Reflections on Sex and Gender

I foresee a future in which males are a minority, perhaps a rarity, and females reproduce by cloning and gene splicing. I foresee a future in which you can change your gender as easily and often as we now change our cosmetic styles in clothing, hair, and skin. I find it difficult to trace the multifarious consequences of those assumptions. Would there be a parallel development in “humanism” that discriminates against cetaceans or cetacean-human hybrids? Such creatures might make excellent spaceship pilots. Some years back, I read a science fiction story (perhaps 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson) in which the spaceship was a biologic creature who invited you to have sex with your choice of configurations. 

Spinning off from astronomy, I have a new interest in microscopy. Hopefully having learned from my mistakes with telescopes, I am still shopping for an instrument for viewing the microcosmos. Part of that process was acquiring some textbooks. I could not help but be

amused by illustrations in Microbiology: Principles and Applications, 2^nd edition, Instructor’s edition, by Jacquelyn G. Black (Prentice Hall, 1990, 1993). The woman has no genitals.* The man does. And he is circumcised. This is not uncommon. It is difficult to find an ordinary illustration of an anatomically correct female. 

Consider ancient Greek ceramics and statuary. The womanity in women is conspicuous by its absence. I blame the Semites. 

9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

The Indo-European languages date to about 4000 BCE and they all share the Semitic root word for “seven.” So, some contact must have occurred. On the other hand, I have read that in archaic times, perhaps 700-550 BCE, in hot weather, it was not uncommon for Greeks to go without any clothing. Only when looms made textiles common did covering become more common, especially for women. In Allan Drury's novel, A God Against the Gods, about Pharaoh Akhenaten (circa 1350 BCE), people often went about unclothed. Another fact is that temples in India perhaps less than a thousand years old do have anatomically correct female deities. So, the historical development of enforced modesty is not clear to me. The fact remains. And we live surrounded by and living within the consequences no less than fish live in the waters. 

 

Plaque sent into outer space aboard Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11

Fish, however, are probably not as confused and conflicted about water as we are about sex and gender.

It has become common in academics for people to insert their preferred gender appellations in their signatures. For those circles, one of my signature blocks is 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

That would now become 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA (he/him/his)

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

 

I was amused by a sigline like this:

Mary Smith (she/they)

College & School 

Project & Thesis

 

So, Ms. Smith would be “she” in the nominative case, but “they” in the objective. She did not say what the possessive is. I suspect that she had not considered what she wanted to be called in German with four cases or Russian with six or Hungarian with at least 12 cases and arguably another six: inessive, adessive, ablative, sublative…  

 

Fashion trends in sexual identity quickly grew as homosexuals, bisexuals, and transvestites inclusively embraced the persons of intersexual and non-sexual orientations. As easy as it was to accept all of that, I needed a moment to get my head around “queer” as a good thing. 

PRICHEP: Margolis, who's been studying pandemic Yiddish learning, says secular Yiddish has always been a chosen space, and people make that choice for a lot of reasons.

MARGOLIS: Descendants of Holocaust survivors, for whom the language was deeply meaningful.

PRICHEP: People who are drawn to the music and literature.

MARGOLIS: And then that youth vanguard of people who gravitate towards Yiddish because it's a queer space, it's a lefty space, it's a progressive space.

“For some secular Jews, their pandemic hobby has been learning Yiddish,” by Deena Prichep, December 25, 2021, 7:58 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday. -- https://www.npr.org/2021/12/25/1067966088/for-some-secular-jews-their-pandemic-hobby-has-been-learning-yiddish

Well, yes, they would have to be secular Jews because religious Jews would find queer spaces problematic.

So, we now have LGBTQIA+. Somewhere in that string is the space for non-binary. Because the string has eight characters, not being included there would allow me to claim that I am non-octary, the modern way to say “straight”--at least here and now because there's no telling what opportunities the future may offer. It might be interesting to advocate for time functions among the alphabetists. LG(x)T(y)B(dy/dx)QI(d^2y/dx^2)A+/-.

Note:

* Her wounds are also disturbing. It would have been possible to illustrate "Sites of Skin Infection" without personalization. Just show the sites. I believe that this illustration presents  woman-as-victim, continuing and reinforcing the problem.

Previously on Necessary Facts

The Madame Curie Complex

Females and Women 

She's Such a Geek!

Turing Never Said That