Pared Planethood, or, Men and Women are From Earth

The existence of vague boundaries is normal: most of us are neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. Sexual

physiology is unusually abrupt in its divisions. (Ian Hacking in Making Up People: 164)

RAW Story posted a news piece last month about an upcoming journal article called "Men and Women Are From Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender". It's a quantitative study and the statistics are, as so often is the case in psychological literature, rather too dense to wade through without my SPSS bible to hand. You can access a early-publication copy of Carothers and Reis' article here.

Using a variety of secondary data sets, the authors undertake an analysis of a host of normative aspects of gender recognition (what they quite amusingly call "symptoms"). 

... it will be important to think of these variables as continuous dimensions that people possess to some extent, and that may be related to sex, among whatever other predictors there may be. Of course, the term sex differences is still completely reasonable. In a dimensional model, differences between men and women reflect all the causal variables known to be associated with sex, including both nature and nurture. But at least with regard to the kinds of variables studied in this research, grouping into “male” and “female” categories indicates overlapping continuous distributions rather than natural kinds. (17, accessible here.)

I find myself particularly intrigued by the efforts of academics from different disciplines to enter in the gender debate. I'm so firmly ensconced in queer theory on these matters that it's quite easy to lose myself in the abstraction of Butler's philosophy. She argues that we are all in the midst of a matrix of cultural intelligibility, perceiving one another through an inescapable framework of normativity. It's nice to have some numbers that, whilst certainly not explicity backing up my beliefs, feed into the wider argument that gender is much more fruitfully thought of as a dynamic continuum of existences.

nb.  the title of this post comes from a hilarious quip tweeted by indefatigable humourist Megan Amram last month.

I hope the decision to downgrade Pluto was made by an organization called Pared Planethood
— Megan Amram (@meganamram) February 5, 2013

speculation and ancestral genetics

A BBC News article published today offers its readers an interesting counter-argument to the burgeoning array of private enterprises offering potential customers a genetic recounting of their ancestry.

"The DNA ancestry tests appeal to our interest in our family trees. However, our DNA is not the story of our family tree. It is a mosaic of genetic sequences that have been inherited via many different ancestors. With every generation you (nearly) double your number of ancestors because every individual has two parents – going back just 10 generations (200-300 years) you are likely to have around a thousand ancestors. We don’t have to look back very far in time before we each have more ancestors than we have sections of DNA, and this means we have ancestors from whom we have inherited no DNA." - from Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing

What we might understand as an infinite regression conundrum in ancestry testing is only one issue in this discussion. As Dana Fullwiley points out in a 2008 article for Genewatch, margins of error in genetic testing technologies can lead to the bizarre possibility of "artificial ancestry", wherein an erroneous ancestral claim can be made about an individual. This brings to light the obscure tension between what we consider to be the reality of our origins are epistemologically, the tools we adopt to determine it, and the inherently speculative nature of ancestry testing.

"Genetic ancestry testing presents a simplified view of the world where everyone belongs to a group with a label, such as ‘Viking’ or ‘Zulu’. But people’s genetics don’t reflect discrete groups. Even strong cultural boundaries, such as between the Germanic and Romance language groups in Europe, do not have very noticeable genetic differences. The more remote and less-populated parts of the UK, such as the Scottish Highlands, do have some genetic differences from the bulk of the population, but they are not big. There is no such thing as a ‘Scottish gene’. Instead groups show a story of gradual genetic change and mixing." - from Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing

We might aso think about the incongruence of claims made by groups of people, and the claims produced by the ancestral genetic testing that is undertaken on them. (check out Sharp and Foster's 2002 article where they argue that in genetic research dealing with "populations of which individual donors are members  means that all  members of those populations may be affected by research findings, including those who did not consent to or take part in the resource” [p. 847]). A challenge of an individual or their collective's world view raises a host of ethical issues.

I've also been thinking quite a lot recently about the renewal of classificatory boundaries of identity through genetic testing. The quote above invokes concepts akin to "genetic drift" and "admixture". I wonder how molecular science is reconstituting specifically social, cultural and/or religious groupings through this language. That's not to say that the science is inherently "wrong". I don't know that research in this area can be right or wrong when it's a matter as speculative as ancestry. It's simply a matter of recognising that who we choose to be is determined by so many different things, and an genetic ancestry tool is one such thing.

Amazing stuff.