Woman: An Intimate Geography (7 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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thought: we have, with our female quilts, with the mosaicism of our chromosomes, a potential for considerable brain complexity. Admittedly, the claim requires a leap of faith and fancy, but let's try it anyway. To begin with, think of the X chromosome as the Smart Chromosome. I suggest this not out of simple chauvinism although I am a female chauvinist sow but because a preponderance of genes situated on the X chromosome seem to be involved in the blooming of the brain. Studies suggest that mutations in the X chromosome are a frequent cause of mental retardation, a more frequent cause than mutations in any of the other twenty-two chromosomes. The corollary of all that retardation is brilliant: if so many things can go wrong with our favorite chromosome to result in mental deficiency, that means it holds an awful lot of important targets genes necessary for the construction of intelligence. When one or more of those genes fail, brain development falters, and when all hum in harmony, genius is born.
Now take this notion of the Smart Chromosome a step further and imagine your brain as a chessboard built of mother squares and father squares. In the mother squares, the maternal X and all its brain genes are active; in the father squares, the pater X rules. You have pieces of your parents scattered throughout that hardworking three-pound organ you are of two minds about it. No wonder you're confused. No wonder nobody can figure you out. No wonder you're so damned clever.
A woman's mosaic brain complicates the work of our modern mind-readers, neurologists and psychiatrists. Women are known to have highly variable expression of some types of epilepsy, for example, possibly because of the patchwork nature of the chromosomes that control their brain cells. Genes that dictate the output of essential brain signaling chemicals those neurotransmitters that allow brain cells to talk to one another also sit on the X chromosome. The result is that a woman's mind is truly a syncopated pulse of mother and father voices, each speaking through whichever X chromosome, maternal or paternal, happens to be active in a given brain cell. Thus, the course of a woman's mental illness, be it schizophrenia or manic-depression, often is more unpredictable and labile than that of a man. Could brain mosaicism also explain why multiple personality disorder (assuming we give it the benefit of the doubt as a genuine psychiatric disorder) so often seems to strike women? Could sufferers indeed be afflicted with internal clashing

 

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commandos, mother-speak and father-speak, cacophonous enough to spin off other fragmentary characters? As Teresa Binstock, of the University of Colorado, pointed out to me, nobody can answer such questions yet, because the idea of brain mosaicism is so new "that most neurologists, neuroanatomists, and cognitive neuropsychologists have not yet thought about it:
Until they do, let us all, scientists and nonscientists alike, do some musing for ourselves. Let us toy with the idea that, say, the legendary female intuition has some physical justification that with our brain mosaicism, we have comparatively more gray-doh to pinch into shape, a greater diversity of chemical opinions, as it were, which operate subconsciously and which we can synthesize into an accurate insight. This is not a notion I plan to live or die by. I have no evidence to back it up. It's nothing more than a . . . hunch. And because in my family it was my father who thought of himself as the intuitive one, my mother who came across as the more rational, mathematically inclined member of the pair, I will give credit, or blame, for the idea to the mystical X that I secured from him.
To X out is to negate, to nullify. To sign one's name with an X is to confess to illiteracy. Yet we must take pride in our X chromosomes. They are large, as chromosomes go. They are thick necklaces of genes. They define femaleness, or rather they can define femaleness.
Jane Carden is a woman of medium-short height (five foot four), medium age (late thirties), and large style. She projects a dome of charisma all around her. I notice her from across the room: she glows. In part it's her great skin, the sort of skin that appears in Dove commercials but that no soap or cream can slather up for you. Later she tells me that she's never had a blemish in her life, that she is in fact incapable of breaking out. Instead of pores, it seems, she has freckles. She wears a white and brown cotton sweater that extends down to her hips, a rope-chain necklace, and big plastic-framed glasses that make her look at once owlish and girlish. Her hair is brown and very thick guaranteed thick for life, she says. Just as she is immune to acne, so she is protected against alopecia areata, or male-pattern baldness, a condition that, despite its name, regularly patterns itself across female scalps.
Another reason for Jane's radiance is her live-wire intelligence. She

 

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starts talking excitedly as soon as we meet. She's a gifted yakker, the sort who speaks in tumbling, racing sentences that remain articulate despite the speed with which she forces them out. She is a tax lawyer in California. Jane Carden isn't her real name; it's the pen name she uses when she writes about her story on the Internet or in newsletters. She made it up as an anagram of Jeanne d'Arc, a heroine of hers. We sit down for lunch, and she orders toast but then doesn't eat much of it. She's too busy talking. We talked at length that day, and many times subsequently. The only times she slowed down during our conversations were when she started to weep.
Jane of Arc was born in New York City to middle-class Jewish parents, her mother a medical secretary in a hospital, her father an accountant for the city housing authority. They already had two sons quite a bit older than Jane. They considered themselves liberal and open-minded, the sort who assumed, if a son brought a girlfriend home for a weekend, the two would sleep together. Jane was a smart girl, an excellent student who loved school from the first day of kindergarten, and was outgoing and popular. She was neither an athlete nor a tomboy, in the sense of wishing to be and acting as though she were a boy, although she noticed, as so many of us girls did, that boys had an arbitrarily better deal in the world. "I remember my first-grade teacher saying, 'The beauty of America is that any little boy could grow up to be president,'" Jane recalls. "That upset me, because
I
wanted to be president:" Later, in seventh grade, when another teacher said, "Girls have no business being lawyers there are too many strong words used in the courtroom," Jane decided, Well, that clinches it; I'm going to be a lawyer.
In most ways, Jane liked being a girl. She dressed up in her mother's clothes and high heels and reddened her mouth with lipstick whenever she got the chance. She joined the Campfire Girls. She was happily high-pitched and subject to the usual sense of exuberant entitlement and manifest destiny. She was, in short, normal except that she had a big scar running across her pubic region. "When I inquired about it as a child, I was told I had some sort of hernia operation," she says. Hernia operation: just the sort of thing that sounds forbidding and confusing enough to keep the kid from asking anything else.
But on turning eleven, just as she was about to enter the magic time

 

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when girls start dwelling on one topic menstruation the story was changed. "I was told that I had twisted ovaries at birth and that they were removed to prevent them from becoming cancerous," she says. "I was told at the same time that I'd have to commence hormone replacement therapy, take estrogen. I was told that I would never have menstrual cycles, that I would never have children." Jane distractedly smears jam over a cold piece of toast, takes a nibble, and puts the toast down again. "One of the problems with being told you had twisted ovaries is that it fixates you on cancer. You get so flipped out that you're dying of cancer that you can't even sort out anything else about what the hell is going on. I was absolutely convinced that my end was near."
Well, not quite convinced. Part of her also recognized the story for what it was: bad fiction. "It didn't make sense, it didn't add up," she says. "But I was too paralyzed with fear to be able to talk about it with my family." Her father told her he was proud of her for not crying about her condition. That was that. From that moment on, there would be no more discussion of Jane's "twisted ovaries" or what this clunky phrase really meant. Certainly there would be no discussion of Jane's feelings or fears. "Sometimes my mother made cryptic allusions to the subject, like suggesting that I should think about marrying an older man, because an older man either wouldn't want children or would have children by a prior marriage, so he'd find it acceptable.'' "It" being Jane's infertility. "Infertility. That's all that counted, my infertility. Once, during a fight I had with my brother, who's now a psychologist, he screamed at me that I'd grow up to be an old, bitter, childless woman."
She was getting a bit bitter, not about her life or her infertility but toward her family, for their attitude about her condition, their apparent indifference stained dimly with hostility. She knew something was seriously unusual about her case when she was taken as a young teenager to an endocrinologist. The doctor wouldn't explain anything more to her than her parents had, but he clearly found her condition so remarkable that he invited groups of medical residents to examine her while she lay in stirrups, and he never failed to invite outside observers to attend each time she came for a visit. If her twisted ovaries were long gone, what in hell were they looking at up there?
Still, she didn't turn sullen or introverted. She went off to college, spending one year at the all-female Wellesley and three years at the

 

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mostly female Vassar. It was the late 1970s, and she embraced feminism. She thrived, academically and socially. She graduated from Vassar at the top of her class. She made throngs of friends. The only thing she didn't do was lose her virginity. She felt too ashamed of everything below her umbilicus. She didn't want to think, in any intimate sense, about her missing organs, her amenorrhea, the vagina that had been such a source of fascination to so many medical students, and she didn't want a lover thinking about any of it either.
But she didn't stop dwelling intellectually on her disorder. After graduating from college, she went to law school in Florida. It was during her first year there, while poking around in the medical library, that she found the story of herself. She saw pictures the kind where the patients' bodies are shown but the faces are Xed out and she read descriptions, and she knew the truth immediately and absolutely. She had what was then called testicular feminization and is now more commonly known as androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS. This is a fairly rare condition, affecting about one in 20,000 births. But in its rarity it has something to teach all of us, about how to think about the genetics of sex, and about the correspondence between our chromosomes the readout from a fetal chromosome screen that will tell you, Ta da!, your baby is a girl or a boy and our brains and our bodies.
People with AIS do not exist to instruct a benighted world, and some resent being regarded as genetic anomalies that clarify genetic commonness, being the ones in the doctor's steel stirrups, being the ones whose faces are blotted out in textbooks but whose bodies are naked and available for public scrutiny. Nevertheless, we all need help in learning the obvious, which Jane Carden embodies and which we'll discuss here and in the next chapter: that women are made, not born; that women are born, not made; and that both statements are true in their profound and limited fashion.
If Jane's mother had had amniocentesis while pregnant with Jane, and if she wanted to know the sex of the baby, she would have been told, It's a boy another son in a son-heavy family. And then, when the baby was born, the mother would have been told, Disregard the previous announcement, it's a girl. Jane has the external genitals of a girl: outer labia, clitoris, and vagina. She has no inner labia, though, and her

 

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vagina is short, extending to only about a third the length of a normal vagina. It ends abruptly in a kind of membrane, rather than leading to a cervix that serves as the gatehouse to the womb. She has no uterus or fallopian tubes. She used to have testes in her abdominal cavity, but they herniated noticeably downward into her pelvis and so were removed ten days after her birth. The excised testes were her "twisted ovaries."
Here is what happened to Jane. She has a Y chromosome, in which are embedded a few dozen genes, most of them of as yet undeciphered function. But one gene on the forked-tongue chromosome is quite renowned for initiating the male narrative. It is called SRY, for sex-determining region on the Y chromosome. It used to be called TDF, for testes-determining factor, but genes, like syndromes, often go through periodic, inexplicable rehabilitations in which they get new names. In any event, SRY does something rather dramatic when it switches on during the eighth week or so of pregnancy: it starts building testes in a male fetus's abdominal cavity. Much later in fetal life, those magical little sacs of maleness drop down to the outside of the body, into the scrotum, and later still they paradoxically become pendulous symbols for bravery and strength He's got balls! despite their reputation as the most vulnerable region on a man's body.
In the fetus, the testes bud quickly and begin excreting androgens, hormones such as testosterone. Androgens in turn sculpt the primordial genital buds into a penis and scrotum. But it's not enough to make a male; at the same time, the fetus's female program must be stifled. To that end, the testes also secrete a hormone called müllerian inhibiting factor, which makes fetal structures that might otherwise develop into a uterus and fallopian tubes wither away.
In Jane's case, much of this action unfolded according to standard operating procedure. Her Y chromosome performed as expected, and SRY switched on. She grew little internal testes. The testes worked. They secreted androgens. They secreted müllerian inhibiting factor. The inhibiting factor prompted the dissolution of Jane's primordial womb and tubes. But then something happened, or rather didn't happen. As it turns out, the Y needs the X to complete the creation of Adamically correct genitals. The quintessential female chromosome holds on its grand expanse a surprisingly large piece in the puzzle of man-making. Of its 5,000 genes, one is the gene that allows the body to respond to

 

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