Becoming a Visible Man

Chapter 1 How Do You Know?

1 1 How Do You Know? You all know what sex you are, right?” That’s how I like to start. To most students I look like a professor, a psychologist, or a businessman. I am short, athletically built, with a full, trimmed beard, a balding head, and a deep voice. I seek out the students’ eyes, as many as will meet my gaze. They are a mélange of ethnic backgrounds, ages, and life experiences, a generation or two different from the much more homogeneous group with whom I attended college in the late 1960s, and I think how much richer education can be today with so many diverse viewpoints close at hand. That is, provided we are not afraid to listen and give credence to different voices. Most of the students look blankly at their papers or at the empty chalkboard behind me, but a few stare quizzically at me. Some look at me and look away.Are they afraid? Am I fearful of their judgment, or of their misunderstanding? Can I get through their preconceptions, their resistance , and their various cultural positions that I have no time to explore? I am not their instructor; I’m merely a guest lecturer the instructor wants them to meet. I only have an hour or so with them, and—like everything else—mine is a topic that can be explored in so many ways.I can only skim the surface with them. I can only hope to awaken them, to alert them to the possibilities. “Come on,” I encourage them. “You all know what sex you are, right?” A few students nod in affirmation. “So, how do you know? Without looking down . . . no cheating, now. . . . How do you know what sex you are?” Green,BecomingFinal.indd 1 3/24/04 2:35:42 PM Becoming a Visible Man 2 Now some of them start to laugh.“Your mother tells you,” someone suggests. “And you believed her?” I ask, smiling. “Seriously, how do you know?” “By your chromosomes?” someone asks. “Okay,I don’t mean to embarrass anyone,so don’t volunteer information you are not comfortable sharing, but how many people in this room have had their chromosomes checked?” I inquire. In over ten years of lectures like this, speaking to several thousand people, I’ve encountered only three individuals who confessed to having had their chromosomes checked, all for development-related anomalies. This time not one hand is raised. “Right,” I explain. “It’s rare that any of us knows what our sex chromosomes actually are. Did you know that 1 in 20,000 men have two X-chromosomes,rather than one X- and oneY-chromosome? They don’t findthisoutuntiltheirfemalepartnercan’tgetpregnantanddoctorseliminate her infertility as the reason.Sure,there are plenty of reasons for a man to be sterile, but one possibility is that he has two X-chromosomes. One in 20,000 men is a 46-chromosome, XX male; ten percent of those have no Y-chromosome material. That’s a pretty high number for something we are led to believe is impossible. That statistic is from Chapter 41 in the 13th edition of Smith’s General Urology, a standard urology textbook. And what does that tell us about the Y-chromosome? Not that you need a Y to be male, but that you may need a Y to make viable sperm. Maybe! Because there are two species of small rodent-type mammals, called mole voles, in which there is no Y chromosome, yet they are still reproducing both males and females, still procreating just as other mammals [Graves, 2001]. So if you can be a man with two X-chromosomes, and at least 1 in 20,000 men is, what makes you a man?” Some students, particularly males,are scowling now,confused,possibly getting angry.“That’s right: it’s all more complicated than we’ve been led to believe.” “We can identify the sex chromosomes in a developing fetus, but geneticists will tell you we have no idea what genes are firing. We especially don’t know what genes are firing during embryogenesis,when the embryo is formed. Our science so far understands certain clusters of gene firing, like those that control the development of limbs or cause the webbing between the fingers to go away, but we do not understand the sequence of gene firings necessary to create an unambiguous male or female result, Green,BecomingFinal.indd 2 3/24/04 2:35...