Of genes and gender

By Steven Hussey

If socially defined gender roles are a natural product of our biology, why are they so difficult to live up to? How much rebuking of “effeminate males” or scolding of breadwinning mothers by conservative culture does it take to reveal the weakness of the link between sex and behaviour? Biology is not destiny. Entrenching gender conformity according to one’s biological inheritance is as meaningless as condemning vegetarianism based on a conspicuously omnivorous dentition.

There are dozens of biological structures from a bygone evolutionary era that our species carry around today. From our deteriorating appendix and wisdom teeth (often best removed than retained), to our vestigial tails, certain features of our biology are clearly not required for our survival, yet genetic inheritance dictates that they persist for some time. But such evolutionary “baggage” can be as frustrating as being caught in a lift with someone passing wind, and not being able to escape from it immediately. We can transform our hair colour in minutes or surgically tweak the genetic contribution to our nose structure overnight, but what we cannot change in a short time is our DNA. The many body hair-producing genes we lug around today is a daily inconvenience for many, yet it would take thousands of generations to breed the hairless genetic makeup that some of us envy, and shaving isn’t doing much to eliminate those “hairy” genes.

Secondary sexual characteristics, such as the prominent hairiness and musculature of men, are evolutionarily ingrained in our sex. But in the long haul the causal relationship is actually in reverse: instead of our sex characteristics being the product of our biology, our biology is the evolutionary product of our behaviour, in that these characteristics of our hunter-gathering past were those that conferred greater success in mating. Biology is instead the destiny of our behaviour, and will conform to our lifestyles given enough time (and, in catch-22 fashion, influence our lifestyles once more). Indeed, in our modern urban environment where hunting for game or fighting off predators is confined to virtual reality, heterosexual women are picking out less “macho” men, and that could be man’s eventual evolutionary outcome.

We are the only species that has gained awareness of our evolution and, instead of unconsciously conforming to the evolutionary product of our ancestors’ behaviour in ancient environments like animals so instinctively do, we have the power to rebel against Darwinian authority. Where natural selection would have killed off the weak and vulnerable, we defy nature by caring for them and allowing them to pass on their genes. Where deep voices and testosterone-fuelled brute force may have allowed competing males to settle disputes, thus perpetuating the genetic inheritance of such traits far down the evolutionary line, we live in an era where these are no longer essential although they are certainly still with us. Similarly, whereas it was essential to our survival for men to hunt and women to raise children and harvest berries in our previous hunter-gathering life, the invention of agriculture and the development of complex societies has obliterated the need for us to conform to this trend — no matter how much we are inclined to do so from the genetic inheritance that was shaped by our ancestor’s way of life. Biology is nothing more than a response to one’s ever-changing environment and way of living, and by no means should our biology therefore dictate to us how to live. Conventionally defined gender expressions are nothing more than evolutionary relics from a past irrelevant to our future.

We are in a stage of our evolution where we have challenged the hard and fast gender roles of our past in a society that survives quite well without them. Therefore, instead of surrendering ourselves to the evolutionary baggage we carry like genetics slaves, it is our evolution that must, and will, conform to our choices and lifestyles. Just as a blonde has the ability to defy her “blonde genes” by dying her hair pitch black, we have every right to defy that one essential gene differentiating male from female. The penis and vagina, too, are nothing more than organs developed over evolutionary time to ease the transfer of sperm. Why should this historical “purpose” for sexual organs bind us to their use in heterosexual intercourse? What rule of nature dictates that if a tongue evolved for eating and talking, it shouldn’t be used for French kissing or oral sex? What cosmological “natural order” frowns upon European descendants seeking out a living under the harsh African sun, if their poorly adapted pale complexion had clearly evolved for the inhabitation of a colder, sun-scarce latitude? Nature does not judge. Only people do.

Our genes — the dictators of our biology — are merely hand-me-downs from a distant, primitive past. As with all dictators, we don’t have to obey them. And as with hand-me-downs, we don’t have to wear them.

Steven is a genetics/biotechnology postgraduate at the University of Pretoria. His lack of understanding of the human species has led him to believe that his closest relatives inhabit a region of the cosmos no closer than Alpha Centauri.