Article: Billions of Sexes

March 12, 2012. 11:06 pm • Section: Trans Talk
Posted by: Jillian Page

http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2012/03/12/article-billions-of-sexes/

There's a great academic article by Martine Rothblatt called Billions of Sexes on a site called Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technlogies in which Martine says there is "a continuum of sex types, ranging from very male to very female, with countless variations in between."

Smiles . . . speaking as one variation to a fairly wide audience of others (and I love you all), I'm particularly interested in what Martine has to say about chromosomes. We've talked here about chromosomes in the past — and basically, I've asked our detractors, "Hey, what do you know about my chromosomes? Or your own chromosomes, for that matter?"

Martine has this to say, among many other things: "First, it is not true that all legally defined women are XX and all legally defined men are XY. Hundreds of thousands of people are born

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Billions of Sexes (Part 1)

Martine Rothblatt
From Transgender to Transhuman
Posted: Mar 12, 2012

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rothblatt20120312

There are two sexes, male and female, right? Wrong! In fact, there is a continuum of sex types, ranging from very male to very female, with countless variations in between.

This startling new notion is just now beginning to emerge from feminist thinking, scientific research, and a grass-roots movement called "->-bleeped-<-." In the future, labeling people at birth as "male" or "female" will be considered just as unfair as South Africa's now-abolished practice of stamping "black" or "white" on people's ID cards.

Here in the European Community there are only two sexes - it makes everything simple.

There are people at Susan's who are outside the sex and/or gender binary. Some of them are also European.

Z

Billions of Sexes (Part 2)

Martine Rothblatt
Transgender To Transhuman
Posted: Mar 13, 2012

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/5440

Professor Sylvia Law, a noted legal scholar, argued that "a core feminist claim is that women and men should be treated as individuals, not as members of a sexually determined class." This is also a theme that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized in her lawsuits as a women's rights advocate: "Nurturing children in my ideal world would not be a woman's priority, it would be a human priority." This feminism rejects sex-based differences among people as wholly irrelevant to any socioeconomic purpose. As Simone de Beauvoir noted some four decades ago: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

New Feminist Thinking

It is but a short step from the new feminist thinking to our thesis. If sex-based differences are irrelevant, then what is the point of saying one is either male or female? While there is often a medical reality to sex-based differences, this does not justify a carryover of sex typing to the social, economic, and legal spheres of life. There are innumerable medical differences among people, such as diabetes or propensity to heart disease, but this does not justify the creation of a legal straightjacket of difference about such medical conditions.

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Thursday, 15 March 2012
HOW many sexes?
Zoe Brain

http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-many-sexes.html

A comment on Billions of Sexes (Part 1) by Martine Rothblatt, on the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies site

    I differ from the author only on emphasis, and degree. However, these differences have important effects.

    Let's start with the idea that there are male and female brains. They differ anatomically, and these differences correspond to different stereotyped behaviours, regardless of upbringing. This is most obvious in girls who have CAH, masculinised brains, and a male preference in play patterns, even though they have a normal female upbringing.