The G-cat

Divide and conquer (nothing)

Divisiveness is becoming quickly apparent as a plague on the modern era. The segregation and categorisation of people – whether politically, spiritually or morally justified – permeates throughout the human condition and in how we process the enormity of the Homo sapien population. The idea that the antithetic extremes form two discrete categories (for example, the waning centrist between ‘left’ vs. ‘right’ political perspectives) is widely employed in many aspects of the world.

But how pervasive is this pattern? How well can we summarise, divide and categorise people? For some things, this would appear innately very easy to do – one of the most commonly evoked divisions in people is that between men and women. But the increasingly charged debate around concepts of both gender and sex (and sexuality as a derivative, somewhat interrelated concept) highlights the inconsistency of this divide.

The ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ arguments

The most commonly used argument against ‘alternative’ concepts of either gender of sex – the binary states of a ‘man’ with a ‘male’ body and a ‘female’ with a ‘female’ body – is often based on some perception of “biologically reality.” As a (trainee) biologist, let me make this apparently clear that such confidence and clarity of “reality” in many, if not all, biological subdisciplines is absurd (e.g. “nature vs. nurture”). Biologists commonly acknowledge (and rely upon) the realisation that life in all of its constructs is unfathomably diverse, unique, and often difficult to categorise. Any impression of being able to do so is a part of the human limitation to process concepts without boundaries.

Gender as a binary

In terms of gender identity, I think this is becoming (slowly) more accepted over time. That most people have a gender identity somewhere along a multidimensional spectrum is not, for many people, a huge logical leap. Trans people are not mentally ill, not all ‘men’ identify as ‘men’ and certainly not all ‘men’ identify as a ‘man’ under the same characteristics or expression. Human psychology is beautifully complex and to reduce people down to the most simplistic categories is, in my humble opinion, a travesty. The single-variable gender binary cannot encapsulate the full depth of any single person’s identity or personality, and this biologically makes sense.

Sex as a binary

As an extension of the gender debate, sex itself has often been relied upon as the last vestige of some kind of sexual binary. Even for those more supported of trans people, sex is often described as some concrete, biologically, genetically-encoded trait which conveniently falls into its own binary system. Thus, instead of a single binary, people are reduced down to a two-character matrix of sex and gender.

However, the genetics of the definition and expression of sex is in itself a complex network of the expression of different genes and the presence of different chromosomes. Although high-school level biology teaches us that men are XY and women are XX genetically, individual genes within those chromosomes can alter the formation of different sexual organs and the development of a person. Furthermore, additional X or Y chromosomes can further alter the way sexual development occurs in people. Many people who fall in between the two ends of the gender spectrum of Male and Female identify as ‘intersex’.

You might be under the impression that these are rare ‘genetic disorders’, and don’t count as “real people” (decidedly not my words). But the reality is that intersex people are relatively common throughout the world, and occur roughly as frequently as true redheads or green eyes. Thus, the idea that excluding intersex people from the rest of societal definitions has very little merit, especially from a scientific point of view. Instead, allowing our definitions of both sex and gender to be broad and flexible allows us to incorporate the biological reality of the immense diversity of the world, even just within our own species.

Absolute species concepts

Speaking of species, and relating this paradigm of dichotomy to potentially less politically charged concepts, species themselves are a natural example on the inaccuracy of absolutism. This idea is not a new one, either within The G-CAT or within the broad literature, and species identity has long been regarded as a hive of grey areas. The sheer number of ways a group of organisms can be divided into species (or not, as the case may be) lends to the idea that simplified definitions of what something is or is not will rarely be as accurate as we hope. Even the most commonly employed of characteristics – such as those of the Biological Species Concept – cannot be applied to a number of biological systems such as asexually-reproducing species or complex cases of isolation.

The diversity of Life

Anyone who argues a biological basis for these concepts is taking the good name of biological science hostage. Diversity underpins the most core aspects of biology (e.g. evolution, communities and ecosystems, medicine) and is a real attribute of living in a complicated world. Downscaling and simplifying the world to the ‘black’ and the ‘white’ discredits the wonder of biology, and acknowledging the ‘outliers’ (especially those that are not actually so far outside the boxes we have drawn) of any trends we may observe in nature is important to understand the complexity of life on Earth. Even if individual components of this post seem debatable to you: always remember that life is infinitely more complex and colourful than we can even imagine, and all of that is underpinned by diversity in one form or another.