The 7 Sexes: Biology of Sex Determination

Notes

N o t e s Preface 1. I. A. Hughes, “Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders,” Archives of Diseases of Children 91 (2006): 554–562. 2. Wild Guesses in an Era of Scientific Ignorance 1. Thomas R. Forbes, “The prediction of sex: folklore and science,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings 103 (1959): 537–544. See p. 537. 2. Eugene S. McCartney, “Sex determination and control in antiquity,” American Journal of Philology 43 (1922): 62–70. 3. More precisely, about the 1880s, because it required the cell theory, the recognition that fertilization involved the union of one sperm with one egg, and the discovery of the two pronuclei in meiosis that unite after sperm entry to produce the zygote. 4. M. G. Bulmer, The Biology of Twinning in Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 5. Ovid’s account of the origin of Hermaphroditus can be found in Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 42. 3. The Ancient World 1. R. H. F. Hunter, Sex Determination, Differentiation, and Intersexuality in Placental Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–3. 2. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato /symposium.html (accessed on January 30, 2012). 3. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, trans. Arthur Platt, http://ebooks .adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/generation/ (accessed on January 30, 2012). Aristotle argues that most animals that are not two- or four-legged are either small; produced by spontaneous generation, which includes most insects and worms; or lacking legs and sessile, in which case he believes they have no sex. Of the sexually producing animals, he 206 Notes to Pages 15–25 believes that maleness and femaleness are essences, the maleness reproducing outward and the female reproducing inward in parallel with their sexual organs. 4. Ibid., book IV. 5. Galen is also known as Aelius Galenus and Claudius Galenus. His reproductive studies, On Seed and On Anatomical Procedures, are not available in English translation. Excerpts from them are usually translated and quoted in articles about Galen’s theories and how they differed from those of Aristotle. Michael Boylan, “Galen’s conception theory ,” Journal of the History of Biology 19 (1986): 44–77, a criticism of Galen’s writings in Latin, claims he was more of a collector of the writings of others that he bound together and which were attributed to him by later commentaries. 6. Ibid. 7. Galen’s view of semen as a vital fluid and its loss as damaging to health became the basis of medical interpretations of masturbation, or “excessive venery,” as a debilitating practice in the eighteenth century. See Elof Carlson, “Self-pollution and Declining Health,” in The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001), 23–38. 4. Monotheistic Religious Interpretations 1. If the chimeric model is adopted, Adam is a cryptic hermaphrodite. Both sexes would have been created at the time of Adam’s creation, but Eve’s presence would have been revealed later, when the surgery to remove her and expand her cells to that of an adult occurred. 2. In Genesis 38, Tamar is put in a frustrated situation. Onan’s older brother Er was killed for some unspecified act displeasing God. After Onan’s death, the youngest brother, Shelah, was secreted away by his father, thus cheating Tamar of her right to marry him. Tamar tricks her father-in-law, Judah, and becomes inseminated by him. The episode reveals the importance of the patriarchal line of heredity (to King David) that was in use then. Later commentators differed in their interpretation of spilling seed as masturbation or coitus interruptus, but in either case it was deemed a waste of vital fluid or life. 3. R. H. F. Hunter., Sex Determination, Differentiation, and Intersexuality in Placental Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3. 4. Koran 80:17–23 refers to the nuftan as having created Adam. Some commentators interpret the nuftan as the individual sperm, and others as a form of blood that is the imprinting vitality that generates life on formless matter. 5. The Moslem view of the second creation for Eve stresses the special status of the process of female sex determination by having it done on Adam while he is temporarily brought to Heaven for the surgery. 6. Intention is important in Catholic theology. Nocturnal emission is not considered a sin because it is not willed...