Kudzu and the California Marriage Amendment

by Rick Moen
August 25, 2008
(last updated Feb. 16, 2023)



This past century, large portions of the American South have been consumed by an unintended side-effect.

I refer to the infamous "kudzu" vine, imported from Japan for its stunning erosion-control properties. This tactic worked: Crumbling riverbanks and hillsides were stabilized all over the South — but, then, everyone realized with mounting horror that this hardy legume is almost completely unstoppable anywhere protected from hard freezes, growing at the awesome rate of a foot per night and reaching heights of 100 feet. Entire abandoned houses have been observed to vanish under a kudzu carpet, over a summer growing season. It's now considered a pest; sometimes, an outright menace.

The plant can be used with caution, where its invasive side-effect is known and planned for — but the point is that it was deployed without understanding its full effects.

Laws' side-effects, likewise, can render them self-defeating (though, on the bright side, bad laws are easier to eradicate than kudzu): I'm going to explain, below, why recently popular marriage-definition legislation like California's November 2008 "California Marriage Protection Act" (an initiative state-constitutional amendment) creates kudzu-class unintended side effects its proponents haven't anticipated and will find horrific — in that they're going to end up mandating and legally sanctifying exactly the sort of same-sex marriages they're intending to ban.

Please note: Yr. humble author is deliberately avoiding the question of whether same-sex marriage is desirable, an offense against God, and so on. (For what it's worth, said author is a heterosexual genetic male, happily and monogamously married to qty. one (1) heterosexual genetic female. So, this essay is not a sneaky ploy to induce gender confusion in unwary citizens.) It's not that I don't have opinions on that contentious question. It's just that they're not relevant to what I'm writing about.

In short: I'm going to show that recent legislation restricting marriage to "a man and a woman" — regardless of whether you consider that effort good, bad, or indifferent — is going to produce harmful, unintended side effects (maybe even for you, your family, your friends, and so on), exactly the opposite of what proponents intend.

I'll not be moralizing, and this isn't lobbying from the "intersex" movement or anyone else. I'm just a regular hetero guy, quietly telling you what's starting to happen, why, and how to see for yourself. OK?



Marriage Protection Meets Biology

Here's the sort of law we're talking about:


Proposition 8
Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry: Initiative Constitutional Amendment

SECTION I. Title

This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."

SECTION 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:

Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.


Now, that's simple and should have predictable, orderly results, right? I'll bet the Soil Conservation Service guys in the 1950s thought that about kudzu, too.


The biggest problem is that laws like the California initiative will make the courts decide who is male and who is female — and all available decision criteria create unavoidable miscarriages of justice that will, or should, dismay initiative proponents.

You're probably thinking, about now, that I'm going to exaggerate the sex-definitional1 problem: Probably, you and everyone you know are each unambiguously male or female — or at least each has always believed himself or herself to be so, and nobody's challenged that, and nobody's likely to.

That's true, absolutely: Only maybe one live birth in 100 has some non-standard sex anatomy, and genetic anomalies are slightly rarer than that. However, let's talk about those 1-in-100 or 1-in-1000 cases — because those could be you, or your aunt or uncle, or your best friend — and because our system of law has to deal with 1-in-1000 situations, too.

An illustrative example: Let's say you're an adult woman. You were always female; you never had any doubts about this. You have all the right parts and none of the wrong ones; you think of yourself as a gal. You get married. (Yes, I do mean to a man.) Somewhere down the road, your genes get tested: To your astonishment, it says you're not only not XX (double-X being the classic female chromosome pairing), but in fact XY (classic male chromosomes). Testing shows your blood to be loaded with testosterone and other classic androgens (male hormones). Ultrasound locates an undescended set of testes in your abdomen. What's going on? (Note that all women do produce androgens, normally, but at much lower levels than in men.)2

What's going on is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS, found in both "Partial" = PAIS and "Complete" = CAIS sub-variants), where, at a critical early stage of development, because of a structural variation on your X chromosome, your cells' androgen receptors became unable (with CAIS) or poorly able (with PAIS) to respond to those hormones. The hormones were there, but had no (or much reduced) effect. Your entire subsequent development was thus into a woman. You're a gal — one with no ovaries / womb and thus infertile, and with vestigial testes somewhere inside, but every other inch a woman.

Laws like Proposition 8 might very well cause such a woman's marriage to be retroactively annulled — or prohibited in the first place. Furthermore, if the law decides that this particular citizen is male on account of the Y chromosome, testosterone, and testes, then she would be permitted to marry... guess who?... another woman. So, courtesy of Prop. 8, we are likely to suddenly have court-mandated same-sex marriages.

Let's say you're an adult male. You've always been male; you seem to have exactly the right parts, and so on. Your genes get checked one day, and they come up "XX" — the classic chromosome pair of a genetic female. Yet, you're a 230 lb. guy with facial hair who was a high school running back. What's going on?

When your mother and father's genes fused, the key part of Dad's Y chromosome (the "SRY" = Sex-determining Region Y bloc) got translocated to somewhere other than chromosome 46. Are you an XY, a genetic male? Well, no, you're not — even though you think you're a guy, you look like a guy with typical male development, and so on, though you and your wife are having fertility problems. (This is called "De la Chapelle syndrome.") Your marriage might end up getting annulled, too — and you might end up being permitted to marry only men.

It turns out, those two cases — AIS and transported SRY blocs — are only the beginning of the troubles we're facing. Here's a litany of other ways people can end up biologically difficult to classify, through no fault of their own. I'll keep the jargon factor low, but you can certainly skip this list if not interested:



  1. You're a girl with female sex organs — but, at puberty, your voice deepens and testes descend out of your lower abdomen. (I'm steering clear of some of the more graphic details, here.) It turns out you have XY chromosomes (male), but look like a young woman. You might or might not be fertile, but it would (if so) be as a male. This is a recessive genetic condition called "5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency" that causes testosterone to be chemically transformed in peripheral tissues before it can have its usual effect.

  2. You're a man with all of the expected parts, facial hair and all. One day, during unrelated abdominal surgery, doctors are surprised to find inside a full set of normal female parts (ovaries, Fallopian tubes, womb, etc.). Genetic typing shows you to be XX, but something called "Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia", starting early in life, caused your adrenal glands (near your kidneys) to induce production of an unusual mix of sex hormones, changing your entire course of post-natal development, leading you to appear, and believe yourself to be, male.

  3. You're a gal: All the gal parts. None of the others. Yet, you're XY. It turns out that, during development, you ended up short of a hormone called "Müllerian Inhibiting Factor". That factor would have let your Müllerian ducts regress and the related Wolffian duct develop, leading to more-complete and functional development of male organs, which would have given you more androgens. Its absence means you end up looking, seeming, and believing yourself female. (This pattern of early development is called "gonadal dysgenesis".)3

  4. You're a girl — but you don't seem to be entering puberty. Genetic testing shows you're XY, though in all other respects completely female. What's happened is that the sex-determining "SRY" region of the Y chromosome didn't trigger development of testes, with resulting female development. This is called "Swyer syndrome", or "XY gonadal dysgenesis".

  5. You're a man, albeit somewhat on the tall and thin side. You and your wife are having fertility problems. You're both checked: It turns out you, the husband, have "XXY" or "XXXY" or "XXYY" chromosomes. (There's also been one reported case of "XYYY".) You might be borderline fertile (as a man), or you might be out of luck. This is called "Klinefelter's syndrome". There's also a variant "mosaic" form of Klinefelter's where some of your body's cells have XY chromosomes and others have XXY.

  6. Speaking of mosaicism: You're a male with all the fixings, but also female equivalents — and raised as a boy. You then get the worst parts of both types of puberty, with both menstruation and your voice cracking, and so on. This is an incredibly rare but documented "cellular mosaic" condition where you have some XY cells and some XX ones, the only known way of generating true (bi-fertile) hermaphrodism, which is otherwise impossible and a medical myth. (There can be diverse combinations of mosaicism: XY with XXY, XX, XXXY, and so on.)

  7. You're an apparently normal man, with fertility problems. Genetic testing reveals "XX" genes, and no SRY block can be found anywhere. This "SRY-negative XX male syndrome" is observed but so far not fully understood.

  8. You're a gal. You're late entering puberty. The doctors find no womb or a partial one. Otherwise, you're an (infertile) XX woman with absolutely nothing wrong with you. The causes are not really understood, but it's called Mayer Rokitansky Küster Hauser (MRKH) syndrome.

  9. You're a gal, but your secondary sex characteristics at puberty seem underdeveloped, relatively speaking. You turn out not to be XX, but rather have a single, unpaired X chromosome (also called either "XO" or "45,X" as opposed to "46,XX") — or a second X is present but abnormal, or some single-X cells are mosaiced among XX ones. In any of those cases, you might be fertile, or maybe not, and it's called Turner (or Ullrich-Turner) syndrome.

  10. You may be unsurprised to hear that babies also sometimes end up with mixed sexual characteristics caused by fetal conditions (e.g., Mom was prescribed a progestin-based medicine such as Danazol, a testosterone-related hormone once prescribed to treat endometriosis), or for no identifiable reason. Traditionally, obstetricians tend to pick a sex and use neonatal surgery to converge the baby towards it — something more common than people realize, as nobody wants to talk about it — yet another contentious, opinion-soaked issue I'm carefully avoiding. (But, anyway, the point is: Are you sure you're not a man, or a woman, primarily because a scalpel made you that way?)

(If keeping count, please note that I've listed 12 distinct, real-world, genetic/hormonal/developmental conditions raising profound sex-classification conundrums, not 10: AIS4 and transported SRY blocs count as the 11th and 12th. And by the way, there are others I did not detail, too.)



What's the point of all this? It's that, even if you and everyone you know falls into none of the above categories — and, honestly, how many of us know for sure? — somewhere on the order of 1 in 1000 of us do. In the USA, that's enough people to populate Minneapolis or Colorado Springs. The entire populace of a medium-sized American city could be told by some court, "No, you're not the sex you always thought you were. Go marry someone of that sex you minutely resemble, and have always believed yourself to be, but that (according to us) you aren't."

If you back laws like Proposition 8, you're trying to put all such people into exactly the situation you say you're against — pushing them into marrying the same sex. In fact, you're doing something more extreme than that: You're saying they should be permitted to marry only the same sex.



Proto-Kudzu: The Olympics

These ironies have been seen before — i.e., we really should know better — because of sex-testing's unfortunate history during the 20th Century's Olympic Games. In the years and decades following the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, awareness grew of the strange, ultimately sad case of Dora Ratjen (1918-2008) of Bremen, who'd been a women's high-jump competitor for Germany (eliminated in the finals), and then took gold for the German Reich at the September 1938 European Athletics Championships in Vienna.

A few days later, on an express train to Cologne (Köln), Magdeburg Police Detective Sergeant Sömmering, hearing a tip about a woman passenger who was actually a man, insisted on taking Dora to the police station for questioning as to whether she were a man. There, Dora hesitated, then said she was indeed a man, albeit one legally female who'd been raised female from birth. Dora was arrested on suspicion of fraud and her gold medal confiscated. Charges were later dropped as evidence emerged that neither Dora nor any of the athletic officials had been guilty of fraudulent intent, as there was no scheme for financial gain: Dora had been raised female in part because of somewhat non-standard genital anatomy, realizing she had male traits only at puberty, but then lead a lonely life of concealment, attempting to continue the only life she'd ever known.

The 1938 train ride changed that, as she was suddenly ruled male. Dora changed her name to Heinrich Ratjen, Jr., was a working man in Hannover for some years, and then lived out a quiet life running his parents' bar in Bremen. German and international sports authorities adjusted competition records, handling the matter quietly, as the Ratjen family had requested.

Public attention to the case was therefore very low until an extremely inaccurate short piece appeared in the Sept. 16, 1966 issue of Time magazine, breaking the story to English-speaking audiences: Time's uncredited author invented out of whole cloth a subsequently oft-repeated but totally bogus moralistic tale of former Olympic athlete Dora Ratjen having been unmasked in 1957 as "Hermann [sic] Ratjen", a waiter in Bremen, and then (supposedly) tearfully confessing having been forced by the Nazi authorities to compete as a woman "for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany". (I regret having repeated, in early versions of this essay, a variant of Time's baseless account, working from a BBC World News story that had been likewise lead astray by the deeply dishonest, dishonorable, and unethical Time piece. By contrast, my profound thanks to Der Spiegel's Berlin bureau chief Stefan Berg for correcting in 2009 the Henry Luce rag's misdeed, after Ratjen had been once again maligned in supposedly "based on a true story" movie Berlin '36, once again based on Time's fishwrap-reject article.)

In any event, following the (sensationalistic) 1960s retellings, Dora's story impelled the International Olympic Committee to attempt to fix the problem using physical exams, during preparations for the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games (after trying them on an experimental basis during the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games) — only to find that a significant minority of athletes had what one might call ambiguous parts. So, they tried switching to "buccal [i.e., cheek] smears" — testing cheek swabbings for the "Barr body" (aka "sex chromatin") in a cell nucleus that indicates an inactive X chromosome — which is what occurs with double-X. The IOC inferred — badly — that athletes without Barr bodies must be XY and thus male. Later, starting with the 1992 Albertville Winter Games, IOC switched to checking for the key "SRY" gene bloc on a Y chromosome (using a molecular polymerase chain reaction to amplify the gene sequence where present) — but not for that same gene bloc if attached to a non-standard chromosome — that codes for male traits. Both tests accidentally implicated innocent CAIS women with XY genes (female in all respects that should matter) and others as detailed above, whose genetic anomalies gave them no competitive advantage. In particular, in 1967, Polish sprinting champion Ewa Kłobukowska was disqualified, publicly humiliated, and stripped of her medals (and banned from professional sports!) for being (probably) XXY with XX mosaicism, on the basis of failing the Barr body test, as was Spain's hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño for being XY (CAIS) in the 1980s. Further, during preparations for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games, Austrian skier Erika Schinegger was genetically tested, determined to be XY, and disqualified. This was a great shock to all three women, who were raised female and had no reason to think otherwise. (Erika subsequently did have a sex change, having her previously unsuspected internal male genitals surgically uncovered, is now Erik, and became a father. Maria's competitive eligibility was reinstated. but only in 1988, long past her prime as a runner. Ewa retired, married, and gave birth to a son. Her medals were never returned, nor was she ever given an apology for the committee's error.)

For extra irony: CAIS (and 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency) women athletes are in fact about the only humans on earth of either sex who logically should be above suspicion: Unlike everyone else, those women's condition makes them uniquely unable to cheat by taking anabolic steroids to build muscle, because by definition their bodies simply don't respond at all to steroids (including testosterone), making them, actually, hyper-female — more female, in absolutely all ways that matter, than are regular XX women with normal androgen metabolism. And, worst of all: The SRY-bloc test failed to spot men with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia or androgen-producing tumors, who are XX but enjoy all the muscle advantages of maleness — or, likewise, men with Klinefelter's syndrome, or men with their SRY genes on non-standard chromosomes (or, even more problematically for testing, on no chromosomes at all).

The IOC wisely gave up after two more revelations: First, 1930s track and field Polish gold-medalist Stella Walsh (née Stanisława Walasiewiczówna) tragically died in a 1980 armed robbery: Autopsy showed some parts of both male and female genitalia, plus both XX and XY chromosomes (i.e., mosaicism). (Ironically, Walsh had accused 1936 Olympics competitor Helen Stephens of being male after Stephens edged out Walsh for the gold in the 100 meter dash. Stephens underwent a sex exam and passed.) Then, the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games furnished what was probably the final blow against IOC's testing program: Eight athletes were announced to have failed IOC's SRY-bloc test: To IOC's embarrassment, seven turned out to be androgen-insensitive XY women, and the eighth to have 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency — both of the classic conditions in which XY genes inherently confer absolutely no advantage in sports. All eight women were permitted to compete.

Sensing a no-win situation, IOC finally about-faced, starting June 1999 (effective starting at the 2000 Sydney Summer Games): There is no longer a mandate for sex testing (although Beijing's local 2008 Olympics committee is testing some female athletes at a local sex testing lab at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, i.e., those who have been challenged, without IOC imprimatur — and, in fact, against the advice of IOC's medical commission chairman).

2012 update: IOC's Executive Board took another stab at the issue, using somewhat more rational criteria. Female athletes at the 2012 London Summer Olympics can be challenged to see if (1) their serum testosterone is elevated to the "male range", (2) that androgen elevation is "functional" (i.e., not CAIS women who have high serum testosterone but have zero effect from it), and (3) "confers a competitive advantage". Those criteria might work, even though the scientific assumption about testosterone being the factor that yields advantage is arguably doubtful.

2016 update: Controversy continues. IOC has at times made moves towards a new policy, such as dictating a maximum blood-testosterone level for women athletes, but then backed off.

Details: In November 2015, an ad-hoc IOC committee, "Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism", issued guideline recommendations to sporting organizations sponsoring future Olympics stating that "trans" female athletes should be allowed to compete as female if the athlete 1. has elected "gender" [sic] identity of female for a minimum of four years, 2. she can demonstrate that her total serum testosterone has been under 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months prior to her first competition, with longer durations to be potentially required as competitive advantage in particular sports may dictate, 3. her serum levels must remain so through competition, and 4. she must be tested to verify this.

This erratic and relatively crude veering from IOC's more-rational 2012 Executive Board statement was partly in reaction to a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arbitation decision: Indian athlete Dutee Chand (who is not "trans") had challenged a decision of Athletic Federation of India and International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) to exclude her from competition as a woman on grounds of high endogenous testosterone. CAS on balance agreed wtih Chand in finding IAAF's Hyperandrogenism Regulations to have unacceptably poor scientific foundation, and summarily suspended those regulations, pending better scientific evidence to support them.

Interested readers should compare the thoughtful and careful CAS statement with the disappointingly lackluster IOC ad-hoc committee one that references it: The latter doesn't even recognize complications like androgen insensitivity, CAIS & PAIS; thus, IOC seems to be going backwards rather than learning. However, I gather from the example of the 2008 Beijing Games that each Olympics sets its own policies, and IOC committee opinions are deemed advisory.

In any event, IOC then got cold feet and stated in February 2016 that, despite the ad-hoc committee's recommendation, it would not attempt any rules on hyperandrogenism for the time being.



The Kudzu Vines Start Creeping: Legal Effects and Sex Changes

The dilemma of innocent Olympic athletes helps highlight one sort of problem with "marriage protection" laws, with which anyone can have sympathy — citizens with genetic anomalies but who aren't trying to game the system being shocked to have their marriages to what they thought was the opposite sex suddenly annulled (or prohibited). All available criteria suffer that fault:

There really are no workable tests. This isn't just a technical problem that hasn't been worked out: Remember, the best minds in the International Olympic Committee, aided by the world's top doctors and scientists, tried to solve it for 31 years, and gave up.


I mentioned first the plight of CAIS women trapped by dumb testing regimes partly because it's so easy to sympathize. By contrast, some readers will, for various reasons including socially conservative views, be less sympathetic towards people who voluntarily change sex — either fully via sexual reassignment surgery (SRS), or in sundry other ways taking on traits of the other sex. Again, I will not touch that contentious subject (where even the vocabulary is an ideological minefield), except to say that, approve or not, it happens, and creates situations with real-world legal effects — effects even more contrary to "marriage protection" proponents' intentions than the scenarios described earlier.

Consider a pre-operative transsexual XY male who wishes to marry an XX female, and end up living as two married women. The two first marry — which is lawful per the "marriage protection" law. Then, the male changes sex: Voila, same-sex marriage. (The law does not invalidate marriages automatically because of SRS — nor for more depressing reasons such as adultery or wife-beating. However, if it did, a male wanting to "game the system" could use measures to live as female short of full SRS. A female could do the reverse. If the state, by contrast, doesn't recognize SRS as changing one's legal sex, then marriage can lawfully occur either before or after surgery.)

This isn't mere speculation. Texas's "marriage protection" law is exactly what let two women, Jessica and Robin Wicks, one a male-to-female transsexual, win their marriage license in San Antonio, Texas: The women had been previously denied that marriage license as a same-sex couple, but successfully argued that the Texas 4th Court of Appeals's 1999 "Littleton v. Prange" decision (Littleton being a widow barred from suing over her husband's death from medical malfeasance, because she'd been born male and then had SRS) guaranteed them the right to marry, based upon their inferred chromosomes — because the judge ruled chromosomes rather than outward sex characteristics to govern which sex Jessica Wicks (né Grady Roland Wicks) is.

The Wicks newlyweds' attorney was quoted as saying he was encouraging other transsexuals to travel to San Antonio to get married. (Same-sex couples giving public thanks to a "marriage protection" statute and a socially conservative judicial district: the first of many "marriage protection" ironies to come.)

Around the same time, in New Hampshire, another two women, Judi and Mikayla Howden, were in a similar situation: Mikayla started out as Michael, married Judi, and then arrived at the painful decision that he was rightfully a woman and underwent SRS to become Mikayla. The result? A lawful same-sex marriage, despite — and, in fact, courtesy of — New Hampshire's ban on such things.

An article on the matter cannily points out:

[SRS] recognition lets existing, heterosexual marriages like the Howdens' become same-sex. Denying recognition permits new same-sex marriages - like one between Judi and Mikayla if they were to marry today - because the spouses' sexes differ only on paper, not visibly.

Oh dear, oh dear. "Marriage protection" statutes not only fail to ban same-sex marriage, but also furnish a legal blueprint for its mass-production.



So, What, Then?

To sum up, "marriage protection" statutes are already a debacle from the standpoint of their own advocates: Those laws spectacularly fail to advance their objectives — and are in fact a powerful tool for social conservatives' political and social enemies to create same sex marriages that were impossible without them. That effect can only get worse, over time. The only thing they're particularly good for is breaking up real, existing marriages of those unlucky enough to fail an inevitably arbitrary and unrealistic legal test of one's sexual identity: None of those "Which sex are you?" tests proposed, tried, or likely to emerge fixes the problem.

This honestly isn't supposed to be an advocacy piece, so: Maybe being choked by kudzu is appealing. It's (famously) hardy, is a lovely shade of green, has delicious edible roots that can be cooked and eaten like potatoes, and has quite pretty purple flowers.

On the other hand, if you, our voters and legislatures, decide you'd rather not be blanketed by kudzu, then y'all should consider ceasing to plant it. Just a thought.



Nov. 5, 2008 addendum: After a furious electoral battle, whose $40M "yes" campaign was funded mostly by $30M+ from out-of-state Mormon (1, 2, 3) and, to a lesser extent, Scientology, church interests, California's Proposition 8 passed by a very narrow margin. I trust that the irony of Mormons lobbying to limit marriage to "one man and one woman" will be lost on no one (even if the concept of "traditional marriage" didn't have numerous ironies including counter-examples within the Christian faith's most devout segments).

June 17, 2011 addendum: An increasing number of Federal judges are now ruling the 1996 nationwide "Defense of Marriage Act", of which Proposition 8 was a direct copy, to be unconstitutional on equal-protection grounds, such as this week's decision by 20 judges of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, refusing to dismiss as contrary to DOMA a bankruptcy petition from one of the 22,000 same-sex couples married in California prior to Proposition 8's passage — underlining the point that marriage has no necessary connection to reproduction and child-rearing in the first place, and is discrimination lacking the "rational basis" required (among other things) if discrimination is claimed to be lawful.

Failure to meet the rock-bottom "rational basis" standard was one of the many reasons why veteran conservative George W. Bush-appointed Federal District Court judge Vaughn R. Walker threw out Proposition 8 in its entirety in landmark decision Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which devastatingly eviscerated proponents' arguments (and should be read by anyone interested in this issue, as his writing is clear and novice-accessible). Judge Walker's decision for the US District Court for the Northern District of California was (initially) stayed pending appeal. Critically, California's officials declined to appeal Walker's decision, so the ballot initiative's proponents appealed in their place, as 'intervenor-defendants'.

July 7, 2011 addendum: The illustrious Randall Munroe of XKCD fame brought broad public attention to this essay with a laudatory mention on Google+. Yr. humble author shouldn't brag, but has always been an avid XKCD fan, so: Woot!

Feb. 7, 2012 addendum: A three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit upheld Walker's decision on slightly different (narrower) grounds than the ones Walker himself applied. (The case had been redubbed Perry v. Brown, at this point, reflecting changeover in the Governor's office.) Proponents' request to appeal that decision to be reheard by all of the judges en-banc was denied, so proponents attempted appeal to the US Supreme Court.

June 26, 2013 addendum: In 2012, the US Supreme Court agreed to review the case (re-dubbed once again as Hollingworth v. Perry), and on June 26, 2013 disposed of the case by ruling that Prop. 8's supporters had lacked legal standing to appeal Judge Walker's District Court ruling, and remanding the decision back to the Ninth Circuit with instructions that proponents' appeal to the Ninth Circuit be dismissed. Consequently, Judge Walker's District Court decision voiding Prop. 8 will stand. Additional litigation may occur to settle whether Walker's decision applies to everyone or just the two couples who sued (because it resulted in an injunction), but that is likely to be swept aside by the governor and county clerks treating Prop. 8 as dead. (DOMA's prohibition of Federal recognition for same-sex marriages was also finally voided, in a companion decision on equal-protection grounds, and holding that the Federal government has no business interfering with states' laws protecting the fundamental rights of citizens.)

June 28, 2013 addendum: The Ninth Circuit having moved swiftly to vacate its stay of Judge Walker's decision, there are happy couples getting married again.

Oct. 21, 2018 addendum: Showing that some people just refuse to learn, according to a New York Times report, the Trump Administration's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been circulating (since spring 2018) a draft memo that would define "sex" for purposes of Federal enforcement of Title IX, Education Amendments Act of 1972 (the Federal statute banning discrimination on the basis of sex, in Federally funded education programs). The memo says (in part): "Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.... [According to the story, this means genitalia.] The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex, unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence." As shown by decades of Olympics experience, there is no known criterion based on "reliable genetic evidence" that doesn't give rise to absurd and obviously wrong outcomes in a huge number of cases. The DHS draft memo claims this policy would establish for applicable Federal agencies (Education, Justice, HHS, and Labor) a uniform definition of sex as either male or female "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective, and administrable". However, as we've already seen, this claim is entirely false, in a very significant number of cases. Therefore, the proposed policy is, if adopted (as it ultimately wasn't), likely to create further travesties, not to mention litigation.)

July 5, 2021 addendum: The memo draft turned out to be from Harvard-issued attorney Roger Severino, director of HHS's Office for Civil Rights and former director of Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. (Office for Civil Rights enforces protection of patient privacy protections, and ensures patients’ civil rights are protected, their freedom from discrimination, and their access to services such as interpreters.) There was reportedly also a similar draft memo from some unidentified staffer at Department of Education — the apparent aim of those two policies having been to make "transgender" non-existent by definitional fiat.

If implemented, the policies would probably have had basically null real-world effect, as neither Mr. Severino nor Mr. Trump could unilaterally reverse two decades of Federal courts' Title IX precedent — but, in the event, the Administration dropped the proposal like a kudzu-covered rock, after public awareness and adverse publicity. Critics had focussed narrowly on the implied attack on Federal civil rights, but, in your humble author's view, said focus ignored a more-damning problem: As this essay details, Mr. Severino and his Education Department colleague's initiative would, if implemented and not blocked by swift court injunction, have been yet another epic own-goal the Administration luckily averted by hastily dropping it. (Mr. Severino then pursued his larger objectives via other means beyond the scope of this essay.)

1 Note: Sex, not "gender". The latter term properly refers to psychological and cultural categories, never to biological ones: Masculine / feminine are examples of gender concepts; by contrast, male / female are sex categories. Thus, semi-literate expressions like "same-gender marriage" and "gender testing" are meaningless — except perhaps in reference to such things as who's wearing trousers.

In the 2010s, many people appear to have started using the word "gender" to mean "what sex (if any) you identify as". It would be convenient if such a word existed in English. (After all, how we're plumbed, i.e., our sexes, is a personal matter relevant only to those closest to us, and our doctors.) A language shift to create one may thus be underway. However, borrowing "gender" for that purpose does have the drawback, for now, of creating confusion given the word's established meaning.

2 Androgens are steroid hormones regulating males' development and maintenance (but females produce them, too, in lower amounts). Testosterone is of course the best known, but by no means the only significant androgen: Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and Androstenedione (A4, a precursor of various other androgens) are of equal importance to male development. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is important as the primary precursor of both various androgens and estrogen. Androstenediol (A5) is produced by DHEA metabolism and is precursor to testosterone. Breakdown of some androgens produces Androsterone, yet another minor androgen.

All of these androgens are primarily developmental hormones, having not much effect after puberty.

3 Much thanks to Dr. David Marjanović of Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity, Berlin, for helping me get right embryological details about Müllerian and Wolffian ducts. Any remaining inaccuracy is entirely mine. I try to be careful, but, after all, am writing outside my field: Corrections are always warmly welcomed.

4 Before the interrelationships between chromosonal structures and receptor proteins was well understood, slightly different phenotypic presentations of AIS were initially given individual scientific names, prior to understanding that they're all the same thing, androgen insensitivity caused by molecular defects in the androgen receptor gene: Reifenstein syndrome, Goldberg-Maxwell syndrome, Morris's syndrome, Gilbert-Dreyfus syndrome, Lub's syndrome, "incomplete testicular feminization", Rosewater syndrome, and Aiman's syndrome. These terms are thus now deemed obsolete.

A 2016 Danish study, aiming to better estimate prevalence of AIS and similar disorders of sex development in the female population, found that, among live female births, 4.1 per 100,000 women are AIS and 1.5 per 100,000 women have XY gonadal dysgenesis, these being the two most common ways of being female but with (more-typically male) 46,XY chromosomes.

5 As a point of personal interest, yr. humble author was adopted in infancy and raised by a couple unable to conceive. Also, yr. humble author is himself lately reproductively sterile on account of medical reasons. So, he might be forgiven for objecting to the notion of both his own and his parents' marriages being disallowable on fertility grounds, along with countless others.

Copyright (C) 2008-2023 Rick Moen, <rick@linuxmafia.com>. Reprint rights will be gladly granted, but please ask, so I can know where this work appears.