failed to follow the gender dictates of the Bible was violating the Word of God. She was at best a sinner and at worst, depending on the particular Judeo-Christian cult, possessed by the devil and condemned to hell. There was no way out of the dilemma: if your “nature” was out of line with “God’s Word,” then you must be evil. Millions of women who practiced old matriarchal folklore were ignored by the Greco-Roman laws but were condemned to death as witches by Christianity. The religious doctrine of male goodness and female guile (evil) gave men the control over women that was never perfected under earlier active/passive gender stereotypes.

Science and technology have decimated both the religious stereotypes in support of male egotism and the sociobiological basis for genital-specific gender. This occurred mostly when the scientific method replaced religious doctrine as the basis for finding truth on earth. Concepts like “men are godlike” have no scientific meaning. Social scientists could find no evidence that people with vaginas are more evil than people with penises. If evil is defined as most people would define it—propensity for murder, rape, callousness—then people with vaginas are generally saints, whether or not they follow a bible. Finally, one needn’t lock up a woman to ensure that a child she births has been created by a particular man’s sperm. Technology provides chromosome tests to give that information.

One of the biggest tragedies of the apartheid of sex is that countless millions of women have been terrorized over centuries simply to ensure that half the chromosome complement of a new child is, within a fraction of a percent, that of a particular male. While the genome (chromosome complement) of no two people is the same (other than identical twins), the genomes of all people are identical to well within 1 percent. Many people find this surprising because they fail to realize that what they see in a person—hair color, skin tone, facial shape—is but a minute fraction of what a person is actually made of—hair, skin, face, internal organs, and extraordinarily complex biochemistry.

It would seem that the biggest flaw in sociobiology is that the harm caused to the human species by savagely oppressing half its population (women) must far outweigh the problematic evolutionary advantages of individual men devoting their efforts only to their genetic offspring. After all, offspring sired by other men would chromosomally be almost the same. So the evolutionary losses due to polyandry are minimal. But the lost contributions to humanity of oppressed women have been massive—half the potential of the species! If unbridled egotism was ever an evolutionary advantage, it no longer is today. To surmount the manifold challenges to our survival on fragile earth, the species needs the unrepressed energies of its female half far more than a limited guarantee that certain babies are partial copies of self-selected men.

Testosterone

A third school of thought, represented mostly by physical anthropologists, argues that men oppressed women throughout history because of the greater flow of testosterone through the male body. In this view, heightened levels of testosterone make men angry, frustrated, and aggressive. Societies developed a female “punching bag” class as an outlet for male aggression because incessant fights among men would be too destructive. Negative gender stereotypes for women emerged so that their treatment as second-class citizens did not grate too roughly on the human psychological need for consistency.

As evidence for this anger theory, physical anthropologists point out that testosterone is associated with aggressiveness in humans and animals. Hyenas are often pointed to as an example of an animal species in which females are more dominant and aggressive than males and also have high testosterone levels. Similarly, scientists point out that female rat embryos that are nestled between male rat embryos in a mother’s womb are more aggressive than those born from all-female litters and also have higher levels of testosterone (as a result of seepage from the neighboring male embryo). Lawyers have been found to have higher testosterone counts during a trial than when occupied with less aggressive pursuits.

Testosterone is also used to explain the average 10-15 percent greater upper body musculature of men. Anthropologists have observed that as a result of this greater upper body strength, it was in the survival interests of tribes to let men do the hunting, warrior work, and heavy plowing. This resulted in men differentiating themselves from women, stereotyping themselves as strong and the women as weak.

Male anger can no longer be used to justify genital-specific stereotyping. Laws against assault and battery require people to control their hormonal urge to strike out against someone. Increasingly, men cannot beat women without going to jail. Hence there should be less and less male-on-female violence to justify unempowered female stereotypes. As far as physical strength goes, technology has been the great equalizer between sexes. As women continue to be integrated into the armed services, the “weak woman” stereotype will become ever less credible. Women soldiers are just as deadly as men soldiers. The physical anthropologist’s perspective on gender stereotyping is ably summarized in University of Florida professor Marvin Harris’s essay “The Evolution of Human Gender Hierarchies”:

An obvious point, but one likely to be missed in the absence of an evolutionary perspective, is that today’s hyperindustrialism is almost totally indifferent to the anatomical and physiological differences between men and women. It is no accident that women’s rights are rising as the strategic value of masculine brawn declines. Who needs 10 or 15 percent more muscle power when the decisive processes of production take place in automated factories or while people sit at desks in computerized offices? … Despite the waning importance of brute strength in warfare, women continue to be excluded from combat roles in the armed forces. Clearly women can be as competent as men with intercontinental ballistic missiles, smart bombs and computerized firing systems. But men and women must jointly decide whether to push for equality of opportunity in the killing fields or to push for the end of war and an end to the social need to raise macho warriors, whether they be males or females.

Testosterone is also fingered by physical anthropologists as the causal factor that leads men to think differently from women. It is alleged that testosterone influences neural development so that men and women have differently structured brains. In this view, many male and female gender stereotypes exist because they accurately depict different male and female approaches to life, regardless of gender socialization.

Once science toppled religion as the arbiter of truth, there was in fact little choice but to look to the human brain for the absolute difference between men and women that history told us prevailed. The seat of “human nature” could only be the brain or the soul. Since the latter could not be found elsewhere, it was presumed to arise from the mind. So science had to find absolute differences between the minds of women and the minds of men or else admit to a transgendered human nature and an end to the apartheid of sex.

First there were abortive pseudoscientific attempts up through the early twentieth century to prove female intellectual inferiority due to smaller brain size or female physical infirmity due to maternal skeletal structure. It was during this time that Madame Curie became the first person ever to win the Nobel Prize twice, once in physics and once in chemistry. Another stick of dynamite in the edifice of apartheid. Nor did physical infirmity stop Gertrude Ederle, in 1926, from breaking (by two hours!) the male world record for swimming the English Channel. Kaboom! By the late twentieth century scientists abandoned efforts to prove absolute differences between the “natures” of men and women. They weren’t there.

Finally, within the last twenty years science has settled on differential test score results and microneural anatomy to establish male-female meaning. For example, it is frequently said that women score better on most tests of verbal ability and men on most tests of mathematical skill. To laypeople, this is translated as “Women are more communicative (in other words, emotional, idle) and men are more mechanical (smart, active).” Similar average test score results have been used to say women are more intuitive and men more logical. In essence, average test score differences today are used to reinforce ancient Greco-Roman sexual stereotypes. This might be called “quantitative patriarchy.”

In fact, as shown in the following table, there are always men who test in the women’s range and women who test in the men’s range. The table shows the sexual spread of several mathematical skills tests, with scores above the ninety-fifth percentile meaning subjects who received scores higher than 95 percent of the other subjects. The overlap between women’s and men’s scores is almost always much greater than the range in which only women or only men score. The table also reflects the phenomena called “variability” —that women’s scores tend to be bunched a bit more closely together and men tend to e disproportionately represented by extremely high and low scores. For example, there are more than twice as many men as women in the very high scorers—but those persons represent only about ten percent of all the men and women. In other words, the tests actually show that men and women think more alike than unalike. The tests are testaments to gender individuality, not to the validity of stereotypes.

Neurobiologists look for differences in dissected, damaged, or electronically scanned male and female brains. To the extent differences are found, there is an irrestible urge to relate them to apparent real-world differences and to explain them as result of more or less testosterone hormonalization of the brain. To date, neurobiologists have not provided any repeatable scientific evidence of absolute differences in male and female brains. Various researchers’ findings are contradicted by other researchers.

Spatial Analysis Testing*

Scoring below 5th Percentile: .56% (Males); .44% (Females)
Scoring below 95th Percentile: 92.09% (Males); 96.34% (Females)
Scoring above 95th Percentile: 7.35% (Males); 3.22% (Females)

* Extrapolated from A. Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (2nd ed. 1992), 33.

As of today, the strongest claim made (based on a few dozen dissected brains) is that a small part of the hypothalamus, a tiny clump of important nerve cells deep within the brain, varies in diameter from .01 mm to .16 mm in women and .01 mm to .21 mm in men. Thus the volume differences within each sex are far greater than the differences between sexes. In any event, the total differences are less than .1 (one-tenth of one) percent the size of a cigarette. This sex difference research is so weak that there is still less than a fifty-fifty chance of looking at a hypothalamus and guessing correctly whether it belonged to a woman or a man. As with other scientific research showing average mental differences between men and women, the results argue more strongly for a continuum of sexual identity than for a duality of sex types. Areas of overlap are always much greater than areas of difference.

None of the scientific research has shown an absolute difference between men and women. There are always many men to score in the women’s range, and vice-versa. Science has finally disproven the age-old dogmas about the absolutely different natures of men and women. There is nothing inherent in having a penis that leads one to act “masculine” or to be “active.” Nor does having a vagina necessarily imply femininity or passivity. Instead science has shown that people are infinitely unique with one of two kinds of genitals (in many variations) and the potential for any sexual identity they choose.

Liberation

All of the reasons for men to use negative stereotypes against women are obsolete. Men need not put down women as passive in order to assuage childbirth insecurities, because there is nothing to be insecure about. Both men and women are important to childbirth. Men need not cast women as evil, out of fear of female sexuality and parentage insecurity. It is the emotional bond, not the chromosomal, that ties child to father for life. Besides, evil is what you do, not who you are. Finally, men need not label women as weak or dumb in order to justify pushing them around. The world of today is too dangerous a place for testosterone cowboys. In any event, one doesn’t need much testosterone to be a killer or a genius. Ask a female GI or Nobel laureate. None of the factors that may have justified genital-specific gender over the past thousands of years are valid today.

If there’s no longer a need to “out-group” women, there is also no longer a need to differentiate between men and women. If there is no out-group, we are all part of the same in-group. Technology has transgendered us. Technology has changed society in ways that decouple gender from genitals. Accordingly, society can liberate gender from genital stereotypes just like biology liberated intimacy from estrus cycles.

As the table below outlines, human civilization since the rise of patriarchal governments has provided us with several definitions of mental maleness and femaleness:

Exemplary Conceptualization Gender Stereotypes

MALE v. FEMALE

ACTIVE v. PASSIVE (Grcco-Roman; Polytheistic Patriarchy)
Aggressive v. Peaceful
Strong v. Frail
Assertive v. Nurturing
Intellectual v. Idle
Leader v. Follower

RIGHTEOUS v. SINFUL (Monotheistic Patriarchy)
Good v. Evil
Trusting v. Devious

MATH-LIKE v. VERBAL (Science; Quantitative Patriarchy)
Logical v. Intuitive
Direct v. Indirect
Mechanical v. Communicative

Gender stereotypes will continue as long as people have an obsession for categorization. But the association of these stereotypes with reproductive roles or genitals is meaningless now that sex is mostly something we do to feel good and child rearing is something any-sex person can do. In essence, family law and technology is returning much of the freedom from biology that patriarchy took away.

We know today that offspring are the product of one person’s egg, another’s sperm, millennia of genetic ancestors, and maybe some reprotech or genetic engineering assistance. So there’s no need to fight over which sex caused the baby—lots of sex, going back thousands of years, causes every baby. We also know today that the child’s name and inheritance are matters of gender-free choice. So there’s no need to pin down our sexes just to ensure the kid gets a name and a house. The legitimacy of a child no longer depends on their father or their mother. For the vast majority of people, what they have is what they worked for. As a pillar of sexual apartheid, reproduction control for patrilineal or matrilineal reasons is obsolete.

The Greeks’ effort to strengthen the early patriarchal structure with justifications that went beyond reproductive roles was later taken up by monotheists and eventually by pseudoscientists. They began to locate sexuality in the person’s soul and to color that sexuality with pervasive gender-based stereotypes. Hundreds of years later Judeo-Christian doctrine would paint the stereotypes as good (Adam) or evil (Eve). And, in the present day, pseudoscientists are attempting to persuade us that gender-stereotypical behavior is burned by testosterone into the modern-day cognate of the soul, our brain cells. Hence even though reproductive roles alone cannot justify gender stereotypes, the Greek myth of genitals as gender signposts to the soul burdens us still.

Test scores reveal a continuum of brain sex, ranging from stereotypically very “male” attributes to very “female” characteristics. Based on this research, one would have to say that brain sex is analogical (continuous), not digitally male or female. Yet legally we force sex to be male or female, based on digitally dimorphic (either/or) genitals. Hence unless we exclude the brain from the definition of sex, we are imposing a legal apartheid of sex that lacks a scientifically rational basis. Brains are transgendered.

In fact, the brain cannot be excluded from a definition of sex. All concepts of sex—from the Greco-Roman active/passive dichotomy to the Judeo-Christian good/evil dialectic to the scientific math/verbal divergence—presuppose thought, mind, and brain. It would appear to us to be singularly inhuman to channel a person’s life according to hidden genitals rather than intrinsic abilities. In modern times the false simplicity of the age-old dualisms is realized; we accept that any person may be more or less active/passive, good/evil, or mathematical/verbal. This inevitably implies that any person may be more or less male/female. Hence it is logical error to label all persons as either male or female. This logical error becomes repressive when the law imposes it at birth and mandates conformity to it throughout life.

The law’s error arises not only from the ancient belief in a strict duality of male/female mental attributes, but also from the ancient belief that one’s genitals were certain arbiters of one’s soul. At birth genitals are as digitally different (either/or) today as they ever were. However, science has never been able to show that the dimorphic genital difference is reflected in a dimorphic brain sex difference. The brain is a continuum of sexual stereotypes; the genitals appear as male or female. It is this inconsistency that undermines the prevailing paradigm of legal sex-typing. Hence we must ask: If the legal separation of sexes is not true or real, does the state nevertheless have an interest in classifying people into one of two sexes based solely on their most private anatomy? And if the state does have such an interest, is it sufficiently strong to outweigh the human right to express sexual identity outside the male/female dialectic?

The Sex of an Avatar

Avatars are pure software constructs. If they continue to increase in sophistication at the rate of the past ten years, they will soon literally think for themselves. How will they feel about sex? There are millions of different answers to this question because there will be millions of differently programmed avatars. An avatar whose software program and associated database was very much a copy of a flesh human’s main memories and thought patterns would feel about sex the same way the flesh human felt about sex. Could the avatar actually have sex? Touch-sensitive screens already provide software with a sense of feeling. Chess programming expert David Levy exudes confidence in his 2007 book Love and Sex with Robots that touch-screen software is the leading edge of a full spectrum of replicated sensuality.

Ray Kurzweil, in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, demonstrates how a continuation of the computer industry’s 40-year track record of processor speed doubling (Moore’s Law) will result by 2020 in desktop computers with the capabilities of the human mind. Computer science guru Marvin Minsky argues persuasively in his 2006 book The Emotion Machine that software can be written to feel all the same things we feel when we love or make love. A good sign of the humanness, or autonomy, of an avatar is that they choose their own sex and display their own gender. Such an avatar would be both transgendered and transhuman. Transgendered because they chose their own gender. Transhuman because they identify with being human, even though they are not made of flesh.

Avatar sexuality is a key bridge from transgender to transhuman. It makes cerulean clear that sexual identity is limitless in variety and detachable from reproduction. And by making that point, it simultaneously demonstrates that human identity is limitless in variety and detachable from reproduction. If you can accept that a person without a penis can peaceably live life as she pleases (including as a man), then you should be able to accept that a person without a physical form can peaceably live life as they please (including as a human). Can you can accept that someone is not automatically passive, or evil, or dumb simply because they have a vagina instead of a penis? Then you should be able to accept that someone is not automatically passive, or evil, or dumb simply because they have a software mind instead of a flesh-based one. Personhood is about equity, not equipment.

While the ancient trunk of sexual identity lies rooted in successful reproductive strategies, the fruit of that tree has now spread far beyond DNA-swapping. Breaking the connection between gender and genitals opened the channel between personhood and form. Once we realize that our essential sweetness is in our minds, and that each of us has unique life-path potential not fully tethered to a body-determined route, then it is as sensible to be transhuman as it is to be transgendered. The being is mightier than the gene.