Imagine There’s No Genders
Recent scientific discoveries indicate a wide range of diverse lifestyles and ways of being in the past
I’m happy with who I am. But is my general satisfaction with life exclusively due to my gender?
Not at all.
Bruce shocked me, once again, this morning when he said, “Imagine there’s no gender.”
Ten years ago on our cross-country trip from Philadelphia to Southern California, we had our first real argument.
We were driving west on I-10 through the Mojave Desert and Bruce asked about the dark rocks littered everywhere.
“Those are lava bombs,” I said. “I think there were a lot of volcanos out here. When I worked at the museum …”
Arrrrrr! Bruce torqued off. He refused to accept there were any volcanos around and no, those rocks weren’t lava bombs. The cone-shaped hills weren’t the proverbial volcanic cinder cones.
Who was right?
Why, me — the woman — of course.
“Why is he so angry about something like this?” I couldn’t understand. I thought it was just a learning experience.
Our personalities are such that I don’t feel badly when I’m mistaken. Bruce is different and dislikes finding out he is mistaken.
I feel horrible when someone attacks or insults me. Bruce doesn’t let that type of thing bother him much.
Shortly after what I now call the “lava bomb battle,” things had calmed down and we were talking about pollution, war, conflict, and immigrants.
“Imagine there’s no borders,” he said.
I was so shocked by that statement. How could that be? No borders?
Of course I’d heard it a thousand times yet never really considered the full meaning. Everyone knows John Lennon’s song even though like many songs, perhaps they don’t consider the true meaning of the words.
After thinking for a while, I decided, “I am my self, a human.”
As a science fiction writer, it’s both heartening and disorienting to see the massive acceleration in research and learning that’s taking place. I used to easily be ahead of scientific discoveries. Now? It takes me weeks to research the potential impact of a single group of food additives, like artificial sweeteners.
Bruce is an enthusiast of cosmology and physics, and I’m not weak in that area either. Over the past 20 years, significant questions have emerged about the perfect validity of string theory and the Big Bang. There remain unanswered questions in quantum mechanics that probably won’t be answered using 20th century technology and methods: a persistent challenge in nearly every field of study.
When I was a kid, in addition to wanting to be a writer, I also wanted to be an archaeologist. Now, I recoil from the knowledge that this job could involve digging up other people’s graves that should be left undisturbed, but when I was a kid, that concern hadn’t occurred to me except for the Scooby Doo-inspired fear that I might be awakening a curse.
Man Was Not The Only Hunter
Notre Dame biologist Cara Obocock, and biological anthropologist Sarah Lacy have published a major article debunking the long-cherished theory of “Man The Hunter” in the November issue of Scientific American.
Obocock and Lacy traced the commonly-held opinion that men went out and hunted while women stayed behind in the cave and cared for children, cooked, and sewed to a 1968 collection of scientific papers titled Man the Hunter, published by anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore.
Theories about who did what that were published over 5 decades ago have infused our society in a pervasive erasure of anyone who wasn’t Lee or DeVore or who didn’t think and act just like them.
Obocock and Lacy’s article reminded me of the fact that for decades, any type of ancient cave or rock art was assumed to be made by men and boys. However, more recent and rigorous research showed that the handprints commonly found in many caves were made by women and teens of either gender.
According to Obocock and Lacy, “proponents of the Man the Hunter theory assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.”
On the face of it, this theory can be easily discarded, as women directly give birth to new species members and their chromosomes contribute 50% of genetic material. Even people like the Man The Hunter proponents haven’t yet managed to erase women from pregnancy and childbirth. Although retrograde politicians seek to reduce women to just a womb and stop education about physical processes like menarche, women still function and go about their lives.
Evolution has also been seen as a slow process, but new research by independent scientists like Guggenheim Fellow and conservation biologist Thor Hanson indicates that things can change fast. Hanson’s 2021 book Hurricane Lizards & Plastic Squid documents how in a single season, animals can significantly change their physical characteristics and behavior.
Lacy and Obocock document the ways in which sex hormones, both estrogen and testosterone, impact physical performance, documenting how few studies have been conducted on the impact of estrogen and womens’ athletic performance, and how many have focused on testosterone and men’s athletic performance. They conclude, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”
There will doubtless be extreme pushback by misogynists and men’s rights advocates against Lacy and Obocock’s observations that women have physical capabilities that influence health and athletic performance.
But these qualities have been depended upon throughout human history whether a woman or a man has possessed them: endurance, flexibility, muscle recovery, and stamina. Lacy and Obocock use the example of ultramarathon runner Sophie Power, who ran a 105-mile marathon while breastfeeding her 3-month-old baby at rest stations.
Another Piece of Wisdom
Bruce is a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 27 years. Both he and I grew up in severely abusive homes. Yet neither of us has repeated the behavior we suffered from as children and teens in our adult lives. Bruce often shares a piece of wisdom from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA): “alcoholics believe themselves to be unique and special, but the opposite is true.”
We are all just humans.
It seems to me that if people spend all their time trying to differentiate themselves from others, particularly if that differentiation is oriented toward being “special” or “better than,” they usually end up achieving the opposite.
Yesterday, Bruce and I were talking about hygeine habits and grooming and I commented, “I have shaved everywhere for my whole life — it does get tiring sometimes.”
“People in ancient history didn’t even used to take baths,” he said.
I disagreed, saying, “Well, I don’t know — the Romans built many baths and everyone went. The ancient Egyptians plucked their hair and used a lot of perfume.”
It seems as though we went through a more recent time in history where baths were frowned upon, from Louis XIV to the “Wild Wild West” when cowboys didn’t want to step into claw-footed bathtubs even though saloon girls made them.
Life is about our relationships with others. Humans do depend on each other. We may not always agree, but the idea that each of us is incredibly special, unique, and especially “better than” others doesn’t seem to confer either happiness, health, or evolutionary success. It’s more often a recipe for conflict, harm, and destruction.
This evolution of research and thought seems to be related to the easily disproven truisms that war and violence are inevitable human nature. Well heck, they might have been dirty in medieval times but they weren’t in ancient Rome — were they?
I am confident that Obocock and Lacy can handle the blowback coming their way. All for saying that women can do a few things and have some physical benefits.
Imagine there’s no genders!
Science can be either beneficial or detrimental to the world. It depends on for what purposes it is used. Gender in that case is not as much of a factor as you think.
The need to subjugate and debase women has always been nonsensical to me. My pet theory is that agriculture's surpluses allowed sociopaths to dominate the formerly egalitarian social structures humans had lived in for 99% of our history. Evolutionary quirks of our primate ancestry manifests as maladaptive behaviors that let the sociopaths not only stay in place, but be even more monstrous than they normally would have been.
It's humbling to think how much better our modern lives would be if a gene or two were a little different, or some long-lost accident of history had gone the other way, and women had never been sidelined as less-than.