WEBVTT 00:00:12.038 --> 00:00:13.601 Okay, so to start, 00:00:13.658 --> 00:00:18.320 I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 00:00:18.344 --> 00:00:21.613 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, 00:00:21.637 --> 00:00:23.919 each conceiving a baby, OK? 00:00:23.943 --> 00:00:26.197 So two couples each conceiving one baby. 00:00:26.221 --> 00:00:29.487 Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, 00:00:29.511 --> 00:00:32.366 because if you do, you're not going to listen to me, 00:00:32.391 --> 00:00:34.202 so just imagine that for a moment. 00:00:34.226 --> 00:00:38.400 And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, 00:00:38.424 --> 00:00:40.592 the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, 00:00:40.616 --> 00:00:42.647 meeting that X chromosome of the egg. 00:00:42.671 --> 00:00:45.843 And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, 00:00:45.867 --> 00:00:48.134 meeting the X chromosome of the egg. 00:00:48.158 --> 00:00:50.209 Both are viable; both take off. 00:00:50.747 --> 00:00:52.795 We'll come back to these people later. 00:00:52.819 --> 00:00:56.479 So I wear two hats in most of what I do. 00:00:56.895 --> 00:01:00.434 And I also sometimes wear metaphorical scarves, 00:01:00.482 --> 00:01:01.549 and great shoes, 00:01:01.577 --> 00:01:04.521 but in this case I want to tell you about the two hats I wear. 00:01:04.574 --> 00:01:07.773 As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. 00:01:07.797 --> 00:01:11.676 I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case 00:01:11.700 --> 00:01:14.286 is the way that people have dealt with anatomy... 00:01:14.910 --> 00:01:17.540 Meaning human bodies, animal bodies... 00:01:17.564 --> 00:01:20.276 How they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; 00:01:20.300 --> 00:01:22.276 how have they thought about bodies. 00:01:23.033 --> 00:01:26.989 The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, 00:01:27.013 --> 00:01:28.869 as a patient advocate... 00:01:28.893 --> 00:01:31.276 Or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate... 00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:33.537 For people who are patients of doctors. 00:01:33.561 --> 00:01:37.276 In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types 00:01:37.300 --> 00:01:39.215 that challenge social norms. 00:01:39.239 --> 00:01:41.396 So some of what I've worked on, for example, 00:01:41.420 --> 00:01:43.467 is people who are conjoined twins... 00:01:43.491 --> 00:01:44.994 Two people within one body. 00:01:45.540 --> 00:01:48.260 Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism... 00:01:48.284 --> 00:01:50.568 So people who are much shorter than typical. 00:01:50.592 --> 00:01:54.614 And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex... 00:01:54.638 --> 00:01:58.666 So people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. 00:01:58.690 --> 00:02:02.276 And as a general term, we can use the term "intersex" for this. 00:02:02.300 --> 00:02:04.838 Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. 00:02:04.862 --> 00:02:08.276 I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex 00:02:08.300 --> 00:02:10.633 that isn't standard for male or female. 00:02:10.657 --> 00:02:12.276 So in one instance, 00:02:12.300 --> 00:02:15.736 you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, 00:02:15.760 --> 00:02:18.276 and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome 00:02:18.300 --> 00:02:21.704 tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, 00:02:21.728 --> 00:02:22.912 to become testes. 00:02:22.936 --> 00:02:26.058 So in the fetal life, those testes are pumping out testosterone. 00:02:26.982 --> 00:02:32.165 But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, 00:02:32.189 --> 00:02:34.269 the body doesn't react to the testosterone. 00:02:34.293 --> 00:02:37.353 And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. 00:02:37.892 --> 00:02:40.754 So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. 00:02:40.778 --> 00:02:44.680 As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. 00:02:45.004 --> 00:02:47.282 When the child is born, she looks like a girl. 00:02:47.306 --> 00:02:50.404 She is a girl, she is raised as a girl. 00:02:50.428 --> 00:02:54.974 And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, 00:02:54.998 --> 00:02:56.577 but she's not getting her period, 00:02:56.601 --> 00:02:58.765 that somebody figures out something's up here. 00:02:58.789 --> 00:03:00.558 And they do some tests and figure out 00:03:00.582 --> 00:03:03.059 that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, 00:03:03.083 --> 00:03:05.529 she has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome. 00:03:05.553 --> 00:03:07.244 Now what's important to understand 00:03:07.268 --> 00:03:09.756 is you may think of this person as really being male, 00:03:09.780 --> 00:03:11.008 but they're really not. 00:03:11.032 --> 00:03:13.096 Females, like males, 00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:15.775 have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. 00:03:15.799 --> 00:03:17.356 They're in the back of our body. 00:03:17.380 --> 00:03:20.810 And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. 00:03:20.834 --> 00:03:23.935 Most females like me... I believe myself to be a typical female... 00:03:23.959 --> 00:03:26.118 I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up, 00:03:26.142 --> 00:03:27.827 but I think I'm probably typical... 00:03:27.851 --> 00:03:30.333 Most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. 00:03:30.357 --> 00:03:33.078 We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. 00:03:33.402 --> 00:03:35.491 The consequence is that somebody like me 00:03:35.515 --> 00:03:38.534 has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens 00:03:38.558 --> 00:03:41.940 than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. 00:03:41.964 --> 00:03:43.486 So sex is really complicated... 00:03:43.510 --> 00:03:45.154 It's not just that intersex people 00:03:45.178 --> 00:03:47.255 are in the middle of all the sex spectrum... 00:03:47.279 --> 00:03:49.376 In some ways, they can be all over the place. 00:03:49.400 --> 00:03:50.558 Another example: 00:03:50.582 --> 00:03:53.487 a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, 00:03:53.511 --> 00:03:55.374 who was born a boy, raised a boy, 00:03:55.398 --> 00:03:57.983 had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, 00:03:58.007 --> 00:03:59.679 had a life as a guy, 00:03:59.703 --> 00:04:02.800 and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. 00:04:03.329 --> 00:04:05.081 What he had was an extreme form 00:04:05.105 --> 00:04:07.786 of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. 00:04:07.810 --> 00:04:09.736 He had XX chromosomes, 00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:13.499 and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear 00:04:13.523 --> 00:04:17.141 that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. 00:04:17.165 --> 00:04:19.702 And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinized, 00:04:19.726 --> 00:04:23.239 his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. 00:04:23.263 --> 00:04:26.500 And he was born looking like a boy... Nobody suspected anything. 00:04:26.524 --> 00:04:29.235 And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 00:04:29.259 --> 00:04:32.850 that he began to have enough medical problems from menstruating internally, 00:04:32.874 --> 00:04:36.246 that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female, internally. 00:04:36.734 --> 00:04:40.268 OK, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. 00:04:40.592 --> 00:04:44.471 Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, 00:04:44.495 --> 00:04:48.234 which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. 00:04:48.258 --> 00:04:50.384 And we're not exactly sure why that happens. 00:04:50.408 --> 00:04:53.231 So sex can come in lots of different varieties. 00:04:54.055 --> 00:04:58.902 The reason that children with these kinds of bodies... 00:04:58.926 --> 00:05:01.693 Whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, 00:05:01.717 --> 00:05:03.043 or it's an intersex type... 00:05:03.067 --> 00:05:05.448 Are often "normalized" by surgeons 00:05:05.472 --> 00:05:09.512 is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. 00:05:09.536 --> 00:05:12.518 In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. 00:05:13.142 --> 00:05:16.184 The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries 00:05:16.208 --> 00:05:19.029 is because they threaten our social categories. 00:05:19.053 --> 00:05:21.822 Our system has been based typically on the idea 00:05:21.846 --> 00:05:25.176 that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:27.803 So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman 00:05:27.827 --> 00:05:29.219 is to have a female identity; 00:05:29.443 --> 00:05:33.676 what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, to have an African anatomy 00:05:33.700 --> 00:05:35.259 in terms of your history. 00:05:36.317 --> 00:05:40.096 And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. 00:05:40.120 --> 00:05:41.753 And when we're faced with a body 00:05:41.977 --> 00:05:44.911 that actually presents us something quite different, 00:05:44.935 --> 00:05:47.729 it startles us in terms of those categorizations. 00:05:47.753 --> 00:05:51.694 So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. 00:05:51.718 --> 00:05:55.359 And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. 00:05:55.383 --> 00:05:57.288 You can imagine how startling then it is 00:05:57.612 --> 00:06:01.442 when you have children who are born who are two people inside of one body. 00:06:02.871 --> 00:06:06.874 Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently 00:06:06.898 --> 00:06:09.769 was last year when South African runner, Caster Semenya, 00:06:09.793 --> 00:06:13.348 had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. 00:06:13.372 --> 00:06:16.196 I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, 00:06:16.220 --> 00:06:18.094 "Which is the test they're going to run 00:06:18.118 --> 00:06:21.576 that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?" 00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:24.893 And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test. 00:06:24.917 --> 00:06:28.768 In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough 00:06:28.792 --> 00:06:30.526 that we have to admit: 00:06:30.550 --> 00:06:34.239 Nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, 00:06:34.263 --> 00:06:37.172 or between male and intersex and female and intersex; 00:06:37.196 --> 00:06:39.271 we actually draw that line on nature. 00:06:40.092 --> 00:06:44.759 So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, 00:06:44.783 --> 00:06:47.719 the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories 00:06:47.743 --> 00:06:50.430 that we thought of as stable anatomical categories, 00:06:50.454 --> 00:06:54.584 that mapped very simply to stable identity categories 00:06:54.845 --> 00:06:56.980 are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. 00:06:57.004 --> 00:06:58.957 And it's not just in terms of sex. 00:06:58.981 --> 00:07:00.576 It's also in terms of race, 00:07:00.600 --> 00:07:03.016 which turns out to be vastly more complicated 00:07:03.040 --> 00:07:05.132 than our terminology has allowed. 00:07:05.156 --> 00:07:08.248 As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. 00:07:08.272 --> 00:07:10.101 We look, for example, about the fact 00:07:10.125 --> 00:07:14.437 that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. 00:07:14.461 --> 00:07:16.161 What are we to make of the fact 00:07:16.185 --> 00:07:19.652 that we differ from them only, really, by a few nucleotides? 00:07:19.676 --> 00:07:22.119 And as we get farther and farther with our science, 00:07:22.143 --> 00:07:24.332 we get more and more into a discomforted zone, 00:07:24.756 --> 00:07:28.041 where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had 00:07:28.065 --> 00:07:30.163 are probably overly simplistic. 00:07:31.163 --> 00:07:34.774 So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. 00:07:34.798 --> 00:07:37.003 One of the places we're seeing it, for example, 00:07:37.027 --> 00:07:39.041 in our culture, in the United States today, 00:07:39.065 --> 00:07:41.844 is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. 00:07:41.868 --> 00:07:43.476 We have difficult conversations 00:07:43.500 --> 00:07:46.639 about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, 00:07:46.663 --> 00:07:49.628 such that it has a different right than a fetal life. 00:07:49.652 --> 00:07:52.176 We have very difficult conversations nowadays... 00:07:52.200 --> 00:07:54.949 Probably not out in the open as much as within medicine... 00:07:54.973 --> 00:07:57.222 About the question of when somebody's dead. 00:07:57.246 --> 00:07:59.873 In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much 00:07:59.897 --> 00:08:01.999 with this question of when somebody was dead. 00:08:02.023 --> 00:08:04.415 At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, 00:08:04.439 --> 00:08:06.583 and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. 00:08:06.607 --> 00:08:08.466 If it stopped twitching, you bury them. 00:08:08.490 --> 00:08:09.926 But today, we have a situation 00:08:09.950 --> 00:08:12.261 where we want to take vital organs out of beings 00:08:12.285 --> 00:08:13.869 and give them to other beings. 00:08:13.893 --> 00:08:15.352 And as a consequence, 00:08:15.376 --> 00:08:17.980 we have to struggle with this really difficult question 00:08:18.004 --> 00:08:19.639 about who's dead, 00:08:19.663 --> 00:08:22.008 and this leads us to a really difficult situation 00:08:22.032 --> 00:08:25.008 where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before. 00:08:25.031 --> 00:08:28.442 Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories 00:08:28.467 --> 00:08:30.453 would make somebody like me really happy. 00:08:30.477 --> 00:08:33.529 I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, 00:08:33.553 --> 00:08:35.988 but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. 00:08:36.011 --> 00:08:37.702 Understanding that these categories 00:08:37.726 --> 00:08:40.818 are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. 00:08:40.842 --> 00:08:44.096 It makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. 00:08:44.720 --> 00:08:46.876 So in order to tell you about that tension, 00:08:46.900 --> 00:08:50.017 I have to first admit to you a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. 00:08:50.041 --> 00:08:52.650 I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, 00:08:52.674 --> 00:08:53.847 but they were great. 00:08:53.871 --> 00:08:58.985 I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did, 00:08:59.009 --> 00:09:03.479 that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, 00:09:03.503 --> 00:09:06.507 and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. 00:09:06.531 --> 00:09:09.869 It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers. 00:09:09.893 --> 00:09:12.167 The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, 00:09:12.191 --> 00:09:14.243 the original anatomical activists, 00:09:14.267 --> 00:09:15.872 and this is why. 00:09:15.896 --> 00:09:19.171 What they rejected was an anatomical concept 00:09:19.195 --> 00:09:20.731 and replaced it with another one 00:09:20.755 --> 00:09:24.084 that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. 00:09:24.408 --> 00:09:26.130 So as you all recall, 00:09:26.154 --> 00:09:29.558 what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, 00:09:29.582 --> 00:09:33.220 and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. 00:09:33.244 --> 00:09:36.883 The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, 00:09:36.907 --> 00:09:39.040 but they did have a concept of birthright. 00:09:39.064 --> 00:09:40.736 They had a concept of blue blood. 00:09:40.760 --> 00:09:43.943 They had the idea that the people who would be in political power 00:09:43.967 --> 00:09:47.144 should be in political power because of the blood being passed down 00:09:47.168 --> 00:09:50.842 from grandfather to father to son and so forth. 00:09:51.494 --> 00:09:53.862 The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, 00:09:53.886 --> 00:09:56.537 and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, 00:09:56.561 --> 00:10:00.394 and that concept was "all men are created equal." 00:10:00.418 --> 00:10:03.781 They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered 00:10:03.805 --> 00:10:08.219 was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, 00:10:08.243 --> 00:10:10.787 and that was a really radical thing to do. 00:10:11.260 --> 00:10:12.712 Now they were doing it in part 00:10:12.736 --> 00:10:15.028 because they were part of an Enlightenment system 00:10:15.052 --> 00:10:17.061 where two things were growing up together. 00:10:17.085 --> 00:10:19.353 And that was democracy growing up, 00:10:19.377 --> 00:10:22.442 but it was also science growing up at the same time. 00:10:22.466 --> 00:10:25.945 And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, 00:10:25.969 --> 00:10:28.255 a lot of them were very interested in science, 00:10:28.279 --> 00:10:31.307 and they were interested in the concept of a naturalistic world. 00:10:31.331 --> 00:10:33.817 They were moving away from supernatural explanations, 00:10:33.841 --> 00:10:37.078 and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, 00:10:37.102 --> 00:10:41.157 where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright. 00:10:41.181 --> 00:10:43.463 They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. 00:10:43.487 --> 00:10:46.542 And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, 00:10:46.566 --> 00:10:49.272 they talk about nature and nature's God. 00:10:49.296 --> 00:10:51.485 They don't talk about God and God's nature. 00:10:51.509 --> 00:10:55.412 They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. 00:10:55.436 --> 00:10:58.676 So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept 00:10:58.700 --> 00:11:01.410 that was about anatomical commonality. 00:11:01.934 --> 00:11:05.063 And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way 00:11:05.087 --> 00:11:07.000 the Civil Rights Movement of the future. 00:11:07.024 --> 00:11:10.565 They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great. 00:11:10.589 --> 00:11:12.232 So what happened years afterwards? 00:11:12.256 --> 00:11:15.698 What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, 00:11:15.722 --> 00:11:19.084 took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality 00:11:19.108 --> 00:11:21.315 being more important than anatomical difference 00:11:21.339 --> 00:11:23.873 and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries 00:11:23.897 --> 00:11:26.660 is not significant enough in terms of a difference 00:11:26.684 --> 00:11:28.973 to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, 00:11:28.997 --> 00:11:32.679 the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc." 00:11:32.703 --> 00:11:34.755 And women successfully argued that. 00:11:34.779 --> 00:11:37.176 Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, 00:11:37.200 --> 00:11:39.319 where we found people like Sojourner Truth 00:11:39.343 --> 00:11:41.612 talking about, "Ain't I a woman?" 00:11:41.636 --> 00:11:45.581 We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights Movement 00:11:45.605 --> 00:11:46.955 saying, "I am a man." 00:11:46.979 --> 00:11:51.376 Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy 00:11:51.400 --> 00:11:54.090 over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. 00:11:54.114 --> 00:11:57.151 We see the same thing with the disability rights movement. 00:11:57.492 --> 00:11:59.650 The problem is, of course, 00:11:59.674 --> 00:12:02.052 that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, 00:12:02.076 --> 00:12:05.501 we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. 00:12:05.525 --> 00:12:08.254 Mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, 00:12:08.278 --> 00:12:09.945 anatomically, in our culture. 00:12:09.969 --> 00:12:13.649 For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. 00:12:13.673 --> 00:12:16.258 I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. 00:12:16.282 --> 00:12:17.949 I don't want to say a five-year-old 00:12:17.973 --> 00:12:20.604 should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. 00:12:20.628 --> 00:12:22.595 So there are some anatomical divisions 00:12:22.619 --> 00:12:25.928 that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. 00:12:25.952 --> 00:12:28.845 But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are 00:12:28.869 --> 00:12:31.480 and why do we retain them, and do they have meaning. 00:12:31.504 --> 00:12:35.294 So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. 00:12:35.318 --> 00:12:37.176 We have two beings, both conceived 00:12:37.200 --> 00:12:40.691 in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. 00:12:40.715 --> 00:12:44.465 Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, 00:12:44.489 --> 00:12:46.991 so she's born on June 1, 1980. 00:12:47.015 --> 00:12:51.188 Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980. 00:12:51.786 --> 00:12:53.578 Simply by virtue of the fact 00:12:53.602 --> 00:12:56.060 that Mary was born prematurely three months, 00:12:56.084 --> 00:13:00.326 she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does... 00:13:00.350 --> 00:13:04.565 The right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. 00:13:04.589 --> 00:13:06.222 Henry has to wait for all of that, 00:13:06.246 --> 00:13:09.260 not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, 00:13:09.284 --> 00:13:11.549 except in terms of when he was born. 00:13:12.189 --> 00:13:15.349 We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. 00:13:15.373 --> 00:13:17.566 Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male... 00:13:17.590 --> 00:13:19.981 Although I haven't told you that he's the XY one... 00:13:20.005 --> 00:13:24.176 By virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, 00:13:24.200 --> 00:13:26.140 which Mary does not need to worry about. 00:13:26.164 --> 00:13:29.937 Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right 00:13:29.961 --> 00:13:31.561 that Henry has in all the states, 00:13:31.585 --> 00:13:33.067 namely, the right to marry. 00:13:33.091 --> 00:13:35.855 Henry can marry, in every state, a woman, 00:13:35.879 --> 00:13:38.887 but Mary can only marry today in a few states, a woman. 00:13:39.419 --> 00:13:42.312 So we have these anatomical categories that persist, 00:13:42.336 --> 00:13:46.085 that are in many ways problematic and questionable. 00:13:46.109 --> 00:13:47.830 And the question to me becomes: 00:13:47.854 --> 00:13:53.842 What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, 00:13:53.866 --> 00:13:56.436 that we reach the point where we have to admit 00:13:56.460 --> 00:13:59.337 that a democracy that's been based on anatomy 00:13:59.361 --> 00:14:00.793 might start falling apart? 00:14:02.080 --> 00:14:04.804 I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time, 00:14:04.828 --> 00:14:07.976 it feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. 00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:09.176 So where do we go? 00:14:10.029 --> 00:14:14.110 It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: 00:14:14.134 --> 00:14:17.572 "We have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere." 00:14:17.596 --> 00:14:20.282 But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position. 00:14:20.306 --> 00:14:25.176 So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man 00:14:25.200 --> 00:14:27.595 is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, 00:14:27.619 --> 00:14:30.689 and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome. 00:14:30.713 --> 00:14:33.435 In practice they don't test people for their chromosomes. 00:14:33.459 --> 00:14:34.942 But this is also very bizarre, 00:14:34.966 --> 00:14:37.286 because of the story I told you at the beginning 00:14:37.310 --> 00:14:39.120 about androgen insensitivity syndrome. 00:14:39.144 --> 00:14:42.676 If we look at one of the Founding Fathers of modern democracy, 00:14:42.700 --> 00:14:43.880 Dr. Martin Luther King, 00:14:43.904 --> 00:14:47.107 he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech. 00:14:47.131 --> 00:14:50.398 He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, 00:14:50.422 --> 00:14:52.293 but on the content of their character," 00:14:52.317 --> 00:14:53.839 moving beyond anatomy. 00:14:53.863 --> 00:14:56.842 And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." 00:14:56.866 --> 00:14:58.522 But in practice, how do you do it? 00:14:58.546 --> 00:15:01.496 How do you judge people based on the content of character? 00:15:02.033 --> 00:15:03.185 I also want to point out 00:15:03.209 --> 00:15:07.020 that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, 00:15:07.044 --> 00:15:10.347 because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know 00:15:10.371 --> 00:15:13.948 that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. 00:15:13.972 --> 00:15:17.567 I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know 00:15:17.591 --> 00:15:20.614 that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions 00:15:20.638 --> 00:15:23.360 about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know. 00:15:23.384 --> 00:15:27.562 So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? 00:15:27.586 --> 00:15:29.511 It turns out to be really difficult. 00:15:29.535 --> 00:15:31.016 And part of me also wonders, 00:15:31.040 --> 00:15:32.912 what if content of character 00:15:32.936 --> 00:15:36.176 turns out to be something that's scannable in the future... 00:15:36.921 --> 00:15:39.230 Able to be seen with an fMRI? 00:15:39.254 --> 00:15:40.865 Do we really want to go there? 00:15:41.300 --> 00:15:42.636 I'm not sure where we go. 00:15:42.660 --> 00:15:45.211 What I do know is that it seems to be really important 00:15:45.235 --> 00:15:48.178 to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead 00:15:48.202 --> 00:15:50.206 of thinking about this issue of democracy. 00:15:50.230 --> 00:15:52.941 We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, 00:15:52.965 --> 00:15:55.299 and I think we would do a good job in the future. 00:15:55.323 --> 00:15:57.926 We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, 00:15:57.950 --> 00:16:00.243 where a man who's sexually attracted to other men 00:16:00.267 --> 00:16:01.464 is liable to be murdered, 00:16:01.488 --> 00:16:03.659 unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, 00:16:03.683 --> 00:16:05.570 in which case he's allowed to live. 00:16:06.108 --> 00:16:07.899 We don't have that kind of situation. 00:16:07.923 --> 00:16:11.222 I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with... 00:16:11.246 --> 00:16:13.229 A surgeon I talked to a few years ago 00:16:13.253 --> 00:16:15.689 who had brought over a set of conjoined twins 00:16:15.713 --> 00:16:18.624 in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. 00:16:18.648 --> 00:16:22.098 But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he'll do this surgery... 00:16:22.122 --> 00:16:25.848 This was a very high-risk surgery... His answer was that, in this other nation, 00:16:25.872 --> 00:16:29.505 these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. 00:16:29.529 --> 00:16:32.681 My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum 00:16:32.705 --> 00:16:34.312 instead of a separation surgery?" 00:16:34.336 --> 00:16:36.785 The United States has offered tremendous possibility 00:16:36.809 --> 00:16:39.176 for allowing people to be the way they are, 00:16:39.200 --> 00:16:42.898 without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. 00:16:42.922 --> 00:16:45.100 So I think we have to be in the lead. 00:16:45.124 --> 00:16:47.581 Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you 00:16:47.605 --> 00:16:50.136 that I've been talking a lot about the Fathers. 00:16:50.160 --> 00:16:52.176 And I want to think about the possibilities 00:16:52.200 --> 00:16:55.105 of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, 00:16:55.129 --> 00:16:57.002 if we had more involved the mothers. 00:16:57.585 --> 00:17:00.623 And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, 00:17:00.647 --> 00:17:04.492 and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights 00:17:04.516 --> 00:17:06.765 that can come from different kinds of anatomies, 00:17:06.789 --> 00:17:09.411 particularly when we have people thinking in groups. 00:17:09.435 --> 00:17:11.942 For years, because I've been interested in intersex, 00:17:11.965 --> 00:17:14.443 I've also been interested in sex-difference research. 00:17:14.467 --> 00:17:16.819 And one of the things that I've been interested in 00:17:16.844 --> 00:17:19.445 is looking at the differences between males and females 00:17:19.470 --> 00:17:22.108 in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. 00:17:22.133 --> 00:17:24.205 And what we know from cross-cultural studies 00:17:24.230 --> 00:17:26.069 is that females, on average... 00:17:26.094 --> 00:17:28.375 Not everyone, but on average... 00:17:28.400 --> 00:17:33.291 Are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations 00:17:33.315 --> 00:17:34.893 and to taking care of people 00:17:34.917 --> 00:17:37.193 who are, basically, vulnerable within the group. 00:17:37.919 --> 00:17:40.126 And so if we think about that, 00:17:40.150 --> 00:17:42.151 we have an interesting situation in hands. 00:17:42.175 --> 00:17:44.141 Years ago, when I was in graduate school, 00:17:44.165 --> 00:17:47.362 one of my graduate advisors who knew I was interested in feminism... 00:17:47.386 --> 00:17:49.622 I considered myself a feminist, as I still do, 00:17:49.646 --> 00:17:51.195 asked a really strange question. 00:17:51.219 --> 00:17:54.128 He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism." 00:17:54.152 --> 00:17:57.323 And I thought, "Well, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. 00:17:57.347 --> 00:17:59.921 Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, 00:17:59.945 --> 00:18:02.007 so there's nothing feminine about feminism." 00:18:02.031 --> 00:18:04.056 But the more I thought about his question, 00:18:04.080 --> 00:18:07.298 the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. 00:18:07.322 --> 00:18:10.031 That is to say, there might be something, on average, 00:18:10.055 --> 00:18:12.927 different about female brains from male brains 00:18:12.951 --> 00:18:18.015 that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships, 00:18:18.039 --> 00:18:20.872 and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable. 00:18:20.896 --> 00:18:23.698 So whereas the Fathers were extremely attentive 00:18:23.723 --> 00:18:27.534 to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, 00:18:27.558 --> 00:18:31.403 it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, 00:18:31.427 --> 00:18:35.033 what we would have is more of a concept of not just how to protect, 00:18:35.057 --> 00:18:37.377 but how to care for each other. 00:18:37.401 --> 00:18:39.974 And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, 00:18:39.998 --> 00:18:42.205 when we take democracy beyond anatomy, 00:18:42.229 --> 00:18:45.764 is to think less about the individual body in terms of the identity, 00:18:45.788 --> 00:18:48.138 and think more about those relationships. 00:18:48.162 --> 00:18:51.627 So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, 00:18:51.651 --> 00:18:54.544 we're thinking about what we do for each other. 00:18:54.568 --> 00:18:55.719 Thank you. 00:18:55.743 --> 00:18:58.517 (Applause)