[Vision2020] Book Review from New Scientist

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Review: Sex in shades of grey 
  a.. 05 July 2009 by Deborah Blum 
  b.. Magazine issue 2715. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
  c.. For similar stories, visit the Books and Art and Love and Sex Topic Guides 
 
Sex isn't black or white (Image: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features)

  a.. Book information
  b.. Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the myth of two sexes by Gerald N. Callahan
  c.. Published by: Chicago Review Press
  d.. Price: $24.95
"I AM satisfied with a wild free Nature," the psychologist-philosopher William James once wrote to a quarrelsome colleague. "You seem to me to cherish and pursue an Italian Garden, where all things are kept in separate compartments, and one must follow straight-ruled walks."

I've always admired the way James challenged what he perceived as scientific dogma. In this case, he raised a conundrum we still wrestle with today. Science, with its love of classification, seeks to impose a strict order on the world around us. Yet life on Earth is (forgive the pun) by nature tangled, messy and, in James's words, "everywhere gothic".

This Jamesian perspective pervades Gerald Callahan's smart and compassionate book. Callahan's argument arises from the fact that human sexuality spans a slippery biological spectrum. The stereotypical view of two sexes - me Tarzan, you Jane - is not only cartoonish, it limits our understanding and appreciation of our own biology.

The stereotypical view of two sexes - me Tarzan, you Jane - limits understanding of our own biology 
"We still see a gap where none exists," Callahan writes, "a mirage that shimmers over the hot land of sex." He argues instead that there is a range of sexual characteristics that stretches from the testosterone-inflated Tarzan to the womanly "perfection" of a stereotypical Jane and all the variations that lie in between. "In truth, we are all intersex," he concludes.

The standard model of human development is built on 46 chromosomes, including two that determine sex: XX for female, XY for male. But, as Callahan points out, not everyone ends up 46XX or 46XY.

Variations in sperm or egg, in the mixing of cells from mother and father and in the cell division that follows can all stir the genetic soup into alternative outcomes. The possibilities, Callahan writes, "are as grand and as varietal as the fragrances of flowers: 45X; 47XXX; 48XXXX; 49XXXXX; 47XYY; 47XXY; 48XXXY; 49XXXXY; and 49XXXYY." These variations are familiar to geneticists - the first on the list, for instance, is known as Turner's syndrome - but the general public is still stuck in a black and white, XX/XY world.

Much of Callahan's book is spent exploring our understanding of intersexuality, from the physicians of ancient Greece to today's neuroendocrinologists. He also weaves in the stories of people who live in the stretch between the classic male and female endpoints. "Truthfully, I think the most important thing I would like people to understand about me is that I am a person," Kailana, who is hermaphrodite, tells him in a diatribe of anger, grief and courage.

Callahan, an associate professor of immunology and the public understanding of science at Colorado State University, is an accomplished and versatile writer. His work has appeared in everything from Nature to the Southern Poetry Review. As a result, the book has an appealingly literary flair, even in the descriptions of complicated biology. Sometimes it verges on purple prose, as when he describes Los Angeles as a place of "limp palm trees curdling in the oily light", but for the most part the language is nicely polished.

Do I think the result is smooth enough to change the minds of those who prefer the standard model of sexuality? Not really. Such attitudes are grounded in habit and faith more than scientific logic. I hope, however, that it adds to the forces moving us toward a more generous perspective. We are all better off for appreciating, as James wrote long ago, that real life never does follow that straight-ruled path.

Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Sex on the Brain: The biological differences between men and women (Penguin, 1998)
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