Human development at the edge of sexual ambiguity


Image: Mopic via Shutterstock.com.

"If you look carefully at the research, sexual diversity, on the level of genital appearance, hormones and chromosomes, is present and predictable in humans," writes Cory Silverberg, who is the Sexuality Guide at About.com.

"To use the language of normativity, the fact that some of us don't fit into one of two boxes is as normal as the fact that some of us do."

Cory was writing about a new piece of science that examines "what it is that makes us think about bodies as being either one sex or another, only male or only female." He tells Boing Boing:

Prof. Michael Weiss has been looking at the SRY "master switch" which turns male sex development on for years. Using some intense science he and his colleagues have discovered that the switch, which they assume is robust because they assumed that sex differentiation was robust, is in fact super sensitive, leading them to conclude that "human males actually develop near the edge of sexual ambiguity."

Read more at Cory's column.