The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [166]
With that new perspective, I have come to view gender less as a riddle that should be solved and more as a collage, which we each assemble in our own fashion. Nature provides the canvas, and on that canvas we assemble scraps of meaning from family, religion, science, friends, and the media—a kind of surrealist montage that, like children’s art, is a natural expression of being, so natural that we forget that it is art. Rather than insisting on the primacy of either nature or culture as the source of gender differences, perhaps we now need to recognize that both play a role and that neither explanation makes sense without the other. Nature may provide the architecture of gender, but culture does the decorating. If gender identity is, as seems increasingly certain, hardwired into the brain at birth, and if the way we choose to express our sense of ourselves as gendered beings is dependent on cultural norms, shouldn’t culture follow nature’s lead and celebrate variety? Difference can be, as Susan Stryker points out, “a real source of pleasure,” if only we can overcome our ancient suspicion of diversity. In an era in which Americans are fighting and dying purportedly to free other people, perhaps we might take this one small step toward freeing ourselves by finally outlawing discrimination based on gender expression. What is freedom, after all, if it is not the freedom to be one’s self?
TWO YEARS LATER …
AFTERWORD TO THE ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION
Oh, those perverse fruit flies!
Butch female fruit flies seducing femme ones with the time-honored drosophila courting rituals—tapping the chosen lady on the foreleg, singing to her, and vibrating one wing. Girlish male fruit flies gathered on a food plate forming boy on boy chains, like some kind of Fire Island conga line. What could possibly incite such behavior? Have the fruit flies launched their own Stonewall rebellion—casting off the chains of fruit fly heteronormativity, buzzing with newfound “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” pride?
Not exactly.
The gender-queer fruit flies are instead the result of a rather elegant scientific experiment. Ebru Demir and Barry J. Dickson of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences genetically manipulated male and female drosophila—splicing a single neuronal gene, fru—in order to determine whether or not a complex innate behavior like courting could be controlled by a single gene. The answer, in fruit flies at least, is yes.
Among wild-type fruit flies, males court only females and females don’t court at all. The female instead responds to male overtures with her own stereotyped courtship behavior, slowing down in flight and opening her vagina to permit penetration. These courtship rituals are known to be tied to the fru gene, which is spliced differently in males and females. Males with naturally occurring variants of fru have previously been observed to be somewhat unsuccessful in their courting— the fruit fly equivalent of the forty-year-old virgin. Building on this earlier research, Demir and Dickson hypothesized that fru might be a behavior “switch” gene, capable of regulating courtship behavior in the same way that other genes dictate reproductive anatomy. To test this idea, they spliced the gene in the female direction in anatomically male fruit flies, and in the male direction in anatomically female fruit flies.
The result? Sexual anarchy.
Males courted other males, females courted