THE THREAT TRUMP POSES TO AMERICAN MEN

I’m a woman. At least I thought I was, until I read about the multiple ways a person can have biological traits of both genders. Now, I ‘m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong. I still look like a woman and still love men. Intimacy with one is a joy. Nevertheless, recent scientific studies of sexual differentiation point to a vast plain where genes, chromosomes, hormones, cells, environments, and other products of evolution engage in a complicated game to create male and female bodies and brains. There’s nothing simple about this. I dare say most of us are a mix in one way or another.

So, it’s painfully and scientifically wrong for President-elect Trump and his followers to try forcing our culture back into a binary gender world of males and females without overlap by an intersexual population of gays, lesbians and trans people.

I knew about the complexity of sexual differentiation from my long years as a science writer and author of a book on the genetics of behavior. But only recently have I checked back in with the research and I am astonished by what I have found.

Evolution has created human beings that are only approximately male and female, connected by a chain of intersexuality. Up to 2 percent of the human population does not fall naturally in either a male or female category. Such individuals are mixed enough to be personally challenged in choosing a gender to belong to. That’s one piece of the puzzle. There are literally hundreds of ways to be gender-mixed. You could have male genes and female hormones. Or you could have female genes with male hormones. At the level of individual cells, the variation is astounding. Some cells may have a different sexual propensity than the body as a whole. And one part of the brain can differ sexually from another part.

In the past few decades, American society has finally come to terms with this reality — that men and women really do overlap in biology and capability. Women can serve in combat if they have the right physical qualities. They can fight fires; they can head up corporations; they can serve as President. And two people of the same gender can marry.

Yet, the signs of Trump’s ascendency point to an alarming future — that we may be forced back into a world that imposes binary distinctions on biological complexity.

Why? What makes this gender division attractive to them? A primary reason: It is decreed by the dictates of male-dominated culture, i.e. patriarchy. Anthropologists know this one well from the studies of hundreds of societies.

Patriarchies survive on sexual anxiety. They must impose rigid distinctions between male and female in order to maintain male dominance. In many cases, they do this very deliberately by cruelly mistreating young boys to create an aversion to all things feminine. For women, the consequences are grave, including subordination, loss of opportunity or education, confinement to the home and forced pregnancy, depending on the culture.

In ancient Greece, women were kept inside the house and could only venture out with a male escort. In ancient Rome, the situation for women was nominally better — they could own land and run a business — but not by much.

And patriarchy has other dangerous outcomes. Once male adolescents accept that their mothers and sisters belong to a different and lower category, they have the mental equipment to stuff racial and ethnic differences into the same boxes known as “other.” In this way, patriarchy becomes a cultural system that protects “us” against “them.” It is the engine of war.

But there are some anomalies in this ancient pattern. Surprisingly, 3,000 years ago, the ancient Hebrews — an important source of our western patriarchy — identified six different categories for gender. Six! In addition to the two binary ones, male and female, they recognized four intersexual categories.

They were:

Androgynos: A person who has both “male” and “female” sexual characteristics;

Tumtum: A person whose sexual characteristics are indeterminate or obscured;

Ay’lonit: A person who is identified as “female” at birth but develops “male” characteristics at puberty and is infertile.; and

Saris: A person who is identified as “male” at birth but develops “female” characteristics at puberty and/or is lacking a penis. A saris can be “naturally” a saris (saris hamah), or become one through human intervention (saris adam).

The categories, which appear in the ancient Jewish text, the Mishnah, are aligned with actual biological types and speak to an interesting awareness, if not tolerance, of intersexual differences long before classical Greece.

Yet, here we are again. In the 21st century we are debating whether women should serve in combat or use certain restrooms if they choose to change the gender they were assigned at birth.

Let me say, as a woman who read “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963 and who set out on a career as a journalist, determined to avoid life shackled to a stove, WE ARE NOT GOING BACK.

I don’t care how many Trump people think they can stuff us back into the household. There are too many of us who have spent the last half century gaining authority and freedom to allow our nation to retrieve the tattered ends of male dominance.

We want union with men. We love them. But partnership is the path, not subordination. So how do men learn partnership? It isn’t easy or fast to recognize the “opposite” gender in oneself. To become, as boys and men, sensitive, vulnerable, emotional, willing to care for children — traits like these involve personal development and training, not a culturally imposed prescription for masculinity. Being a man is not a formula, it’s a personal journey to individual identity.

Many men are well on their way, motivated by the opportunities women’s progress has opened to them. But too many, now getting attention in the Trump world, are stuck. If the ragged edges of “bro” culture, “toxic” masculinity (whatever name you want to use for patriarchal male dominance), do not recede, these men will find themselves ever more separated from contemporary women, ever more unable to attract a female partner.

That way leads to a version of what South Korea appears to offer — a large population of women who reject the men around them because they represent different cultural expectations. Let’s not go there.