Evolution’s Rainbow
Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
Joan Roughgarden
Reviewed by Jamie Faye Fenton
Joan Roughgarden
Joan Roughgarden is a professor of
evolutionary ecology and geophysics at
Participation in the 1997 San Francisco Pride Parade opened Joan’s eyes and made her curious about the role of diversity in biology. She started a research project.
There was little to go on. It seems Western science itself was blind to diversity, sweeping aside natural exceptions to the hetero-centric metaphor. Not even Charles Darwin was immune. Science had missed something big, the vital role of cooperation and diversity in evolution.
Joan responded by writing Evolution’s Rainbow. The result is a wide-ranging book covering natural science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, bio-ethics, and GLBT identity. It is also, like many personal projects of transgender authors, a defense brief for her soul.
I generally like to summarize an author’s line of argument first, and then give my reactions. Joan covers many topics and my summary is quite long. I will switch back to my own perspective in the section titled “Reactions”.
Sex and Gender
“Male” means making small gametes and female means making large gametes. The smaller gametes are called sperm and the larger gametes are eggs. This is the only universal difference. This is because a scheme in which one sex favors gamete size over quantity and the other quantity over size will always win-out in competition with schemes with equal sizes.
Sexual reproduction is less efficient than asexual reproduction. Despite this, sex can be a better strategy, because it allows a species to “rebalance the genetic portfolio” to hedge against fluctuations in the environment. A sexual population can maintain a much larger genetic reservoir, squirreling away adaptations currently out of favor for the day when the climate and ecosystem change.
Gender is the appearance, behavior, and life history of a sexed body. This definition is different than the typical division between “physical sex” and “mental gender” used in the TG community. Or, as Kate Bornstein put it: “Sex is fucking, everything else is gender”.
Beyond these two simple definitions, everything else is up in the air. Joan gives numerous examples of why this is so.
A Wide Range
Hermaphrodites are common in the ocean and in plants. Some organisms change sex during their lives, others can change from asexual to sexual, depending on conditions. There are species where the females are larger than the males, others in which the males give birth and/or bear the burden of child-rearing. Female birds have XY chromosomes and males XX. Female hyenas and some female primates have penises. Male fruit-bats have mammary glands. Certain deer and kangaroos are intersexed. So are kangaroo rats, pigs, and bears.
Some fish change sex in order to balance the sex ratio. Other fish have two genders, one female and the other part-male part-female. The anglerfish male is tiny and attaches itself to the female, ultimately becoming one of her organs.
In both the birds and the bees, sex and gender is quite different than it is for us.
There are many instances in which the parental investment of males in raising the young exceeds that of the females. This is called sex role reversal and can extend to having females competing for males, forming dominance hierarchies, keeping harems, and an apparent double standard.
Sex role reversal is not seen in mammals. Mammalian females make an enormous investment by supplying the egg, carrying the embryo, and providing milk, which males can’t match. Mammalian reproduction may have evolved in response to climatic change and as a way for females to assume control of their offspring. Males then acquire an incentive to control the females.
The “normal family” is considered to be a male and female parent living with their offspring, with the male dominant. Other possibilities are “unnatural”. This is wrong. Many human families have only one parent, or have two same-sex parents, or are lead by grandparents.
The stereotypical male-female dominance relation is not universal. Power relationships are both diverse and subtle. In primates, we see coercion among the chimpanzees and orangutans, and a peaceful sexuality among the bonobos and monkeys.
Monogamy is rare, even among mammals. Many birds are monogamous because the parental investment is localized in the nest rather than the female body. Others form cooperative extended families with more than one male or female parent.
Vampire bats have a buddy system for sharing meals and form extended families. Social relations are formed and expressed by grooming. More generally, animals can acquire reputations for cooperating or cheating. Much of this has escaped notice in field study.
The distribution of reproductive activity across members of a group is called reproductive skew. High skew occurs when the distribution is uneven, and skew is a primary factor in how individuals structure their lives.
Animal behavior is often described using human metaphors. In birds, extra-pair copulators are called “perpetrators” and the nesting non-parental males “cuckolds”. Animals “steal” and “deceive”. Such words suggest a biased attitude.
Sandra Vehrencamp developed an alternate model in which reproductive skew is connected to a labor market for cooperative effort. Animal societies are a political economy of reproductive opportunity. The structure of this economy depends on distribution inequities in the availability of resources or exposure to danger combined with genetic relationships. Its an ongoing negotiation between breeders and helpers.
There are families with more than two genders. Each variation is called a morph.
Morphs within a sex can differ in many ways: size, color, relationships, mating behaviors, environments, parenting behaviors, life-spans, and typically, social roles. Within-sex polymorphisms are easy to spot in fish and lizards.
Sometimes a morph will change as an individual matures. Male bullfrogs mature from silent to singing. The plainfin midshipman fish also has two male morphs, one is large, can sing, and guards the nest. The smaller, silent morph darts in the larger morph’s territory to fertilize eggs.
The sunfish has 3 male genders and 1 female and demonstrate a third male role. The large males guard, the smallest are end-runners, and the medium size cooperates with the larger. This pattern is common. The larger male offers access to mating opportunity to the medium male in return for help in guarding. In some cases, this same-sex relationship is established by courting.
Tree lizard males have controllers and two end-runner morphs. A lizard end-runner can switch back and forth between the role of nomadic and sedentary. For lizards, the hormone progesterone determines which morph an individual becomes.
White throated sparrows have two morphs of each sex. One morph is more aggressive than the other. They tend to pair off into opposites – a butch female with a femme male and vice-versa. Territorial defense trades off against the better parental care provided the passive partner.
The most complex case is the side-blotched lizard, which has 3 male and 2 female genders. The two female morphs vary by their egg production and tolerance for territorial crowding. The relative populations of each morph cycle over time.
In some species, males “cross-dress” as females. This is usually explained as a form of deceit called female mimicry, which seems overly complex. Other explanations are less tortured and more explanatory. For example, a masculine male might recruit a feminine male to live nearby as a non-threatening neighbor or to cooperate in some other way. A common characteristic is the lessening of hostilities. Viewing cross-gender behavior as deceitful is transphobia extended beyond humanity.
Sexual Selection
This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring…
… I believe, that when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by sexual selection: that is, by individual male had had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defense, or charms, which they transmitted to their male offspring alone.
Joan claims
Nor are females necessarily coy. In some species, they initiate sex. In others, such as Bocage’s wall lizard, females change to male coloration to signal unavailability. There are butch and femme female damselfly morphs. The butches benefit from less distracting male attention when population density is high, while the femmes benefit when it is low. Other female insects synthesize male perfumes as an anti-aphrodisiac.
Females can choose the size of their families, although coercion is seen in mammals. Extra pair copulations and paternity are a natural strategy for females to balance the dangers of male power with the benefits of male parental investment.
Dominate males do not have better genes than subordinates by objective standards of measurement. Females select males whom they believe will deliver on the promised parental care. Females can mate with multiple partners to distribute paternal responsibility. Females can change their presentation to regulate mating frequency. Females can choose their family size. Courtship is not a beauty contest; rather it is a negotiation of parental commitment.
All of these contrary facts prove that
Same-sex Sexuality
Appearing in 1999, the book Biological Exuberance presents documented evidence of same-sex mating in over 300 vertebrate species. There appears to have been a cover-up.
There are lesbian lizard pairs where each partner cycles from butch to femme in opposite phase. They copulate, as do some asexual lizards, perhaps to form pair-bonds.
The pukeko bird is bisexual, with both male-male and female-female matings occurring 10% of the time. This activity is seen as reducing hostility and regulating brood size. The oystercatcher has two types of threesomes. One is cooperative and the other aggressive. Both have one male and two females.
Both geese and swans have male-to-male pair-bonding. These relationships are stable and gay swan couples raise their young together.
Sheep are notoriously gay, engaging in frequent anal sex. There are “effeminate male” sheep that prefer to be with the ewes and dislike gay sex. Scientists have tried to breed gayness out of sheep, which may cause more harm then good.
Deer, reindeer, moose, giraffes, pronghorns, American bison, mountain zebras, warthogs, African elephants, Asian elephants, llamas, and many more animals engage in same-sex mating. Some are more gay, others more lesbian, and in some species both sexes have at it. The list extends to include numerous predatory mammals, small mammals, vampire bats, marine mammals, and the primates.
Same-sex mating is so blatantly obvious among primates that it has been studied since the 1970s. Japanese macaques are old world monkeys that live in mixed groups of 50-200, with 4 times as many females as males. (The males migrate from group to group every few years). There is a female dominance hierarchy. Short term lesbian relationships form between more distantly related individuals, with the lesser monkey enjoying a temporary elevation of status. Why?
Neutralists claim that homosexuality in Japanese macaques is a harmless distraction; while adaptationalists believe that it is a “socially inclusive trait” that has value on its own. The debate is not settled.
Bonobos are our close relatives and are notorious sluts. Bonobos enjoy oral sex, hand jobs, French kissing, and both same and cross-gender mating many times a day. Each encounter lasts 15 seconds. Sex is used to facilitate sharing, for reconciliation, to welcome, for bonding, and for reproduction. Female bonobos will exchange sex for sweets, suggesting that the oldest profession is even older.
These other uses beyond reproduction suggest that mating can be used to gain entry and participate in a social group that controls resources. Lemurs, baboons, langurs, white-handed gibbons and gorillas all have same-sex matings. The evidence suggests that homosexuality in primates evolved about 50 million years ago.
Despite the views of the homophobes, who either didn’t look or don’t see, homosexuality is both natural and surprising common.
Cooperation in Evolution
Joan returns to her discussion of the three major claims of
This struggle for survival was usually described using the metaphors of conflict. This shading underplays the role in cooperation in optimizing fecundity and increasing the probability of survival.
All multi-cellular organisms are cooperatives that live or die together. Likewise, cooperation exists within the cell; many cellular subunits once existed independently. The nucleus is not the center of control. Humans are self-contained alliances of bacteria.
Evolutionary psychologists have built a shaky tower of dubious claims on top of this discredited sexual selection theory. A particularly inflammatory example is the notion that human males have an evolved capacity to rape.
Joan’s view, again, is that of the political economy of reproductive opportunity. Items of social trade can include food, real-estate, work, etc., as well as mating. This wider view accounts for the natural diversity of gender expression and the value of social-inclusionary traits.
Human Diversity
Joan turns her attention to diversity in humans, first by describing her own development as an organism. Her egg-part formed while her own mother was an embryo, and follows a complex sequence of events leading to the oviduct. Her sperm part also began while her father was 4 weeks old and follows an equally complex pathway to that oviduct. Born with a male phenotype, Joan’s zygote, the genes recombine, and then the cell repeatedly divides and then implants itself in the uterus and embryonic development proceeds.
Eight weeks after fertilization, Joan’s Y chromosomes express the SRY gene and give her testes. Differentiation continues, often controlled by hormones until the fetus is ready and Joan emerges as a boy.
Human males and human females are only moderately different. This difference first appears in the ribosomes a few divisions after fertilization. Development involves a complex pattern of negotiation. A key player is the SRY gene from the Y chromosome and activates masculine characteristics. Because of the negotiation protocols, it does not have absolute power. Much of the structure of the body is determined by the complex interaction of gene combinations.
Richard Dawkin’s concept of the selfish gene overlooks the necessity for cooperation within an organism as well as between them. Perhaps a better model is “the genial gene”.
A given person differs from another of the same sex by approximately 60 genes out of their 30,000. (Which 60 varies). Accounting for sex chromosomes, the difference is only 250 genes. The effects of these small differences are magnified by the fact the some genes control others. The SRY gene that influences masculinity is known to evolve rapidly. Variations on the sex chromosomes can control the magnitude of the differences between males and females and the extent of transgender expression.
In other words, evolution influences how much males and females differ, and to what extent transgender gene expression takes place.
Genetic expression affects hormones, which in turn affects cells with receptors. A developing fetus is affected by hormones from the mother, the child, and the placenta. After birth, the child’s hormones continue to choreograph maturation. Both sexes produce both types of hormones, just at different times and amounts.
In addition to physical sex characteristics, hormones affect the brain and cause dimorphisms to develop that are noted in birds, rats, and in humans. There are only a few small human brain dimorphisms known at present, and a small Dutch study suggests that MtF transsexuals show the same characteristics as genetic women in one of these areas. Men score better on some mental task categories than women and vice-versa, and live (fMRI) imaging studies show differences in activation patterns.
Despite discernable differences, male and female humans have strong overlapping abilities. This creates plenty of room for transgender expression.
The human brain has grown 3 times larger over the last 2.5 million years. This can not be explained by technological progress or by accounts involving sexual selection advanced by evolutionary psychologists. Perhaps the human brain is the consequence of a social inclusionary trait pulling itself up by its bootstraps.
The disparity in male and female life-span may result from each sex selecting different “life history” strategies, optimized for the risk profile each sex faces
The three different identified brain dimorphisms plus the two physical morphs gives rise to 16 possible gender variations. There are undoubtedly more, particularly if intersexuality is also considered.
Gender identity develops some time between the third trimester of pregnancy and 3 to 12 months after birth.
There are some brain differences associated with homosexuality, and there is evidence of sexual orientation running in families. Some researchers claim that a “gay gene” exists, but this has not been confirmed. If such a gene exists, homosexuality is far too common to be a genetic defect. Sexual orientation is fixed at some time between ages 1 and 10.
Why would homosexuality evolve if it works against reproduction? Homosexuals are indeed less fertile. An early idea was that gays were “helpers at the nest”. Perhaps homosexuality is a social-inclusionary trait that was adaptive at some time. Straights and gays can be compared to the male “controller” and “cooperator” morphs seen in fish and birds.
Psychology
Joan dislikes psychology and regards psychologists as dangerous. She reluctantly describes how this discipline views and interacts with transgender people. Most information is anecdotal, coming from therapist’s reports and autobiographic writings. Most MtF autobiographies have de-emphasized transgender sexuality in a bid to gain public acceptance.
The therapist’s perspective is distorted by the disease metaphor, gate keeping responsibilities, and the narrow window of interaction with clients. The best available book on the subject is True Selves, by Millie Brown and Chloe Rounsley. True Selves describes the typical TG life trajectory as beginning with an early awareness of difference, experiencing disapproval and violence, and an attempt to conform that eventually fails. There is then a breakthrough leading to emergence, transition, and perhaps surgery.
Not everyone follows the script exactly. Some eschew surgery; others find they can be both men and women.
For some, sexuality is most important. They participate in BDSM activity, usually in the submissive role. Others derive sexual pleasure from cross-dressing. Some transsexuals feel that their transition process is driven by autoerotic sexual desire. Joan, like many transsexuals, is appalled by this idea, although she believes that self-identified autoerotic transsexuals must be included in the TG community. “A female persona in a male body must survive testosterone”.
FtMs typically start as lesbians and are not squeamish about sex.
Threats to Diversity
Medical science poses a danger to human diversity. While the concept of disease is fuzzy, it has been applied to the detriment of GLBT people. GLBT expression is far too common to qualify as a genetic defect. Other conditions, such as ADHD and sickle-cell anemia, don’t either, because they are adaptive in certain situations.
Lynn Conway claims that the prevalence of transsexuality is under-reported by two orders of magnitude. Transsexuality and several varieties of intersexuality are too frequent to be genetic defects.
Gays and lesbians were once stigmatized as mentally ill and were subjected to abusive treatments. Homosexuality was dropped from the Diagnostic Manual in 1973. Transgender expression remains under the classifications of gender identity disorder (GID) and transvestic fetishism. This must change.
There is some acquiescence, as the medical classification allows for cost reimbursement in some areas. Still, pathologizing transgender expression is stigmatizing and fosters dependency. Transsexuality is a natural condition like pregnancy.
Early medical interventions to “correct” intersexuality often get it wrong.
Genetic engineering also threatens diversity. Monocultures create vulnerability. Cloning barely works for only a few species. Partial cloning raises ethical dilemmas, as do many other bio-engineering possibilities. Genetic engineers possess a dangerous arrogance. The most promising early application area is bio-warfare. Practitioners have a responsibility to preserve diversity at all levels and to “do no harm”.
Diversity in Culture
Several Native American cultures are strong positive examples, with “two-spirited” people held in high regard. The two-spirit category is broad and encompasses gays, lesbians, and transgenders.
Two spirits are important in Zuni legend and ceremony. Osh-Tisch was a famous two-spirited Crow woman who was also a war heroine. Hastin Klah was a gay Navajo medicine man that played a pivotal role in preserving his tribe’s heritage.
Some tribes had transition ceremonies. The Papago would place a boy in a brush enclosure with both a basket and bow and arrow. This was set on fire. If the youth grabbed the basket on the way out he was accepted as two-spirited.
The two spirit heritage is gradually re-emerging from the holocaust of the European conquest.
Polynesian cultures also include a transgender category called the Mahu. Mahu means “half-man half-woman” and can be MtF or FtM. They are identified early and MtF Mahu tend to be attracted to men and are accepted in women’s spaces. Like two-spirits, they are viewed being a combination of the sexes and are generally accepted as part of the natural order. Western transgender culture is making inroads via a more sexual style called raerae or travesti.
Despite their sacred role, hijras are looked down on, considered to neither man nor woman. They can marry and some have done well. Others do not.
Ancient Transgender Categories
The primary transgender category in historical Western culture is the eunuch. Eunuchs were often slaves in serving roles. Some eunuchs were masculine and some were feminine.
In
The Bible mentions eunuchs in both Testaments and explicitly welcomes them into the community of God. They had a ceremonial role in the early Church, eventually displaced by the concept of celibacy. Early Islam also had a transgender culture called Mukhannathun.
Jehanne D’Arc is perhaps the best known medieval transvestite saint. She led the French in battle against the English, was captured and burned at the stake for refusing to renounce her identity.
Sex in Biblical Times
The ancient Greeks are well-known for intergenerational male
sex. The proper practice employed the intercrucial
position in which both partners stand face to face and the active partner
thrusts his penis between the thighs of the passive one. Greek lesbians used an
ancient dildo called an olisbo. Some forms of
homoerotic activity were acceptable in
Contrary to the theology of the Religious Right, the Bible
does not condemn homosexuality. In fact, it contains several descriptions of
loving same-sex relationships: Ruth and Naomi; Jonathan and David. The story of
Modern Transgender Identities
The tomboi of
The vestidas of
The guevedoche of
The transgender movement in the
It may be impossible to determine why and how GLBT expression evolved. Perhaps it was adaptive in some contexts and not others. By its very nature, biological variation will always defy social categories.
The story of Noah’s
Policy Recommendations
The transgender agenda: to be cherished, enjoy freedom and dignity, an end to violence, equal participation, and a right to health care. Joan lauds our hometown hero Mark Leno for his pioneering work in government.
Diversity must be protected by changing the way medicine and psychology is taught. The FDA should maintain a list of diseases and regulate surgical and behavioral therapies. Biotechnologists need to be licensed and should pledge to protect the human gene pool and work for peace. Epidemiological impact needs to be evaluated before authorizing utilization.
We should unveil a Statue of Diversity on the West Coast of
the
Reactions
Whew. That’s a lot of stuff; Time to switch back to being Jamie Faye.
I know Joan Roughgarden. We were friends during her transition period and I enjoyed discussing the science of transgenderism with her. Later our paths diverged, she went for surgery and I went dancing.
I enjoyed her book. Joan comes up with terrific explanatory metaphors. She marshals a mountain of well-documented evidence for sexual and gender diversity in nature. While it sometimes seems too much, it is the only way to defeat the tendency to dismiss counterexamples as flukes. An argument for diversity has to be diverse.
Joan is a notable critic of evolutionary psychology and of the autogynephilia theory. Distressed by the angry tone of the debate, I wrote several articles criticizing the critics. That, plus my wild reputation, put a distance between us. I feel Joan handles this issue well in Evolutions Rainbow. She has grounded her ethical position with scientific facts.
In her section on the genetics of homosexuality, she cites 5 papers written by J. Michael Bailey (as lead investigator) as evidence for points she makes. This is in contrast to her recent writings in other venues excoriating him for writing The Man Who Would Be Queen.
Her description of human reproduction is both scientifically precise and poetic.
In some places, it seems that Joan uses the term transgender to mean “full time transsexual likely to pursue reassignment surgery”. Do cross-dressers belong?
There is a political charge to some of Joan’s writing. Medicine, psychology, male-oriented science, and the church have done us wrong. Having pegged her as conservative, it is a little jarring to see Joan use phrases like “policing the gender binary”.
Joan has changed. Life as a woman will do that to you.
Interpretations
Perceiving the Rainbow
I like the rainbow metaphor for diversity. Each wavelength of light corresponds to a different attribute of the extended phenotype. Since each band can have its own intensity, there are an enormous variety of possible combinations. Not all of them are viable, as only certain colors will light the stage well.
Taking the metaphor a little farther is instructive. When a ray of light finds its way into a human eye, it causes photo-chemical reactions to take place on the rod and cone cells of the retina. The rods sense black and white, while the cones sense relative amounts of red, green and blue. Each of these three “cone” zones cover a third of the rainbow. These 4 signals flow through a neural net which classifies them, and eventually the color is associated with a name by the linguistic capacity.
Two points can be made. First, this system discards information by only sampling the visual spectrum in three broad bands. Multiple wavelengths can produce the same perception. This is why we see bands of color in the rainbow.
Second, different cultures have different systems for describing color, but they all follow a consistent pattern. Some languages have only two words, which invariably translate to black and white. Some have three, black, white, and red. Others have four, five, and so on.
Within any culture, the terms for color can evolve over time. Cultures always begin with only two categories at stage I, and can progress forward adding new terms through the sequence shown in the diagram. The first color split off is always White from Red/Yellow. Then Black splits off from “Grue” in III, Red from Yellow in IV, and then Green from Blue in V. (Some languages do the stage III, IV, & V splits in a different order, but this main sequence holds true for 83% of the languages studied).
Adapted from Color
Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons. Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi. American Anthropologist.
(1999)101:743-760.
The insight here is that the human nervous system, by its very nature, categorizes. Not only is information lost, the ability to describe what remains is limited by culture.
When I was maturing, my culture did not have a word for transgender, much less a heritage of legend to describe who I was and what I was to do. We were colorblind.
Science has extended the range of color perception by 16 orders of magnitude beyond the visible range. It has also introduced numerous new ways to classify perceptions. It remains limited by the power of culture to direct the eye and give names to the colors.
Metaphoric Blindness
Much of the previous account is a paraphrase from early chapters of George Lakoff’s book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Lakoff has also written extensively about the role of metaphor in human cognition.
Metaphors are pervasive in human thought. Based on the primitive attributes of human experience, they structure chains of abstraction. Time flows like water. One’s mood can be high or low. Life is a journey. A particle of light is like a wave. Mathematics consists of metaphors bleached clean into consistent abstract patterns.
The process of science is about carefully extending
metaphors from one domain to another and conducting tests to verify the
validity and extent of the analogy. Like the scaffold on a building, a set of
metaphors both extend the range of tools and obscure perception.
Perhaps metaphoric blindness caused medicine to classify gender variance as a disease. While that idea is clearly dated, when it emerged it was forward-progress from immoral perversion. A hospital seemed better than a jail.
The rainbow metaphor illustrates both the variety of diversity and the limitations we face in perceiving it. It will help us move from the hospital into the light.
Science in Suspension
Why do medicine and psychology continue to view transgender people as having a mental disorder? I think it has more to do with history than malice.
A wealthy FtM endowed the Ericksen Foundation which gave many grants for research into transsexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. This spawned an academic interest in gender issues, with several universities opening gender clinics. The staff of these clinics conducted research on their subjects and published their results. The party ended in the 1980s, when one study claimed that SRS was of dubious value. Many of the clinics closed and research and publication slowed to a trickle. Insurance funding was also withdrawn, so gender treatment became a “cash in advance” business with little incentive to do long range research or publish results. Transgender science went into hibernation.
The end of the gender clinic era froze scientific understanding in the mindset of the 1970s, which then regarded gender variance as a psychiatric condition treatable by medical intervention. The GLBT freedom movement charged ahead, leaving the caregivers behind.
Evolution’s Rainbow is a new beginning for transgender science. Joan thoroughly demolishes the obsolete concepts of GLBT diversity being sinful, being a disease, being unnatural, or as arising from poor up-bringing. She also catalogs a broad variety of examples from natural history and anthropology to build upon. This sets the stage for further progress; however Joan has relatively little to say about which lines of inquiry to pursue.
Joan is clearly uncomfortable with transgender sexuality. It is the only area in the book where I found errors. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of writings concerning the transgender experience are about sex. There is a vast network of unexplored caverns here, and Joan only peers into the entrance.
Transgender Social Categories
Joan’s examples of transgender categories in culture sort into three broad groups:
I. Cultures that revere transgender people. The Native American and Polynesian examples.
II. Those which tolerate but still look down on transgender people. The hijra, eunuchs, and the Western medical model.
III. Cultures that despise transgender people, relegating them to sex work, like the vestidas. This fate is, regrettably, the most common one.
Some of these cultures combine gay and transgender, others, like ours, split gay and transgender, as well as transvestite and transsexual. This is like color category splitting as explained by Paul Kay. (In San Francisco, we have many more shades, like “butch-bear leather men” and “femme tweaker twink”. It is why our Pride Parade is so long!).
Physical conversion rituals such as castration, penis amputation, and GRS are most often seen in the type II para-cultures.
At this point in history, we are at level II, reaching for level I. The ugly memories of level III, and the very real possibility of being cast back make sex a touchy subject. Perhaps this is why post-ops lead the autogynephilia war.
It will be interesting to see if GRS goes out of fashion as we attain level I.
Diversity and Bioethics
Diversity is not only necessary for adaptation; the evolutionary process has invented mechanisms for explicitly generating and preserving this property. The human brain is an evolution engine; a massively parallel generator and selector of ideas, as is culture. This brings us today: Evolved intelligence can now understand and manipulate the process by which it came into being.
Like all other ethical problems, the issues with bio-diversity boil down to hard choices.
Is it better to let a transgender child be born into a cruel
group III para-culture or is it more humane to abort
the pregnancy? Where are the boundaries between diversity and disease; or
diversity and crime? Is it right to destroy cultural diversity; say the
inferior role of women in
Joan recommends that the government regulate biotechnology and medicine. This has its costs. More regulation means delays and more suffering while we wait for treatments to pass through the pipeline. There is also the risk of the government falling under the control of conservatives who might outlaw transgender medicine entirely.
Our community is in a race against biotechnology. We must bring our culture up to Group I before biotechnology enables a Group IV – a culture entirely purged of transgender expression.
Being diversity-positive is better than being diversity-negative. It does not make the hard problems go away.
What is Next?
We must catalog the GLBT manifestations of humanity before they are lost.
What is the right model for evolutionary psychology? Human cognitive capacity must have been structured by evolution in some way.
Is gender identity dysphoria culture-bound? By what mechanisms does it arise?
Are the complexities of transgender sexuality artifacts of its repression, or is there more going on than that?
How should transgender health care be provided in the future? In the current climate, many transgenders need therapy for the same reasons torture survivors do.
Why does cooperation arise in some contexts, and competition in others? What are the principles governing bio-negotiation? Show me the math.
Conclusion
Evolutions Rainbow is a superb introduction to the biology of gender diversity and a call to action. Like its subject, it is a diverse collection of fascinating facts, presenting a compelling case for restructuring scientific attitudes and for a more tolerant and careful society. It is required reading for any transgender studies curriculum.
Transgender science is at last reawakening, so this book is destined for revision. Joan would be happy for that. It is heartening to see the grand expedition resume.