The birds and the bees (Part 6): From sex to politics
Daddy, did you know you were a girl before you were a boy?” Yeah, she said this to me the other day. I’m still not entirely sure where this question came from or how she came to know this information, but when I asked her why she made this statement, she said, “Because, you have nipples.” Ok, fair enough. My guess is that she learned it from the garden club studying male/female parts in plant biology and the hermaphroditic nature of earthworms. I remember one of the oddest thing my biology teacher said in class decades ago about “human allergies are really our sensitivity to the fertilization of plants!” I never would have put it in quite that way, but I’ve never forgotten that statement.
Just like before, my daughter gave me another opportunity to advance the discussion of the birds and the bees a little bit more. She had more pieces to the puzzle of life so I helped her fill in the bigger picture. I asked if she knew what determines a boy baby from a girl baby. She didn’t. Without getting into the genomics of sexuality, I recalled my understanding and said that ‘there are two kinds of sperm (X and Y) that have equal chances of reaching the egg during penetration. All fetuses will develop the same way until around 6 or 7 weeks and that’s when the Y sperm will have different instructions to help the new baby develop a penis and the X sperm will instruct the new baby develop a vagina. But some of the things that were developed prior to this like belly buttons, dimples and nipples will be common in both boys and girls.’ Once I told her this, she took a long moment to process it. Eventually she said, “That’s the only difference between boys and girls, the X and Y sperm?” ‘Pretty much. Boys grow more muscles, get hairier and usually stand taller than a girl, but pretty much everything stays the same, including brain power.’ “Then why do some people say that girls can’t do things like boys.” ‘That’s probably because people who say this don’t want girls to do it. It’s not the girls’ inability to do it, it just that some people feel boys should do certain things and girls should do other things.’ “That’s stupid,” she said. ‘You’re so smart!’
It never amazes me where our conversations wind up. Who would have imagined that a conversation about nipples would turn into a discussion about equality and pansexuality? It ended with my daughter learning that being a girl was a common starting point for all of us.
It never amazes me where our conversations wind up. Who would have imagined that a conversation about nipples would turn into a discussion about equality and pansexuality? But I took the opportunity to help my daughter differentiate between sex and gender with the latter being more difficult to define but it usually refers to roles and identifies—something that is more psychosocial than physical. Vast regions of our global village still equate the sex and gender as one of the same but increasingly it’s important to distinguish the two. And increasingly our society is expressing and exhibiting this spectrum ranging from masculine at one end to feminine at the other with many shades of gray in between. It’s not much of a stretch to convince my daughter of these possibilities without judgment since she already has friends with two moms, two dads, one dad, no moms or dads and other possibilities including persons in sexual transition. The concept of non-nuclear families and pansexuality make up families of just about every shape, size, color and identities.
Although this conversation starting off about the birds and the bees, it ended with my daughter learning that being a girl was a common starting point for all of us. Her embryonic understanding is that while we all started the same way, the final destination of a person’s identity isn’t shaped just by birth gender as ascribed but the attributes, attitudes and choices people make! I like where these birds and bees discussions are going!
