Woman

by Natalie Angier

  However much women with AIS identify themselves as women, they still feel set apart. Most keep their condition secret from all but a few close friends. Interestingly, many of them say the thing they regret most is not their inability to have children but the lack of menstruation, the event they see as a monthly voucher of femaleness. When other girls talk about their periods, girls with diagnosed AIS keep quiet and emotionally shrink away, as though, like the title character in the movie Carrie, they're worried that the "normal" girls will start pelting them with tampons and sanitary napkins.

  Jane spent fifteen years feeling like an untouchable freak, having diagnosed herself by textbook but having no clue how to locate another soul with her condition. "All I wanted was to meet someone else with AIS. It was my life's dream," she says. "I walked around like an adopted child who looks into the eyes of every person and thinks, are you my parent? I'd hear about somebody who couldn't have children, or some other variable like that, and I'd wonder, could she be like me?

  "I asked my own physician, I asked everyone I could if they knew other people. I called a doctor in Dallas who's probably the foremost researcher in the United States on AIS. Everyone kept saying no. They would act like I was out of my mind for asking, and they not so subtly suggested, who the hell would want to talk about it? Who would want to admit it? My own doctor told me that she had two patients with AIS, one a woman in her forties who was so prominent in the community that she would never want her identity revealed. And the other was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl who my doctor insisted was just doing so well that she really had no need to have contact with anyone. That sounded like bullshit. I knew it was bullshit, because that supposedly well-adjusted eighteen- or nineteen-year-old was me."

  Finally Jane again found her answers in a library. While looking through an issue of the British Medical Journal two years ago or so, she read a letter written by a mother of a seven-year-old girl with the syndrome. The family lived in England, and the woman said they were in the process of forming a support group for AIS girls and women and their relatives. She included her phone number at the end of the letter, but Jane could hardly make it out because the page she was reading was already stained with her tears. Jane cries freely as she talks about the day she found the letter. She doesn't bother daubing her eyes with her napkin. "I can never describe for you what that felt like," she says. "I will never be able to describe that." She photocopied the page. She drove home and practiced. She practiced trying to speak in a normal voice, without sobbing and choking. She practiced saying, "I have AIS," which she had never said to anybody but a doctor before. Still, when she called the woman, she broke down on introducing herself. Several weeks later she flew to England for the support group's first meeting. "I will never have a success in my life parallel to having found the support group and other people with AIS," she says. "Without a doubt, that's the greatest success in my life."

  At the group meetings, the women talk about practical issues, such as how to find Lucite vaginal dilators that stretch the short canal into something big enough to accommodate a penis. They avoid euphemism. They talk about themselves as having a birth defect. They talk about scrutinizing their bodies in the mirror, searching for any lingering evidence of maleness. They talk about myths: the myth that links testosterone to libido, for example, in both men and women. If the myth were true, then these women should have no sex drive; they can't, after all, respond to the testosterone their bodies produce. Some sex researchers have said as much about AIS patients—that they're frigid, uninterested, dead in bed. The women themselves come close to spitting in rage at that sort of talk. Whether or not they manage to inflate their vaginas sufficiently to have intercourse, their erotic nature remains intact. They fantasize about sex. They are orgasmic. They lust when there is somebody worth lusting after.

  Another myth they defy is the one that promotes testosterone as the "hormone of aggression." If that platitude held, AIS women should be milder and more violet in their shrinking than the average woman. But the opposite is true: the women are, in their way, Joans of Arc of the temperament. One woman says she deliberately plays at being demure so that nobody will catch on to her condition. Jane claims she has balls when she needs them; the surgeons haven't excised them from her character. "I'm just like my mother, an aggressive, obnoxious human being," she said to me. "I'm the daughter my mother created. I'm the woman I was meant to be."

  3. DEFAULT LINE

  IS THE FEMALE BODY A PASSIVE CONSTRUCT?

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I noticed as I began shopping during pregnancy for baby ballast is that three decades after the birth of the current feminist movement, there is still no escaping the binary coding by color. Whether you're looking at clothes for newborns, for six-month-olds, or for that relatively recent store category, preemies, everything is either pink or blue. Maybe it's because the promiscuous use of sonograms and prenatal tests means that most people know the sex of their baby ahead of time, so there's little need to hedge your purchase even when buying a gift for a prenate. Whatever the reason, the emphasis on sartorial sex distinctions seems stronger than ever before. Just try finding an item of infant clothing that isn't trimmed or beribboned or beanimaled in either pink or blue, and you'll realize how limited your fashion options are. Oh, here it is, the lone ungendered baby outfit: a yellow T-shirt with a picture of a duck on it.

  I also realized, as I floated distractedly through the aisles of the baby megamarts, that I didn't much care. For all my crustiness and deeply held feminism, the pink-and-blue breakdown didn't irritate me as much as I expected it would. One reason for my indifference was that the adorableness factor took over. All baby clothes are adorable, whoever they're meant for (and in the end, of course, they're meant for the parents). All remind you of how vulnerable an infant is, how wholly incompetent and in need of adult largess. You don't look at blue clothes and think "strong" or pink clothes and think "fragile." You look at everything in these micromatized dimensions and think, "How precious! How ridiculous! What was evolution thinking of?"

  I also consoled myself with the knowledge that the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is fairly recent. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the color codes were less absolute than they are today, but, if anything, pink was likelier to be put on boys and blue on girls than the reverse. So though we may at this point be convinced that one color is inherently feminine and the other masculine, the conviction clearly is nonsense. (If you want to spend a few minutes on pleasant mental thumb-twiddling, you can make up plausible fables to justify either interpretation, to wit, that blue, in lying on the high-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum, is a more appropriate color for those high-energy boys, or, alternatively, that blue, being a color of cool objects such as ice and water, better suits the supposedly sedate nature of girls.) The arbitrariness of the distinction gives me comfort and lets me think, Eh, let's not get too frazzled over this one. When it comes to girls' clothing, I'm less opposed to pink than I am to dresses, for the simple reason that I hated dresses and skirts as a child. I hated the way they impeded my mobility and playground power, and I hated the fear I had while wearing them that with one stiff breeze I would be exposed to the world, with no choice afterward but to slip quietly into a permanent vegetative state.

  Yet if there's one thing about the pink-blue dichotomy that annoys me, it's the unidirectional manner in which we sometimes let it slide. It's fine to dress a girl in blue, but think about pink on a boy. Think hard about subjecting your son to girl clothes. Think about dressing him in a pink T-shirt, and even you, my most rad-chic mother, will hesitate and, in compromise, reach instead for the yellow shirt with the duck on it. None of this is surprising or limited to babies, of course. A woman can wear stovepipe trousers or blue jeans or a farmer's bib or tails and a top hat and so what—she's just exercising her options as a consumer; but if a man puts on a skirt he'd better be ready to pick up a bagpipe and blow. We've known this for years, but it's s
till a nuisance to know it. "I guarantee that even if you were given a case of free diapers and they happened to be pink, you would use them for gift wrapping before you would put them on your first-born son," Vicki Iovine writes in her very amusing book, The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy. "It's an illness, I know, and we could all keep our therapists busy for weeks over this issue of gender stereotypes, but it's the truth." When I first read that line, I thought in irritation, She wouldn't say that about using a box of free blue diapers for your firstborn daughter; yet I knew that for all her flippant shoulder-shrugging, Iovine was right. You don't dress your first or second or twelfth-born son in pink diapers, unless you are a mother in a Hollywood horror movie who will soon be revealed as having Medea-sized intentions.

  So what exactly are we afraid of when we fear polluting a boy with pink? Are we worried that we might turn him gay? The evidence strongly suggests that sexual orientation has little or nothing to do with one's upbringing, and in any event gay sons love their mothers, so what's the problem there? Is it the usual misogyny, the association of masculine with "fully human" and "quality controlled," and feminine with "circa human," the "chipped goods on the remainder table"? In part, yes, we're still very much a misogynist culture, and therefore the boys' stuff is good enough for girls—it may even, when used judiciously on daughters, reflect a certain parental panache—but never, ever vice versa. Girl goods are too silly, too icky, and, let's not mince our words, too inferior for a boy.

  This thought is familiar. It's disheartening. And since we're not about to change the pattern anytime soon, it's distinctly unhelpful. So in my ongoing campaign to sweeten brackish waters and to give a female-friendly twist to an old truism, let me suggest the following: our willingness to clothe females in male garb but not the opposite, and the concomitant acceptance of the tom-boyish girl and distaste for the sissyish boy, indicate, albeit on an unconscious level, an awareness of who is the real primogenitor, the legitimate First Sex, and therefore which is ultimately the freer sex. Simone de Beauvoir may have been right about a lot of sociocultural inequities, but from a biological perspective women are not the runners-up; women are the original article. We are Chapter 1, lead paragraph, descendants of the true founding citizen of Eden, whom we may cheerfully think of as Lilith, Adam's first wife. Lilith is not mentioned in the canonical Old Testament, and in the sources where she does make an appearance—for example, the sixteenth-century Alphabet of Ben Sira—she is predictably described as having been created after Adam, designed for his companionship and erotic pleasure. In these accounts, the couple took to quarreling when Adam announced that he was partial to the missionary position. He liked it not so much for the way it felt as for the political point it made. "You are fit to be below me and I above you," he said to Lilith. His companion refused to acknowledge her subordinate status. "Why should I lie beneath you?" she demanded. "We are both equal because we both come from the earth." Lilith's act of rebellion cut short her tenure in the Garden and assured that all her children would be cursed by God ever after (then again, her more pliant replacement hardly fared much better). But in my unkosher retelling of the story, Lilith was outraged at Adam's pronouncements for their imperialist trash. She knew, even if he did not, bloody hell, she was there first.

  By saying that Lilith preceded Adam, that she, not he, was the one with the rib to spare, I'm not being gratuitously contrarian. In a basic biological sense, the female is the physical prototype for an effective living being. As we saw with Jane Carden, fetuses are pretty much primed to become female unless the female program is disrupted by gestational exposure to androgens. If not instructed otherwise, the primordial genital buds develop into a vulva and at least a partial vagina. (The brain may also assume a female configuration, but this far fuzzier issue we will discuss later.) By the conventional reckoning of embryology, females are said to be the "default" or "neutral" sex, males the "organized" or "activated" sex. That is, a fetus will grow into a girl in the absence of a surge in fetal hormones, with no need for the impact of estrogen, the hormone we normally think of as the female hormone. Estrogen may be indispensable for building breasts and hips later in life, and for orchestrating the monthly menstrual cycle, but it doesn't seem to have much of a role in mapping out girlness to begin with. The male body plan, in contrast, is wrought when the little testes begin secreting testosterone, m¨llerian inhibiting factor, and other hormones. The hormones organize—or, more precisely, reorganize—the primordial tissue into a masculine format.

  But the term default sex has such a passive ring to it, suggesting that girls just happen, that making them is as easy as unrolling a carpet downhill; you don't even have to kick it to get it going. A number of women in biology have objected to the terminology and the reasoning behind it. Anne Fausto-Sterling, of Brown University, has complained that the notion of female as default is an intellectual vestige of the male domination of developmental biology. The reason that nobody has found any of the chemical signals that activate the female blueprint, she argues, is that nobody has looked for them. From a man's perspective, the mechanism behind the growth of fallopian tubes simply can't hold the fascination of the recipe for a penis. Just because hormones don't appear to be responsible for female sex determination doesn't mean that nothing is responsible; other signaling systems exist and participate in fetal growth, though they're harder to find and study than a sharp and unmistakable burst of androgens.

  What we can do is reformulate the principle of female first into something less simplistic and inert than the ho-hum default mode. David Crews, of the University of Texas, proposes a lovely system for discussing the sex determination of an animal: the female is the ancestral sex while the male is the derived sex. The female form came first, and eventually it gave rise to the male variant. Athena was said to have sprung from the skull of Zeus. Perhaps we might better imagine Apollo springing from the head of Hera.

  What the notion of female as ancestral sex means, when stretched to its most interesting dimensions, is that males are more like females than females are like males. Males, after all, are derived from females; they have no choice but to hold in common those features—those girlish features, those pink pajamas!—that were modified in the making of them. But females have no such reliance on the male prototype to invent a sense of self. Self was there to begin with; we defined self. We don't need Adam's rib, we didn't use Adam's rib; our bones calcified and our pelvises hardened entirely without male assistance.

  Crews arrived at his thesis through a couple of lines of reasoning. To begin with, he studies sex determination in reptiles rather than in mammals, so he sees a different system at work, from which he can extract novel principles to counter the conventional wisdom held by the warm-bloods. He has observed that the sex of a crocodile or a turtle is not dictated by an X or a Y chromosome, the SRY gene or the testes it can build. Instead, a baby reptile is sexualized by environmental elements, particularly the air or water temperature surrounding the egg while the creature is developing. All embryos begin with bisexual potential, and then, depending on whether it is mild or cold outside, they grow either ovaries or testes. (Generally, a colder temperature yields males, a warmer one yields females, and an intermediate temperature will give rise to a brood of 50 percent males and 50 percent females.) Importantly, neither sex is a "default" sex. A crocodile can't become a female just by not becoming a male. The pre-she must receive some kind of stimulus, pegged to temperature, that in turn sets off a physiological chain of events to build ovaries. So too to construct testes: the young reptile requires signals from the outside world to set the masculine protocol in motion. In other words, the business of sexualizing a reptile is active and multistep whatever the final outcome will be.

  Reptiles are very different from mammals; nevertheless, the details of their sex determination program tempt us to question assumptions about the neutrality of the female. There may be much that we're overlooking in the embryonic establishment of sex. For example, a male fetus's te
stes release m¨llerian inhibiting factor to destroy the primitive ducts that otherwise would flower into the fallopian tubes, uterus, and vagina. Yet in addition to her m¨llerian ducts, a female embryo possesses until the ninth week of gestation what are called the wolffian ducts, structures that have the potential to become the seminal vesicle, the epididymides, and other elements of male anatomy. In the female, most of the wolffian ductal structures dissolve away during development, but has anybody ever found a wolffian inhibiting factor, a WIF? No. Supposedly no such factor exists. Supposedly the wolffian ducts disappear in the absence of a signal from the testes to persist and flourish. This is part of the female-as-default model. The wolffian ducts will self-destruct unless they're given a reason to live. This hypothesis is possible, but it is hardly plausible. We've seen with the development of eggs and brains that nature, Shiva-child that she is, creates abundance only to destroy the bulk of it. But does destruction just happen, or must it be initiated? If death is an active process—and the new creed of apoptosis claims it is—well, then, it needs activation. Somewhere there must be a wolffian inhibiting factor: not a hormone, not something easily isolated like a hormone, but a signal. A subtle set of teeth that eliminates one aspiration and gives the female principle the run of the shop, to shape the body temple so that Lilith might lie as she likes.