How Black mayors in the South are leveraging both the power of office and the power of the street to achieve overdue changes
Adam Harris October 2020 Issue
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta on August 9, 2020 (Joshua Rashaad McFadden)
Steven L. Reed smooths his gray suit jacket before he grips the podium. The mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, Reed has seen the coronavirus tear through his city faster than anywhere else in the state. The hospitals have run out of beds; medical professionals are pleading for help. If Reed had had his way, he would have issued a stay-at-home order to stamp this out, but he’s limited by the state constitution, which grants the necessary authority only to the governor. So, on June 16, he is standing before eight city-council members with a simple plea: Require everyone to wear a mask.
“The longer we keep this going, the more we’re going to hurt ourselves,” Reed says. “Is it that inconvenient to tell people to wear masks?” The ordinance he’s requesting would carry a small fine if disobeyed. But half of his audience is skeptical. Wouldn’t a public-service announcement be just as good? one councilor asks. Reed responds that providing people with accurate public-health information is important but that “some regulation” is necessary to slow the spread of the virus.
One by one, medical professionals and Montgomery residents approach the microphone and testify about the need for masks. More than 90 percent of the people in the intensive-care unit at the city’s largest hospital are Black. For the most at-risk groups, one man says, mask wearing is not a symbolic political issue but a matter of life and death. He tugs at his mask and fiddles with his shirt. He’s lost six relatives to the virus. His brother is in the hospital dying. “The question on the table,” he says, “is: Do Black lives matter?”
Since the death of George Floyd, the whole country has been confronting that question. But for Reed and his peers—the wave of Black Democratic mayors who have swept into southern city halls in the decade since Steve Benjamin became the first Black mayor of Columbia, South Carolina .. https://www.naacp.org/latest/steve-benjamin-elected-first-african-american-mayor-of-columbia-sc/ , in 2010—the question has particular political urgency. Those mayors—Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta; Frank Scott Jr. in Little Rock, Arkansas; Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, Alabama; Vi Lyles in Charlotte, North Carolina; Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi; Reed in Montgomery; and others—represent cities with large, and in some cases predominantly, Black populations. The symbolic progress these politicians embody is expressed in a collection of firsts: first Black mayor of one city, first Black woman mayor of another, youngest mayor of a third. But as they lead their cities through a national reckoning with systemic racism—amid a pandemic that has exacerbated lethal inequities—symbolism alone won’t do. Navigating through overlapping crises—and advancing the rights and living standards of their constituents—requires the full application of symbolic power combined with the canny use of the policy levers they hold as elected officials. These two sources of power are different; leaning on one can sometimes hinder the use of the other, and getting the balance right is difficult.
When Reed, who is 46, broke two centuries of racial precedent to become Montgomery’s first Black mayor, in 2019, thousands of the city’s residents exhaled. For most of Montgomery’s 200-year history, Reed told me, the plight of the city’s Black people—who make up roughly 60 percent of the population there—has been overlooked. The same was true in any number of cities across the South and beyond. Left unaddressed, dissatisfaction only brews. As Reed stands before the council, he’s talking about masks—but, more fundamentally, what he’s saying is that the Black people in his city are being heard.
After more than an hour of testimony, the council votes. With one member absent, it splits down the middle. Four members—three Black, one white—support the measure. Four members—all white—vote against it. The majority of the white council members can’t be convinced that masks are necessary. One Black member proposes a watered-down measure—a recommendation instead of a requirement—reasoning that it’s better to do something instead of nothing. Another Black member wonders aloud why the council seems unwilling to take decisive action on something as simple as wearing masks.
As they bicker, Reed has already made up his mind. If the city council is not going to require masks, he’ll do it himself. And he’ll deal with whatever legal or political consequences will follow later.
The recent profusion of Black mayors in the South is striking when you consider that, not so long ago, there weren’t any at all. In 1969, when Howard N. Lee took over as the mayor of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he was the first Black person elected mayor of any predominantly white city in the South since Reconstruction.
“The real revolution taking place in the South must occur in the political arena,” Lee said in 1971. “The black elected official is a real symbol of black power.”
But winning elections only gets you so far. Simply putting Black faces in leadership positions doesn’t change the underlying systems. When Lee took office, the experience of cities with recently elected Black mayors in the Midwest had already begun to illustrate this. In 1967, Carl B. Stokes was elected the first Black mayor of Cleveland, where racism and segregation had kept Black communities poor and overpoliced. Businesses were closing. Black people were losing jobs. Resentment festered among Black residents, and despite Stokes’s election, it boiled over into a rebellion in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood .. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/complicated-history-1968-glenville-shootout-180969734/ . At first, Stokes took bold steps that previous mayors would not have, pulling all white police officers from Glenville, in hopes that Black officers from the Cleveland police department could negotiate a peace with the rioters. But when that failed, Stokes sent white officers back to Glenville, and resorted to the same tactics previous mayors had used to quash the uprising. He asked for the National Guard, and tanks rolled through the neighborhood. His political support cratered. While “his method was less repressive” than that of previous, white mayors, the political scientists William E. Nelson Jr. and Philip J. Meranto observed in their classic 1977 book, Electing Black Mayors, “he did not support the rebellion of his people; he opposed it by using his position as mayor to restore law and order in Cleveland’s black ghetto.” Surveying the broader generation of Black mayors from the late ’60s and ’70s, Nelson and Meranto came away jaded by the mayors’ inability to address structural inequities.
In a sense, that generation of leaders found themselves between two sources of power. They were, effectively, political outsiders, who faced all the handicaps of outsiders as they tried to work the political system from the inside. And yet, as newly elected officials, they were reluctant to aggressively use the bully pulpit to stoke the energy bubbling up from the streets. A study by Edmond J. Keller, a political scientist at UCLA, found that while policy preferences of the ’70s-era Black mayors differed from those of their white counterparts, the Black mayors were more “constrained” than white mayors in acting upon those preferences by governors, city councils, and reticent local coalitions. If broad support for effecting change was not already present, Black politicians would shy away from trying to catalyze it.
The new generation of mayors, by contrast, impatient with historical constraints, have been more willing to supplement the tools they can use from inside government with the energy from the political movements outside of it. In the summer of 2019, drawing heavily on the advocacy work of political activists, Steve Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, signed an ordinance to “ban the box,” disallowing questions about previous felony convictions on job applications, which had made it hard for many constituents to gain employment. The year before that in Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, bolstered by support from criminal-justice reformers and advocates for the poor, signed an ordinance ending the cash-bail requirement for misdemeanors .. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/atlanta-council-oks-changes-cash-bail-system-nod-the-needy/SW50dABJAtWgBwpB4vtgBN/ , a policy that had left low-level offenders languishing pointlessly in jail because they couldn’t afford to pay their way out.
When the coronavirus hit in March, Frank Scott Jr.—Little Rock’s first elected Black mayor—quickly implemented curfews and imposed limits on gatherings .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-little-rock-arkansas/609979/ , without any guidance from the state. He knew what the virus could do to his constituents, and especially the underserved ones—the people of color, the people living in poverty. “I’m a son of southwest Little Rock, and I still live there, so I’ve seen the disparities in our city,” Scott told me. But he also reached beyond the official tools of city hall and drew on his powers of sympathy and suasion: In June, when Little Rock residents took to the streets to protest police brutality, he helped keep the unrest from becoming too violent or destructive by marching with the protesters down Capitol Avenue. Scott’s success in mollifying the protesters stood in sharp contrast to, say, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who was booed out of a rally that he attempted to speak at, or New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was called “forcefully oblivious” (among many other things) after he said that the NYPD had acted “appropriately” in an incident when two squad cars barreled through a barrier and hit protesters.
In some of these southern cities, the Democratic mayors have found themselves clashing with their Republican governors. On July 10, as coronavirus cases surged across the South (and three days after she herself had tested positive for COVID-19), Bottoms told Atlanta residents that the city would be starting over, reinstating Phase 1 reopening guidelines—closing restaurant dining rooms and nonessential facilities, limiting travel, and requiring masks—by executive order. “Our communities aren’t waiting for us to figure it out; they are calling upon us to definitively tell them, in this moment, how we have figured it out,” Bottoms told me. “Things often go in dog years in government, but the patience for that just doesn’t exist anymore.”
Left: Mayor Steven Reed at Martin Luther King Jr.’s old house in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 30, 2020. The house was once bombed by segregationists in retaliation for the city’s bus boycott. Right: Mayor Randall Woodfin at the Civil Rights National Monument in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 26, 2020. Behind him, a statue of MLK stands in front of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. (Joshua Rashaad McFadden)
Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, has been somewhat surprised to find himself working from inside government at all, because he emerged from a political tradition that believes real change comes mainly from outside of it. “I was raised by a network of elders who were engaged in community activism,” Lumumba told me. His father, Chokwe Lumumba, a successful human-rights lawyer, an avowed Black nationalist, and an ardent proponent of reparations for Black Americans, was averse to electoral politics. He did not believe they could change the situation for Black people in America—the progress was too incremental. A growing body of political-science research supported this view. “This ability to effect mainly symbolic, rather than substantive, changes reflects the limits of black politics,” the late James Button, a political scientist at the University of Florida, wrote in 1982.
“When people feel locked out of a system, they rail against it,” the younger Lumumba told me. He remembers his father’s generation constructing community centers, hosting day camps for children, and offering martial-arts training. But over time, the Lumumbas came to realize that while the constraints on rebuilding the system from within were real, so were the limits on what could be done from outside electoral politics. “We grew to view politics as a means to better support communities,” Lumumba said.
So the family began working on campaigns, and then were drafted into the fight themselves. In 2013, Lumumba’s father ran to become the mayor of Jackson and won. He immediately began pushing citizens to vote for tax increases that would fund repairs to Jackson’s crumbling infrastructure—and was building momentum toward this goal when he died of a heart attack in 2014. His death prompted his son to run for the same office, and three years ago, at 34, Chokwe Antar Lumumba became the youngest mayor in the city’s history. He built on his father’s efforts, pushing through a property-tax increase that raised the money to repave the city’s decrepit roads. He’s not in city hall just to get reelected, he says. “The failure is when elected officials become intoxicated with the power” and lose sight of the priorities of the community, he told me.
Steven Reed’s father, unlike Lumumba’s, always worked from within the political system, as the chairman for several decades of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the first statewide political organization for Black people. But Steven Reed understands the disillusionment that can set in among lawmakers when they discover how at odds reform and reelection can be. He saw such disillusionment while working as a senior aide in the Alabama lieutenant governor’s office. The wrong issues get prioritized. “State lawmakers would say, ‘Well, I know this needs to be fixed, but if I do this, then that group is going to get mad,’ or ‘It’s never going to change, so why even try?,’ or ‘If I vote for this, I may not be reelected.’?” Reed has come to believe that if politicians do what is just, they need not be overly burdened by worries about the electoral repercussions. In this way, they’ll build trust with voters, which becomes political capital.
All of the southern Black mayors I’ve spoken with recognize the political limitations they face. Uprooting fundamentally racist structures or unjust political systems requires a comprehensive approach, and mayors have only limited influence over economic development and the health-care and criminal-justice systems. Not uncommonly, they have to contend with hostile governors while working to ensure that the coalitions that elected them—many of which extend beyond Black communities and white progressives to moderates more concerned with generating economic growth than accelerating social justice—remain supportive. Yet these mayors also recognize that achieving real justice calls for risk-taking, and this unusual moment might finally allow it. Sometimes that invites anger. (Steven Reed is used to this; as a kid, his family received death threats in response to the political activity of his father.) Sometimes it means nudging your friends out of their jobs, as Keisha Lance Bottoms did to Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields, who stepped down in June when evidence of brutality on the force emerged .. https://abcnews.go.com/US/atlanta-police-chief-erika-shields-resigns-wake-fatal/story?id=71239552 . Sometimes it means getting sued, as Bottoms has been in Atlanta—or as Randall Woodfin was, in Birmingham, when he had the city finish pulling down a Confederate statue that protesters had started to topple. “I’d rather have a civil suit than civil unrest in my city,” Woodfin told me, after the Alabama attorney general sued him.
By dint of their positions, these mayors have megaphones; by dint of growing up Black in the South, they have firsthand experience of the brutality of southern racism, which gives them credibility with their constituents. Simply listening to their communities, and broadcasting their concerns, has moral value and political benefit. But, as Lumumba puts it, “until we move from being the governed to the governors, the same problems will persist in new generations.”
The day after Montgomery’s city council split almost along racial lines over requiring face coverings, Steven Reed stood in front of the same doctors who had stressed their necessity. “Your words last night echoed across the country. They reminded us … of how vital it is for all of us in leadership to take action,” he said. He announced that he would be requiring masks by executive order. “I thought it was important not just from a policy standpoint but from a political standpoint to say that I’d heard the people of Montgomery’s call for action,” Reed told me. Three weeks later, the city council followed his lead and reversed its original decision in a 7–0 vote (with one absence and one abstention). A week after that, Kay Ivey, Alabama’s Republican governor, implemented a statewide mask order.
The events of 2020 have forced these mayors to focus their leadership on day-to-day crisis management. But they remain committed to addressing the underlying inequities that exacerbated the crises. Bottoms and Lumumba are members of a group of mayors exploring a universal basic income; Lumumba supports a nonprofit pilot program for one in Jackson. Lumumba and Woodfin were part of a small group of mayors that pressed Democratic presidential-primary candidates to provide actionable plans for closing the racial gaps in wealth and school equity.
The mayors’ politics differ, and their governing strategies and rhetorical styles vary, but their central messages are the same. “We’re creating the playbook on how to move from platitudes to policy and policy to true action,” Frank Scott told me. “We have to show the results.”
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----- "Identity politics isn’t hurting liberalism. It’s saving it. "Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left" [...] The idea that identity politics is at odds with liberalism has become conventional wisdom in parts of the American political and intellectual elite. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values.” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss argues that the “corrupt identity politics of the left” amounts to a dangerously intolerant worldview. And New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan claims the “woke left” seems “not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion.” This line of thinking is practically the founding credo of the school of internet thought known as the Intellectual Dark Web .. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/10/17338290/intellectual-dark-web-rogan-peterson-harris-times-weiss . P - It is also deeply, profoundly wrong. P - What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality. A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status." -----
The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.
Claire Ainsworth
18 February 2015
Illustration by Jonny Wan
As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.
A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male1. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.
LISTEN Claire Ainsworth discusses the spectrum between male and female. [sorry no separate link]
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2.
[INSERT: Seems before now the "or disorders" should be dropped. It has a negative suggestion to it which under the natural circumstances of the development doesn't feel at all fair.]
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body.Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.
“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”
The start of sex
That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not. Five weeks into development, a human embryo has the potential to form both male and female anatomy. Next to the developing kidneys, two bulges known as the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing: the epididymes, vas deferentia and seminal vesicles. At six weeks, the gonad switches on the developmental pathway to become an ovary or a testis. If a testis develops, it secretes testosterone, which supports the development of the male ducts. It also makes other hormones that force the presumptive uterus and Fallopian tubes to shrink away. If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither. The sex hormones also dictate the development of the external genitalia, and they come into play once more at puberty, triggering the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair.
Changes to any of these processes can have dramatic effects on an individual's sex. Gene mutations affecting gonad development can result in a person with XY chromosomes developing typically female characteristics, whereas alterations in hormone signalling can cause XX individuals to develop along male lines.
For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene3, 4, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the idea of femaleness being a passive default option had been toppled by the discovery of genes that actively promote ovarian development and suppress the testicular programme — such as one called WNT4. XY individuals with extra copies of this gene can develop atypical genitals and gonads, and a rudimentary uterus and Fallopian tubes5. In 2011, researchers showed6 that if another key ovarian gene, RSPO1, is not working normally, it causes XX people to develop an ovotestis — a gonad with areas of both ovarian and testicular development.
These discoveries have pointed to a complex process of sex determination, in which the identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules (such as WNT4) in the networks can tip the balance towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. “It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it's a balance,” says Eric Vilain, a clinician and the director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's more of a systems-biology view of the world of sex.”
Battle of the sexes
According to some scientists, that balance can shift long after development is over.Studies in mice suggest that the gonad teeters between being male and female throughout life, its identity requiring constant maintenance.In 2009, researchers reported7 deactivating an ovarian gene called Foxl2 in adult female mice; they found that the granulosa cells that support the development of eggs transformed into Sertoli cells, which support sperm development. Two years later, a separate team showed8 the opposite: that inactivating a gene called Dmrt1could turn adult testicular cells into ovarian ones. “That was the big shock, the fact that it was going on post-natally,” says Vincent Harley, a geneticist who studies gonad development at the MIMR-PHI Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne.
The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.
Conditions such as these meet the medical definition of DSDs, in which an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal or gonadal sex. But they are rare — affecting about 1 in 4,500 people9. Some researchers now say that the definition should be widened to include subtle variations of anatomy such as mild hypospadias, in which a man's urethral opening is on the underside of his penis rather than at the tip. The most inclusive definitions point to the figure of 1 in 100 people having some form of DSD, says Vilain (see 'The sex spectrum').
----------- The sex spectrum
A typical male has XY chromosomes, and a typical female has XX. But owing to genetic variation or chance events in development, some people do not fit neatly into either category. Some are classed as having differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs), in which their More - [only inside] -----------
But beyond this, there could be even more variation. Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. “Biologically, it's a spectrum,” says Vilain.
A DSD called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), for example, causes the body to produce excessive amounts of male sex hormones; XX individuals with this condition are born with ambiguous genitalia (an enlarged clitoris and fused labia that resemble a scrotum). It is usually caused by a severe deficiency in an enzyme called 21-hydroxylase. But women carrying mutations that result in a milder deficiency develop a 'non-classical' form of CAH, which affects about 1 in 1,000 individuals; they may have male-like facial and body hair, irregular periods or fertility problems — or they might have no obvious symptoms at all. Another gene, NR5A1, is currently fascinating researchers because variations in it cause a wide range of effects10, from underdeveloped gonads to mild hypospadias in men, and premature menopause in women.
Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb11.The man was 70, and had fathered four children.
Cellular sex
Studies of DSDs have shown that sex is no simple dichotomy. But things become even more complex when scientists zoom in to look at individual cells. The common assumption that every cell contains the same set of genes is untrue. Some people have mosaicism: they develop from a single fertilized egg but become a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups. This can happen when sex chromosomes are doled out unevenly between dividing cells during early embryonic development. For example, an embryo that starts off as XY can lose a Y chromosome from a subset of its cells. If most cells end up as XY, the result is a physically typical male, but if most cells are X, the result is a female with a condition called Turner's syndrome, which tends to result in restricted height and underdeveloped ovaries. This kind of mosaicism is rare, affecting about 1 in 15,000 people.
The effects of sex-chromosome mosaicism range from the prosaic to the extraordinary. A few cases have been documented in which a mosaic XXY embryo became a mix of two cell types — some with two X chromosomes and some with two Xs and a Y — and then split early in development12. This results in 'identical' twins of different sexes.
There is a second way in which a person can end up with cells of different chromosomal sexes. James's patient was a chimaera: a person who develops from a mixture of two fertilized eggs, usually owing to a merger between embryonic twins in the womb. This kind of chimaerism resulting in a DSD is extremely rare, representing about 1% of all DSD cases. [https://www.nature.com/subjects/chimaerism]
- “Surgeons discovered that the man had a womb. He was 70.” -
Another form of chimaerism, however, is now known to be widespread. Termed microchimaerism, it happens when stem cells from a fetus cross the placenta into the mother's body, and vice versa. It was first identified in the early 1970s — but the big surprise came more than two decades later, when researchers discovered how long these crossover cells survive, even though they are foreign tissue that the body should, in theory, reject. A study in 1996 recorded women with fetal cells in their blood as many as 27 years after giving birth13; another found that maternal cells remain in children up to adulthood14. This type of work has further blurred the sex divide, because it means that men often carry cells from their mothers, and women who have been pregnant with a male fetus can carry a smattering of its discarded cells.
Microchimaeric cells have been found in many tissues. In 2012, for example, immunologist Lee Nelson and her team at the University of Washington in Seattle found XY cells in post-mortem samples of women's brains15. The oldest woman carrying male DNA was 94 years old. Other studies have shown that these immigrant cells are not idle; they integrate into their new environment and acquire specialized functions, including (in mice at least) forming neurons in the brain16. But what is not known is how a peppering of male cells in a female, or vice versa, affects the health or characteristics of a tissue — for example, whether it makes the tissue more susceptible to diseases more common in the opposite sex. “I think that's a great question,” says Nelson, “and it is essentially entirely unaddressed.” In terms of human behaviour, the consensus is that a few male microchimaeric cells in the brain seem unlikely to have a major effect on a woman.
Scientists are now finding that XX and XY cells behave in different ways, and that this can be independent of the action of sex hormones. “To tell you the truth, it's actually kind of surprising how big an effect of sex chromosomes we've been able to see,” says Arnold. He and his colleagues have shown17 that the dose of X chromosomes in a mouse's body can affect its metabolism, and studies in a lab dish suggest18 that XX and XY cells behave differently on a molecular level, for example with different metabolic responses to stress. The next challenge, says Arnold, is to uncover the mechanisms. His team is studying the handful of X-chromosome genes now known to be more active in females than in males. “I actually think that there are more sex differences than we know of,” says Arnold.
Beyond the binary
Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up. True, more than half a century of activism from members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has softened social attitudes to sexual orientation and gender. Many societies are now comfortable with men and women crossing conventional societal boundaries in their choice of appearance, career and sexual partner. But when it comes to sex, there is still intense social pressure to conform to the binary model.
This pressure has meant that people born with clear DSDs often undergo surgery to 'normalize' their genitals. Such surgery is controversial because it is usually performed on babies, who are too young to consent, and risks assigning a sex at odds with the child's ultimate gender identity — their sense of their own gender. Intersex advocacy groups have therefore argued that doctors and parents should at least wait until a child is old enough to communicate their gender identity, which typically manifests around the age of three, or old enough to decide whether they want surgery at all.
This issue was brought into focus by a lawsuit filed in South Carolina in May 2013 by the adoptive parents of a child known as MC, who was born with ovotesticular DSD, a condition that produces ambiguous genitalia and gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue. When MC was 16 months old, doctors performed surgery to assign the child as female — but MC, who is now eight years old, went on to develop a male gender identity. Because he was in state care at the time of his treatment, the lawsuit alleged not only that the surgery constituted medical malpractice, but also that the state denied him his constitutional right to bodily integrity and his right to reproduce. Last month, a court decision prevented the federal case from going to trial, but a state case is ongoing.
“This is potentially a critically important decision for children born with intersex traits,” says Julie Greenberg, a specialist in legal issues relating to gender and sex at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. The suit will hopefully encourage doctors in the United States to refrain from performing operations on infants with DSDs when there are questions about their medical necessity, she says. It could raise awareness about “the emotional and physical struggles intersex people are forced to endure because doctors wanted to 'help' us fit in,” says Georgiann Davis, a sociologist who studies issues surrounding intersex traits and gender at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was born with CAIS.
Doctors and scientists are sympathetic to these concerns, but the MC case also makes some uneasy — because they know how much is still to be learned about the biology of sex19. They think that changing medical practice by legal ruling is not ideal, and would like to see more data collected on outcomes such as quality of life and sexual function to help decide the best course of action for people with DSDs — something that researchers are starting to do.
Diagnoses of DSDs once relied on hormone tests, anatomical inspections and imaging, followed by painstaking tests of one gene at a time. Now, advances in genetic techniques mean that teams can analyse multiple genes at once, aiming straight for a genetic diagnosis and making the process less stressful for families. Vilain, for example, is using whole-exome sequencing — which sequences the protein-coding regions of a person's entire genome — on XY people with DSDs. Last year, his team showed20 that exome sequencing could offer a probable diagnosis in 35% of the study participants whose genetic cause had been unknown.
Vilain, Harley and Achermann say that doctors are taking an increasingly circumspect attitude to genital surgery. Children with DSDs are treated by multidisciplinary teams that aim to tailor management and support to each individual and their family, but this usually involves raising a child as male or female even if no surgery is done. Scientists and advocacy groups mostly agree on this, says Vilain: “It might be difficult for children to be raised in a gender that just does not exist out there.” In most countries, it is legally impossible to be anything but male or female.
Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”
So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.
Nature 518, 288–291 (19 February 2015) doi:10.1038/518288a
If you got to this that's good. It suggests an interest in big pictures, In science. In change of knowledge suggesting change of attitudes is absolutely necessary for a healthy society to exist.
See also:
conix, It's about time McConnell showed signs of waking up [...] "Biden is working overtime to swing the Senate to the Republicans in 2022. Soccer moms are not happy with the Transgender Women Sports Executive Order. Not happy" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=161440311
...‘Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal’ on Netflix, a Documentary Indictment of American Higher Ed
------ "Identity politics isn’t hurting liberalism. It’s saving it. [...] What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality. A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status. [...] This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can’t eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one’s admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth." ------
By John Serba @johnserba Mar 17, 2021 at 4:00pm
In America we love the wealthy and we hate the wealthy. Operation Varsity Blues The College Admissions Scandal Official Trailer Netflix 2:40
[A different video insert]
'Operation Varsity Blues': Netflix’s College Admissions Scandal Doc Shifts Blame Away From Parents
Netflix documentary-drama Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal wants us to know who Rick Singer is. He’s the guy behind the blockbuster scam where Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, and many heavily moneyed CEOs bribed universities to get their kids in the door — and did some time in the slammer for it. It’s a juicy story, and the film leans heavily on reenactments in which Matthew Modine plays Singer, an interesting choice for many reasons. However, the more notable, but less recognizable name behind the movie is Chris Smith, the documentary producer/director behind Netflix hits Tiger King and Fyre (and whose career launched auspiciously with 1999’s American Movie). If anyone can go beyond the headlines of this real-life saga and present it to us in an entertaining fashion, it’s probably him.
The Gist: Everyone knows the “front door” way to get into a university — study hard, get good grades, participate in extracurriculars, ace the standardized tests. You probably also know the “back door” method — have rich parents who can grease the wheels by writing a seven-or-eight-figure check to the school as a “donation.” Rick Singer wasn’t really interested in the former, and the latter, he was quick to inform families with yachts and Benzes, offers no guarantee. He could guarantee admission, and it would cost even less. It was the “side door” method, where he’d hand a modest bribe to a sports coach or athletic director and get the kid in the school as an athlete in a smaller sport. The kid didn’t have to be at all athletic; Singer would doctor photos to make them look like coxswains and sailors. And it’d ONLY cost the family a few hundred thousand bucks.
[...]
Memorable Dialogue: A fascinating observation by test prep expert Akil Bello: “When you look at it in light of the scandal, you have predominantly rich families who (already) had every advantage… and yet they still cheated.”
Netflix's Operation Varsity Blues Focuses On Rick Singer, the College Admissions Scandal Mastermind
The documentary shows how a college counselor orchestrated the largest admissions scam in history.
By Lauren Kranc Mar 17, 2021
In total, 50 people—33 wealthy and influential parents, two SAT and ACT administrators, one exam proctor, nine college athletics coaches, and one college administrator—were charged in “Operation Varsity Blues,” the 2019 college admission scandal. The years-long fraud and the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted made splashy headlines—largely about actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman’s arrests and convictions. But Netflix’s new documentary film Operation Varsity Blues, by Fyre director Chris Smith, refocuses the attention onto William “Rick” Singer—the college admissions counselor and confessed criminal mastermind behind the entire scheme. While many of the parents and college employees indicted in the scandal have been charged and sentenced, Singer, who pled guilty to all charges brought against him, is yet to be sentenced.
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