Drea hosts a conversation about the little understood world of the intersex, formerly known as the hermaphrodites. The ladies learned all kinds of things about the wonky genitalia of our intersex pals, animals who magically change their sex and animals and insects who get the best of both worlds.
Resources
https://spectrummagazine.org/news/2020/there-more-human-sexuality-xx-and-xy
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/turner-syndrome/
https://www.onekindplanet.org/animal-biology/can-animals-change-their-sex/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/split-sex-gynandromorph.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/intersex-spectrum/
Drea hosts a conversation about the little understood world of the intersex, formerly known as the hermaphrodites. The ladies learned all kinds of things about the wonky genitalia of our intersex pals, animals who magically change their sex and animals and insects who get the best of both worlds.
Resources
https://spectrummagazine.org/news/2020/there-more-human-sexuality-xx-and-xy
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/turner-syndrome/
https://www.onekindplanet.org/animal-biology/can-animals-change-their-sex/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/split-sex-gynandromorph.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/intersex-spectrum/
Hey ladies.
Meags:Hi there.
Drea:Hey Carrie. Did you go? You had, you said you went to Pride. The Pride Parade She did say that right.
Lisa:She did where she went.
Kathy:she's still there.
Carey:Sorry, I'm back. I couldn't figure out how to find my phone on this. I forget it. Yes, I went to Pride.
Lisa:We're so tech savvy, US Gen Xers.
Carey:Yeah. Yeah. I went, I, like, I, I flipped up to check a text that had come in and I was like, I can't, I don't, how do I get back? So,
Drea:You, you pulled a geriatric.
Carey:yeah, totally. And it was like a complete brain fart. Oh. So yeah, I went to Pride. It was, You know, it's been a long time since I've been, at Pride as a spectator. I've marched in it for when I worked for Franco, and it is so corporate. I, I was there for two hours and it, there was probably like another hour and a half of the parade when I left. And by the time I left, we had not seen any local. Thing at it was like, it was all corporations, you know, Toyota, I mean name, name, a corporation, and it was there. So it was kind of like, it was kind of a letdown in that respect, in that I, you know, from when I would watch Pride a million years ago, it was, you know, it was always like local groups and you know, like dykes on bikes and the drag queens and all the fun stuff, but this is just all corporate. So it was a little disappointing, but.
Meags:you can come and you can come up and go to Pride here with me. It's still very not corporate.
Carey:yeah. Yeah, probably so.
Meags:My, my kid will be marching for the second year, and once again, I guarantee that I will not be able to find them because they think they're gonna march with one group. But then, you know, they see friends in another group and they march with that group. And it's like, dude, like I appreciate that you're here, but like, I've already seen 73 people that I know from work and from like soccer leagues and how everything else, and I was really kind of hoping to see you in the parade. But, you know, parenting parenting in, in the, 2020s.
Lisa:He just has to send a text. It's not that hard these days be like, Hey mom, change groups. I'm with this group. Done good. You know where to look.
Drea:You're like, no, they don't do that.
Meags:it is, it is literally the, the biggest, most exciting day for a, a budding queer 15 year old. So it's like, you know, like, it's not really about mom. It's not really about
Lisa:Yeah.
Meags:so, it's like, all right, you do, you do, you kid, you do your, you do have your best possible time. I'll stay outta the way.
Carey:I think that's great. I can't even imagine, like I was excited to go to a gay Pride when I prayed when I was 22, so I can't even imagine it. 15. That's pretty cool. Good for you. Good mom.
Meags:thanks.
Drea:alright, good. This is a good start to pride month. I, I know that I asked you guys if you would be interested. And sharing an interesting L G B T Q fact this evening. I gotta keep all my letters straight. I think there's another one, but I'm sticking with that for right now. who wants to go first? And if you didn't find one, that's cool. It was a very short, like timeframe.
Kathy:I found a fact. I don't know if a categories is fun.
Drea:it doesn't have to be fun. It can be really sad.
Kathy:well, it's not sad. I didn't, I didn't find a, I didn't, I didn't go for a sad one. It's just very factual,
Drea:Okay.
Kathy:which is that Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexuality by repealing their sodomy laws in 1961.
Drea:Good for
Lisa:Wow. Who knew?
Carey:Wow.
Kathy:Yeah.
Drea:impressive.
Lisa:Illinois. Go go Midwest. We're not all bad.
Drea:All right. Who's next?
Lisa:I just Googled something and I'm looking up.
Drea:Okay.
Lisa:I I'm all about procrastinate. Well, it's been a crazy day. Anyway,
Carey:Well,
Lisa:have an interesting fact, if I'm allowed to say,
Drea:Go.
Lisa:right. The mother of pride, quote unquote, was a bisexual woman.
Drea:Okay, great.
Lisa:Brenda
Drea:Oh,
Lisa:a bisexual. No,
Kathy:It's like that's a really short fact.
Lisa:This is from the PRI Pride website, so it's true.
Drea:I believe you.
Lisa:she was a, a bisexual woman and lifelong militant activist who was known as the mother of Pride for her work in organizing the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. She's also accredited with relaying the foundation for the week-long celebrations of Pride leading up the Modern Day Pride Parade. She also co-founded the New York Bisexual Network in 1988. So there you go.
Drea:I wanted to say something very inappropriate, so I won't.
Meags:Shocking.
Lisa:Really?
Drea:All right, Megan.
Meags:I, you know, I am short on actual facts and just long on life experience on this one, so, well, perhaps we'll save that for a latter portion of the program.
Drea:All right. Okay. You can just sprinkle it in when you feel like it. Carrie, do you have any, or do you just, you wanna, you wanna do the
Carey:Any facts? yeah, I mean, I guess I, I can think of lots of facts. let's see. Which, what is an interesting one? Hmm. Well, I mean I talked about it a little bit before, but you know, Stonewall was really the first pride and it was a political protest. and and it eventually became what we know it's pride today, but I think we're losing a little, little sight of the political aspect of pride and that, you know, we need to. We still have a lot of work to do and, and rights and, and so we, we should focus on that maybe a little bit more than like Walmart,
Drea:Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I know. I don't wanna, I mean, I know we, we don't, we only have a certain amount of time and I'm flying out somewhere tomorrow, so I don't wanna, I don't wanna get off, off track, but I definitely wanna come back to this, the trans kids and all that shit. Maybe in another episode. All right, so
Kathy:one more? Do you want one more fact?
Drea:well, and I have one too, so Yes, please. My, I don't have as long of a thing. I didn't write a long thing
Kathy:Gilbert Baker first, he designed the Rainbow Pride flag in 1978 for the San Francisco Pride event, which at the time was called the Gay Freedom Celebration. So go Gilbert,
Carey:Oh, that's, that's a
Kathy:it by hand, just like Betsy Ross did with the American Flag.
Carey:yeah, that's a
Lisa:I had that fun fact as well, and every color of the rainbow flag means something.
Carey:I wish we could call it the Gay Liberation parade again.
Drea:I love that.
Carey:Yeah.
Drea:you get one more and then I get to go.
Lisa:At this point, I just came by one That was really funny, but there was, it's just like, okay. The first dyke March wasn't until 1993. And I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but I had never heard of a dyke march before and I understand the, Psychology of calling it that, like taking back, taking a slur and making it your own. so it said, well, the U the US Pride event can be traced back to 1970. The first dyke march didn't happen for 23 more years. And dyke marches, which usually happen on the eve of Pride parades, were first organized by the radical activist group, the Lesbian Avengers.
Kathy:Oh,
Meags:That's a good name.
Drea:All right. I'm getting
Carey:Yeah, break. Break marches have kind of fallen out of favor in in recent years because there are, unfortunately any number of lesbians who are referred to as. Turfs, trans exclusionary, radical feminists, and they essentially will not recognize transgender women. And so,
Kathy:Wow.
Drea:Wow. What
Carey:probably like the last 10 years, they, you really don't see them very much. so yeah, I mean, my, my sisters who are hating, on trans people need to, need to cut it out. It's not cool.
Lisa:I am.
Meags:let me tell
Drea:wait, wait, wait,
Meags:the young ones hate that stuff. Woo. Very, very, very, up against that particular acronym.
Drea:Okay. Lisa, you can go and then I'm starting.
Lisa:just one. I, this comedian, I, I can't remember the show I was watching on Prime last night. The chick that was on, Mrs. Maisel, not the lead, but the support actor. She, you.
Drea:Short lady, short
Lisa:Short lady. Yeah, she does her own comedy show. She's really funny. But she did the chan line in something like how, you know, trans women have gone through so much to become a woman. They deserve the same respect as women do. So just thought I, I thought of that when Carrie was saying what she saying there.
Drea:Yeah, I'm sorry Carrie. I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm just worried, I'm like worried about time cuz I know I, I have to get up early and, and I haven't
Carey:Yeah, no, I'm sorry. I go. Go for it. Teach us. Learn us.
Drea:I'm gonna learn you. The first thing I'm gonna learn you is my little bit of trivia. I was listening to, one of my favorite podcasts. I've told you guys about it before. Bewi the sheets, and there was a female poet that lived back at the Greek in the Greek times. In the Greek empire. And her name was Safa of Lesbos and she played the liar and legend has it that she invented the guitar pick so she could keep her fingers available for love making with women.
Carey:That's brilliant.
Kathy:Wow. Very
Carey:I've always wanted to go. They have a huge lesbian party every year on the Greek island of Zappos, and it sounds like a lot of f and fun.
Drea:Yeah, well Saffo of Lesbos, like its real name.
Lisa:I know it's like, has that really existed?
Meags:really does.
Lisa:It really, the first time I
Carey:I think it still
Lisa:of shocked.
Carey:I think there's still a part of like Greece or Creed or something like that, that's either called Sappho or Lesbos.
Drea:I love it.
Meags:is an island. It definitely still exists.
Carey:okay. Thank you. Yes.
Drea:All right. Excellent. Well, we've definitely gotten a good start. my topic today is, like sex and gender, and I'm gonna put the disclaimer out there. Now, I don't even believe I have to say this. I'm not a scientist. And if you listen, if you've listened to any of the episodes where I've tried to pronounce like a Latin-based word, you'll know that. You'll absolutely know that. And I'm just pointing this out cuz I might, I really might mingle some facts and then sometimes I make up my own facts, which are actually fiction. And you know, it's really just to improve the story. I try to let you know that it's not real. Usually. It's so absurd. You can figure it out. and then my fellow panelists, they set me straight all the time, so I just wanna put it out there. So no one tries to use this podcast as a reference for a school paper. That would be a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. So, okay, so let's, we're gonna get started. We're gonna go back to the beginning, beginning, beginning, beginning, beginning. How far back do you think we're gonna go?
Kathy:Steve.
Meags:Dinosaurs.
Drea:and Eve. You got it. So first we had Adam and Eve, right? They were the first fucking people. And God didn't have enough raw material. I mean, he was able to make Adam, they didn't have enough raw material to make, Eve, so he had to take one of Adam's ribs out and make her out of that. And and then that does actually kind of make me think like if that really did happen, like why don't men have an un uneven number of ribs? Right.
Lisa:When I was a kid, I thought, oh, than men have less whip ribs than women. I, that's not true, but that's what I thought when I first heard the story.
Kathy:Well, he was already made and then, you know what I mean? He was made and then he took the rib out. Right?
Meags:I am pretty sure the Bible and science, they just don't dovetail very well,
Kathy:They
Lisa:Well, new,
Drea:hurt. You're hurting my heart. You're hurting my heart.
Lisa:new.
Drea:Okay. So anyway, but honestly that was really the way it was for millennia. Like people like, like people really did think women were just an extension of men and that we didn't have a sex, like, we were not, like, we weren't officially a sex until the 19 hundreds when we were finally considered to actually be our own thing. we were still like, we were inci and we were excitable and we were incapable of taking care of ourselves, but we were our own sex. So,
Meags:Pro prone to hysteria.
Drea:Prone hysteria. That's right. So, so then fast forward just a little bit. In 1905 there were a couple of scientists that figured out that male insects have XY chromosomes and females have x X chromosomes to, you know, to determine sex. So, but they kind of stopped there. They kind of stopped their science there, which was unfortunate because it was actually a lot more complicated than that. So like once I, like once I started researching, oh, I did wanna say like, one of the things that I noticed, like when I started researching is I was like, how ch. So apparently we've got this gene, this s r y gene, and it like rolls itself over the x Y or the XX chromosomes and it like cracks them open and then, then like the testosterone oozes out on the x, y, you know, the XY chromosomes and they, it triggers like making a dude and then, You know, the, for the women, it's the cretes for the XX combo, you know, so you get your estrogen. So that's how it happens. That's what chromosomes are. And that's kind of the start. the only problem is that sometimes the chromosomes are wonky. And I'm actually gonna put a pin in it, and we're gonna come back to that in just a second. Any questions?
Kathy:Nope.
Drea:No questions. Okay. Kathy, there's something in here. I think you're gonna really like.
Kathy:Oh, okay.
Drea:Not yet.
Lisa:word.
Drea:No. I mean, it will, it is a hard word for me to pronounce, but, but I can do it. I don't think it's Latin. Anyway, that's not what it was. so okay, we're gonna start talking about like sex determina, the sex determination system in the animal kingdom, which is really wild. And so, like as I was reading about it, I started thinking about Jurassic Park and I always thought that Jeff, Jeff Goldblum's, I guess his line was like, Life wants to live. But then I looked it up and I was like, no, that's not it at all. It's life finds a way.
Kathy:I find a way
Drea:Yeah. I dunno what I was thinking. So anyway, I looked it up and I figured out life wants, how's, you know, it's,
Kathy:life does wanna find a way.
Drea:it does wanna find a way. Life finds a way is actually a much clearer message than what I had life wants to live. So I'm like, okay, we'll go with life, you know, we'll go with what he has to say. So we've got some animals and we've got some insects that they do like really weird sex things, really weird sex things. they, they can change their sex. The scientific name for when an animal can change its sex is se sequential. Her maoism, and this is different than being a, like a plain old hermaphrodite. There are a few different ways that a sex change can happen in nature. and when we've got a sequential hermaphroditism, which is when an animal changes from male to female or female to male, and like an example of this is the California sheep head and they're all born male. They all like hang out and they're busy being males. And then, or act, I lied. They're born female. Cause I, I knew that. I was like, this is weird. That's not what it was. How about supposed to happen? They were all born female. And they hang out. They're busy being females for about four, like between four and six years. And then like all of a sudden they get really, really big. And then like their ovaries, they just degenerate. They just go away and they start, they become boys and they start making sperm. It's like, that's so wild. So that Isn't that
Carey:It is wild.
Meags:That's definitely wild.
Carey:It is and confusing, I'm sure.
Drea:Definitely for me. I was like, weren't you a girl? Like I could swear you were a girl yesterday. So, yeah. So that is sequential. Her math tism. So then we have environmental sex determinism, which is probably some of heard of it. it is when the atmosphere affects an animal while it's incubating. So I have actually heard of it before. And that I thought like it was with turtles and I thought that maybe some turtles were affected this way. But actually I think it's all, all, and I think it's all turtles, alligators, and crocodiles are really highly affected by temperature. So if a turtle's eggs are developing at under 82 degrees Fahrenheit, they're gonna be boys. So Megan, you must have, you know, you must have had turtles.
Meags:We have
Drea:You must have been 82. She's got three boys. let's
Meags:Not exactly but close. Yeah,
Drea:Oh, I'm sorry.
Meags:that's, this is.
Drea:I know. Very on topic. All right, so 82 degrees Fahrenheit, you're gonna have a boy, if the temperature is above 89, you're gonna have a girl. And if the temperature fluctuate, she'll have boys and girls. So that is environmental sex determinism. I dunno. Have you guys heard of that?
Lisa:No.
Drea:Oh, all right. and then I was, I was one of the, I guess animals that came up. What wasn't an animal, it was an insect that came up when I was looking at the sequential hermaphroditism, was this Mormon friary. Butterfly and I was like, it would be nice to be able to talk about like some, something pretty cuz like fish just not very pretty. So, but I was looking at, I looked up for, looked at it and I couldn't find anything about them. And I was like, oh, this is sucks. So then I searched, oh, so I searched her maphrodite butterfly. Why? I can't even, I can't even imagine what my,
Kathy:Your algorithms must be all kinda industry right now.
Drea:Exactly. so yeah, so I looked them up and I found this marvelous phenomenon in, my science research and, have you guys ever heard of Guy Know Drone Morphs? I know I didn't.
Kathy:No.
Carey:No.
Drea:gonna, I'm gonna spell it out. I'm gonna spell it out for you. G y n a n d r o m o r F. No wait. R p h. Did you get it?
Lisa:I haven't heard of that before.
Drea:Oh, no, no. I meant for you to like type it in so you could Google it.
Kathy:Okay. Sorry.
Drea:I was, okay, I'll say it again. Okay. okay, so G Y n A n D r o M o r p H.
Kathy:All right.
Drea:Okay.
Kathy:Come on in.
Drea:All right. I'll go ahead and start talking about it cuz you guys can, you can, you can do your search. So anyway, these little, it is actually, insects and birds can do and actually infestations too, are, are, can basically be half male and half female. And I was just like, this is amazing. And so, like, you can see these, these butterflies that are like on one side look entirely different than the other
Kathy:50 50. 50.
Drea:Yeah. Isn't that wild? See, I told you you'd love it.
Lisa:Hmm.
Drea:so, okay, so they don't, we don't know how they're, how they, how they come about, but for birds, this is the theory I think, is that for birds, the most likely explanation is that females make, They'll make like an unusual double nucleus excel. And one of them will have the Z chromosome and then one will have the W chromosome. They have different chromosomes than us. and then e just for each is fertilized by the Z sperm. And then you end up having like this one. Chick that is half male and half female, and so it can half Yeah. Happens in butterflies, crustaceans, spiders, ticks. I don't know how you can tell a tick is like half and half, but I guess I can. and dragon flies.
Kathy:chicken's. A half. Half chicken.
Drea:Yes. The half and half chicken. It's
Lisa:Oh my gosh. That is nuts.
Drea:Yeah.
Carey:Is that a real thing?
Kathy:Yes.
Drea:I spelled it out twice.
Kathy:She spelled out twice. You gotta look at these pictures. It's a half and half cardinal.
Drea:So, anyway, I just thought that was so cool. I was like, I'm gonna add that in there, even though it wasn't really
Kathy:that they're split like right down the center,
Drea:there's I know,
Kathy:center axis.
Drea:I know, I know. And they're like, so some, but some of them are splotchy too. Like some of them
Kathy:Like this cardinal is half and half
Lisa:Ooh.
Drea:It is. It's half, half red, half. What's the other, call it beige white.
Lisa:Well, that doesn't make sense though, cause a female cardinal is gray.
Kathy:Well, it's kind of, I mean, maybe it's a bright picture. It's kind of gray. Grayish white.
Drea:yeah.
Meags:has reached that part of middle age where she knows what color birds are.
Lisa:I see cardinals around my house all the time.
Drea:That's not a cardinal though. That's not a cardinal. That was not a cardinal. Uhuh. It's too, too fluffy in the middle.
Meags:I also feel like this, this is how like they started thinking that their women were witches. It's like you see a bird like that in a tree and you don't understand anything about science clear, or you think something is up. Somebody
Kathy:in north. It's a northern cardinal. It's a, it's a half and half.
Carey:Oh, it's a Yankee Cardinal
Drea:It is actually in this
Carey:hard cardinal.
Drea:in, in, in the article they were talking the, an Eerie Pennsylvania. They had one of these and it was like a huge sensation.
Meags:It is pretty cool.
Drea:This is pretty cool. So I'm glad I did. I mean, I was sad not to find the hermaphrodite butterfly, but, you know, it's all right. I got this other thing be instead. Alright, so where am I? Okay. So we are moving on. So now basically, now you guys have seen the weird things that nature does and I left a lot out. I left a lot out. and so now, so, but we've seen how ways like that anatomical sexuality will express itself, in nature. And so I am going to bring our discussion back around to some of the weird shit we've got going on with us. And so we know we'll go to circle back. Boys are X, Y, and girls are x X chromosomes. We know how they crack open. and the problem is that sometimes that shit just doesn't work, right? when they're in utero, I. Sometimes people's chromosomes, they just get funky. And people with wonky genitalia, they have this disorder, it's called disorder of sex Development, and they call it D S D for short. And these folks are called intersex. it took, this actually took me a while, but I was like, I had to get into the research and I learned that like the intersex was actually, it was just another name for hermaphrodite. I was like, oh, that's like the new name for hermaphrodite. So, and they were also called, this sounds terrible, congenital Unix.
Kathy:Whoa.
Drea:Yeah. I would
Carey:that
Meags:lot of emotional baggage to put in one
Carey:terrible.
Kathy:That's a
Drea:it is terrible. Like if you put that in front of your marketing people, they'd be like, what? Get rid of that. Like, we can't, we can't name that.
Meags:Hard, no.
Drea:No. No Congenital, no Congenital U Unix. all right. But it's, so I found this description for. Maoism Hematite, also referred to as intersex, is a condition in which there is a discrepancy between the external and internal sexual and genital organs. It is grouped together with other conditions as a disorder, D s D that I was talking about. So as you can probably imagine, these people have been around for a while, so we've never really just been. Man, and you know, male and female, like we've always had intersex folks. I did a little bit of digging into history on Wikipedia and there was the first mention of it is her maho was a myth. Myth. I don't know where the name came from. a Mytho mythological character, an ancient Greece who was born with a physical body, which is a combination of that, of a man and a woman. And it possessed supernatural properties, did not go into the supernatural properties. I personally think that it could bounce really high up in the air. It's kinda my thought, but I don't know.
Meags:That seems super useful.
Drea:yeah, I don't know. Like what do you think that, like if you are hermaphrodite, what would be your, your, your superpower?
Meags:Well, I
Kathy:I mean,
Meags:you could have sex with anybody would be one superpower,
Kathy:yeah.
Drea:That's true. And that's a real one.
Meags:like that's kind of a big one.
Drea:Yeah. All right. I, I'm gonna take away the whole jumping up in the air. That was just off the top of my head. Not very good sex with lots of people, male and female. You could be a really good concubine
Meags:Correct.
Drea:of person. So anyway, All right. I got distracted. So they've got some supernatural properties now. hi. I don't think I'm gonna say this right, but I feel like it's Ted and Bill and Ted's event Adventure. They're, that makes me, you.
Meags:Excellent adventure.
Drea:excellent adventure where they did so crates and they kept calling Socrates. So crates, so I've got here, I've got like hypocrites. I'm gonna just say, anyway, that's the dude. And he was also Greek and he viewed sex as a spectrum. He actually viewed it as a spectrum between men and women with many shades. In the middle, including hermaphrodites, which were the perfect balance between male and female and Roman law, recognized men, women, and hermaphrodites. So this really like, to me, kind of begs the question of like, who the fuck thought they're just men and women? Like where did that come from?
Meags:Jesus E people. Sorry. That's
Carey:Yeah, I think we have to go with the Christians on this one.
Meags:Yeah, sorry.
Drea:man, those Christians so such a hassle. so anyway, they've been around for as long as we've been around and they make up roughly 1% of, of the population. So, basically like what happens is when the babies are developing in the womb, they're like little bitty errors that happen in their sexual differentiation. And so these little errors are what cause, cause their genitals to grow in all kinds of funny ways. I feel very sorry for people with this. so I have a few different diseases for you guys. There's this congenital, Adrenal hyperplasia. C A H h happens in one out of every 13,000 babies. If the female doesn't secrete an enzyme that allows them to produce something called androgen, she'll be born with an ambiguous external genitals. Usually they have an oversized clitoris and a fused labia. I didn't look up any pictures for this. You guys, you are welcome to. I don't know
Meags:Probably for the best.
Drea:Yeah, exactly.
Lisa:dunno.
Drea:and then the same thing happens, to boys at the same rate. So one in 13,000 boys are born with genitalia that look female. and way back in the day, like you, you just, you couldn't tell, like you couldn't tell that they had, you could just see their female gen Taylor, you couldn't see inside and recognize that their boys. so I will
Kathy:So they would look like a girl on the outside, but there'd be no uterus in ovaries and stuff. Right. Gotcha.
Drea:yeah, yeah. They were missing some, some of the junk on the inside.
Lisa:I don't know if you know this, but so as they got to like puberty, so they're grown up as a, a girl being dressed as a girl, recognized as a girl. But then when she goes through puberty, would they then get the big, like Adam's, apple, deep voice, hair on the face, all that stuff?
Drea:It kind of depends. You know, I mean, like, like I know that doesn't part of it. Sometimes the doctors don't know until much, much later in life. Like it doesn't pre present itself and, until later. So, I don't know. I don't know enough. I don't know enough, sorry. I did figure out that what androgens were, cause I was reading about'em all day. I was like, Hmm, wonder what that thing is? So androgens, they're just a group of sex hormones. So,
Lisa:Hmm.
Drea:but I like sit here like imagining a bunch of sex hormones hanging out with each other. I mean, like, like if we're gonna, I think the right this is the right word, if I'm gonna anthropomorphize them, is that the right
Kathy:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Drea:Okay, your, your, your androgens. So, anyway, they help start puberty, pub puberty and they play a role in reproductive health and body development. And they are actually really important for these folks. cuz the next, the next, disease I'm gonna talk about is called androgen insensitivity syndrome. And it's also one in 13,000 babies are born with it. It is very weird. A lot of these, like one in 13,000, I'm like, huh, I don't know what that is. So in this case, it appears that a section of the baby's x Y chromosome is just, is ignoring the androgen, is just like, fuck you to androgen. I'm not gonna pay any attention to you. And so the kid's born with. Testes, that are in their abdomen while the genitals are female and they grow breasts, but they don't menstruate. So,
Kathy:Hmm.
Drea:Yeah, it sucks. It really sucks. So, and then girl, I have just a couple more. So girls can get a disease called Turner Syndrome and they ha, basically what happens is they have two Xs. But for whatever reason, like one just kind of runs out on'em, just kind of slinks away and and then it just leaves this kid with some like really weird nns. so women with Turner's syndrome, they're short, their ovaries are just complete failures. And, and the girls won't go to, they won't go through puberty unless she gets hormone therapy. So it does, I know that they do hormone therapy. And so some of these girls are born with web, a webbed neck and puffy hands and feet. Just, it
Kathy:What's a web? What's a web neck?
Drea:I don't know.
Kathy:I've heard like, you know, like when you don't have like, you know, webbed hands and feet, right? Be like a duck, but your neck is, is this just like extra flesh? Maybe.
Lisa:in between
Meags:I would, I would think that their, their chin attach, you know, like their skin there that attaches to their neck. Would be my guess, but I don't really wanna Google to find out,
Kathy:I don't wanna Google it.
Lisa:I dunno if I wanna see that.
Drea:Yeah. I didn't spell it out for you guys.
Lisa:Poor
Carey:Well, and you know, I, I think it's kind of important to to point out also that, you know, just, it, it's not just like, like a physical anomaly a lot of times with gender, right? Because it's, it's, it's, it's a concept or, so you know, you can have all the parts being a certain gender. And be labeled male easily, or female. but, you know, just know that that's, that's not you. So that maybe whatever the imbalance is or, or whatever, but it's not all, yeah, it's not all, I guess, anatomical.
Drea:No, you're right. I didn't, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get into that. Like, but you're right. I, to me, what this really, what this really pointed out was. That like there's, the answers that we have, are, are inadequate, like, you know, and so like if this, if the intersects can happen, then whatever it is that we believe about males and females that are, you know, like where it all worked out, you know, where it all worked out naturally. Like that doesn't mean as much as we think it means.
Carey:Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Drea:you see what I'm saying?
Meags:Yep.
Carey:Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Drea:So, all right. okay, so we had the Turner Syndrome and then there's a kind of the male version of it, which is called Klein Filter. And I, you know, I don't know. I hope they give these boys hormone therapy because otherwise they're gonna end up being like super short. We're gonna have a small penis, small testes, and, And there's something else. Oh, and they could grow boobs. They could grow boobs, which should be horrible. I mean, you're already like up against a lot.
Meags:So, so all of these things have to be recessive genes, right? Because before we dealt with these things and we gave them hormone therapy and we did all these things, I have to think a lot of these people who were born with these disorders were not, did not live to be a ripe old age and reproduce, right? I mean,
Drea:Well,
Meags:like a lot of them can't.
Drea:yeah,
Kathy:Well, yeah, I, I
Carey:Yeah, I think that's probably true. Yeah.
Kathy:is probably true. you know, but I mean, possibly nothing necessarily life-threatening that they would just be, I would think severely underdeveloped one way or the
Meags:me that's like a, it's like a quality of life issue. I wonder whether, I'm curious whether or not they test for that when you get, you know, depending on the level of genetic testing you have done, whether those are things they look for. Because it seems like you, you would be able to look at two people and look at their genes and their chromosomes and tell whether or not they were in danger of producing a child with Turners syndrome or Kleinfeld or,
Drea:Well, some of it though is stuff that's happening in the uterus. Right. Like things
Meags:okay.
Drea:like not, that are out, I don't know. Like maybe they're not getting quite enough oxygen. That's, you know, like I'm not, I don't know if that's true, but you know what I'm saying? There are
Meags:I hear you.
Drea:Yeah. Fiscal things that are happening
Kathy:Environmental things in the womb that are happening that.
Meags:Right. Interesting.
Drea:Yeah. So, I'm gonna, oh, Megan, I heard you breathe. Did you wanna say something?
Meags:No, I'm just breathing, trying to stay alive. You know how that goes.
Drea:I just, I wanna get you guys to an, I wanna like look and hear you guys enough to answer questions. all right. So where was I? I wanted to talk about the one thing that I find most disturbing, and that was in the 1950s. they decided, doctors decided they needed to normalize the genitalia for the kids. And, I actually, I was like point, I thought that was like one of the upsides about being your sex is like, oh, you get to pick your, you get to pick your sex, for yourself. and so, and I have so much pressure to be a boy or a girl and, but the genitalia and normalizations. Surgeries. They started in the 1950s and the guy who started it, his name was Dr. John Money, and he believed that children are psychosexually neutral until they're, until they're two, but only until two. And then at that point afterwards, they need to have a stable, gender identity. So he really, he really pushed parents to make a decision about whether or not this baby is a boy or a girl. But before they could even. You know, barely talk, you know? And,
Lisa:I hate to interrupt, but you like a minute or two ago, like your sound switched and you got really echoy.
Drea:am I echoing now?
Lisa:Yeah. Am I? Yes. Anybody else hear that? Or is it just
Meags:Yes. Yeah.
Lisa:Because I kept like adjusting my headphones thinking it was me, but
Carey:Yeah, I hear it.
Drea:Oh, it's cause my fucking cat. Alright.
Kathy:No. Or sunshine.
Drea:No. I mean, I love them, but,
Lisa:Just trying to be close.
Drea:okay.
Meags:Yeah.
Lisa:Oh, you sound better.
Meags:Yeah. You're better now.
Drea:Oh, I sound better. Okay,
Kathy:Yes. Fixed
Lisa:Sound good? Sorry,
Drea:did, when did I, when did I start sounding shitty?
Kathy:couple minutes ago.
Lisa:yeah,
Meags:to go.
Drea:Well, I could go back cuz I don't like it when it gets in the middle and it sounds bad, but I don't know where that was.
Lisa:don't know
Kathy:Yeah.
Drea:All right, so we've got, I'll just start with the surgeries. so yeah, so like I, I'm trying to think of where I was.
Kathy:This man told the parents they had to pick.
Drea:yes, so I. Yeah. So they believe he, yeah, so the parents had to pick, and of course this is a terrible thing to do cuz kids don't understand, but when you're two, there's really no gender and we don't, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen when they hit puberty or anything. So, and I, and like last thing I have to say on this is, That I was watching this YouTube video and a woman was, she's a doctor and she's talking about medical professionals and like how they're kind of measuring their success with this. And you know, her example is that like, is the vaginal canal big enough? Rather than, is it pleasurable? Like, is it pleasurable to use or is it, like whatever it is that you, they, it, you know. Whatever the experience you would like the person to have. Not just its size of it, but when, oh, I did wanna say, and this is horrible, like some of the things that they did was they would, conduct a CLI hysterectomy and they would cut out a person's entire clitoris.
Lisa:Oh, it's horrible. Sounds like something out of that TV show slash book, handmaids Tale.
Meags:Okay. That sounds like East Africa. West
Drea:well, well, part of it is, and one, I don't know, I don't think I brought it up, but there's one where you, oh, I did. There's one where you have like an abnormally large clitoris. and so one of the things, they would, they would shave it down and they would also, put like, bury it under folds of skin. And then, the girl, the girl got excited.
Kathy:find.
Drea:And it was, well, not only it was painful cuz you know, it's like pressing up against skin that's not supposed to grow. So anyway, they have put an end to all of that sort of, the, I, most of the surgeries when they're little. But there's, I, I think there's still a lot of work to do in terms of, like, I, I think putting off my personal feeling about it is putting off surgeries and stuff until. You're really psychologically old enough to understand what you're doing, especially if it's like so permanent. It's not a bad idea. You know what I mean?
Lisa:Yeah.
Drea:So, so that is what I had for you guys tonight. Oh, I had a question, a thoughtful question for you guys. You wanna think? Not very hard.
Lisa:Yeah, it's kinda late. I don't know how much I wanna do
Drea:Well, just a little. It wasn't.
Kathy:Go for it. We
Lisa:all.
Kathy:it. We can
Drea:Well,
Meags:can make it happen.
Drea:know, it's like we've known each other a really long time and our all of, I think our understandings of, sex and gender identity and all that has changed over the years. So I was just wondering what is it that you feel like you know now that you didn't know 20 years ago or something that you feel more, more. strongly about now than you did back then.
Carey:Well, that's easy for me. I mean, I feel more. More comfortable in my own skin and, and being a lesbian, it takes a, it takes a long time, especially in this culture. So that's my answer.
Meags:I think for me, like 20 years ago, probably a little bit more than 20 years ago, I started working in an industry where I have had so many wonderful queer coworkers of every stripe imaginable. but like growing up I was not exposed to an awful lot of gay men in my, you know, small town in Maine. in fact, there was one as I recall, but, so like 20 years ago, My understanding, particularly of gay men was that, you know, it was like tv. It was like queer as folk. It was like, you know, everybody was just dating everybody all the time. and it was, you know, I now have so many younger coworkers who they just want, you know, they, they're male and they just would love to find another man to settle down so they can adopt kids and, you know, have this whole other life. And it's like, you know, nobody, nobody I knew 20 years ago wanted anything to do with any of that. so it's just a very, it's a very interesting, progression to see go on around you. And I think, wow, like I, not only did I not have I have any idea about it 20 years ago, it's so different now than it was 20 years ago.
Carey:Yeah, it really is. It really is. Hopefully it's, you know, we're, we're, we're pushing towards better. but yeah, I think people's minds are just much more open to it and hearts.
Drea:Yeah.
Meags:Yeah.
Drea:I think for me, like what I, what I like is just, it's so normal now. Like it's so you, you know, like it's normal to see. You know, women married, or men married or, you know, like, it just, I love it. I love that it's just not, unusual, if that makes sense. It's been, it's been, it's in our fabric of our society now.
Carey:Yeah. Yeah, it is.
Lisa:Yeah, when you think back to like just tv, you know, will and Grace came out and it was just like, oh my God, like one of the main characters is gay. This is such a, or two of the main characters are gay. This is just amazing, you know? but yeah, it's definitely. It's a lot, just more normal for to, well, I wouldn't say normal, that's a bad word. Acceptable by society, I guess, to like, you know, because you just see it everywhere you go. There's a gay couple and it's like, what's the big deal? And that's just, to me, that's the way life is now. And I think it's sad that for some people they don't like it, that that's so normal and they just fight harder to. Look down upon people before being a certain way. It seems like it's, in some ways it's worse now than maybe even the late nineties, cuz I think in the late nineties it was becoming more normal then, and people are becoming much more comfortable with it. And then I feel like now there's just like, there's a big swing the other direction. Yeah.
Carey:I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, well, not in a lot, in some ways it was easier 20 years ago. but I don't think that we had nearly the understanding of gender that we do today and acceptance of different expressions of that. we've all in that.
Lisa:Carrie, you're much more involved than I was, but I don't even remember gender even being part of the discussion 20 years ago. It was just more like gay people deserve to have
Kathy:It was about sexuality. It was more about sexuality.
Lisa:Yeah. Not about gender.
Carey:Yeah. Yeah. And people just have, have always had a really hard time separating those concepts of, you know, what, who you're attracted to is, is not. Determined of who you identify as. So I think people are getting wiser in that. And, and so it's opened up the conversation, but it's also opened up a lot of the hate too. so it's a delicate balance, but I really believe that in the, you know, in, in the next five to 10 years, we're gonna get back on track and people are gonna realize that all this hate is, is just not getting us anywhere.
Lisa:Yeah, I just hope it doesn't have to turn into something violent for people. Like, oh wait, maybe we went too far.
Drea:Hey ladies,
Carey:Yeah.
Drea:I love y'all. I would love to continue this conversation at our next, or one of our, I would love to continue it during Pride Month. So, cuz this is a totally, it's a totally different episode now and I definitely think it's worth No, but I'm just saying, I I think it's, I know I put it in the chat that I started it, so, but yeah, I mean, I love it and I definitely wanna talk about it, but I just, you know, it's, it's late. all gotta go to bed. So
Carey:Yo, we gotta go. You leaving? Are you going somewhere tomorrow
Drea:I am
Lisa:Where are you going tomorrow?
Drea:No, I'm not going back up to Buffalo. I'm going to Las Vegas
Lisa:Ooh, for work
Drea:for fun, but I will be
Carey:Ooh.
Drea:Yeah. Yeah.
Carey:a good time.
Drea:Thank you. I will. All right, ladies. It's been awesome. Thank you for listening. Me listening to me talk about science stuff.
Carey:All right.
Lisa:Bye
Meags:Love you. Good night.
Drea:you. Bye.
Lisa:Bye.