Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner Read Free Book Online

culture, husbands, and fathers, despite the fact that they were not raised to be that at all.
    Our best explanation is biological.
    The enzyme they have insufficient quantities of, 5-alpha reductase, converts testosterone to another androgen called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT normally causes a penis and testicles to develop in the fetus; since these fetuses don’t have it, they emerge with female-appearing genitals at birth. But what causes male puberty is mainly testosterone, and they do have normal amountsof that; therefore, despite their very different starting point, they are able to go through something closely resembling male puberty as the usual changes in the brain’s regulation of the sex organs take place in the teenage years.
    So why are most of them able to make the transition? Our best guess is that their brains have been exposed to typical male levels of testosterone in the womb. As with the Ahs, Andras, and Clokes, and even the cases of loss of the penis and surgical change to female anatomy, testosterone reaching the brain before birth has prepared the machihembras to think and feel like men someday. That day comes when puberty transforms them, and they are surprisingly ready.
    What about the more usual range of gender identities and behaviors? Gay men and lesbian women live a broad and intriguing spectrum of different lives, not easily (if at all) classified or labeled. Many if not most of us will have same-sex intimacies if we are completely cut off from members of the other sex, as in prison. Most who turn to this situational same-sex intimacy revert to heterosexuality if and when the opportunity returns. But at the other end of the continuum of same-sex relations (and there are all sorts in between), there are people who will never feel an attraction except to a person of the same sex, no matter the situation.
    Among those people, there are men who feel and act in a strongly masculine way and men who feel and act feminine; there are women who love women but feel and act feminine and women who love women but feel more masculine. There are men who cross-dress and like to play football, and these men may be gay or straight. Some women get married in a white gown to the woman they love, become sensitive and devoted mothers, and go off to fight in armed combat in a distant land. All these variations are normal. And, as with transsexuals, people who feel in these varied ways and combinations of ways often do not want to be told that their feelings are simply a matter of choice—that if they accepted certain religious beliefsor entered into certain kinds of psychotherapy they would cease to have the feelings they have had all their lives and instead have the feelings somebody else thinks they should have. Of course, people can be coerced or persuaded to be celibate and alone, to suppress their true selves, but that doesn’t mean that the misguided people “helping” them have changed their feelings—except for making them miserable. The reasons that they can’t change their feelings are in large part biological—incompletely understood for now, but biological nonetheless.
    It helps to see what happens to an XY person who looks and acts female throughout life, as psychologist Melissa Hines and her colleagues did in a 2003 study. This is true of people who, despite the Y, lack androgen receptors or can’t make androgens. If this absence of effective androgens is complete, they show no signs of maleness in their brains, behavior, sexual orientation, or identity. Except for being infertile, they are women, period, and they often adopt babies because they do want to be mothers. Hines and her colleagues’ direct comparison of twenty-two women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome but XY chromosomal types with twenty-two matched ordinary XX women revealed no significant differences in any psychological outcome. These XY women are, again, an exception that proves the rule. If the Y is blocked from