In this episode, Ologies podcast host Alie Ward interviews genderqueer researcher Dr. Daniel Pfau. Dr. Pfau talks extensively about gender in biology, including queer behavior in animals, how hormones influence the brain, the variation of gender expression, how a strict gender binary is harmful to entire populations, hormone replacement therapy, and hormones in sports. The episode page includes streaming for Parts 1 and 2, as well as a transcript and show notes.
Gender and Sex – Transgender and Intersex (Book Chapter)
This UMass Amherst textbook chapter models the use of precise, modern, and non-pathologizing language for discussing transgender and intersex topics in the context on human biology. The textbook authors are Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, and Sonny Nordmarken. The chapter is available through Openbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Teaching about Gender Diversity (Book)
Written by teacher for teachers, Teaching about Gender Diversity is an edited collection of interdisciplinary lesson plans that provides K–12 teachers with the tools to implement gender-inclusive practices into their curriculum and talk to their students about gender and sex. Edited by Susan W. Woolley and Lee Airton, this engaging collection features teachers' perspectives on teaching about gender from across North America. Divided into three sections dedicated to the elementary, middle, and secondary grade levels, this practical resource provides lessons for a variety of subject areas, including English language arts, STEM, and health and physical education. To view more titles in Education, visit canadianscholars.ca.
Fred Hutch Science Education Partnership Workshop
This workshop was presented by Lewis Maday-Travis for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Science Education Partnership program on June 3, 2020. The workshop covers the basics of a framework for gender-inclusive biology education. All resources used in the workshop are available at: http://bit.ly/SEPgender
Gender Spectrum Online Professionals' Symposium 2020
We are so excited to give a virtual workshop at Gender Spectrum’s Professional Symposium. Our presentation is titled "Gender Diversity in the Biology Classroom: Small Tweaks and Big Shifts". You can access event info, our slide deck, and the video from our presentation below.
Pathways STEM Outreach Program
This is a unique STEM outreach program for LGBTQ+ high schoolers. Please share with students who may be interested! Sam Long will lead a workshop about diversity in biology in the July session.
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Calling all LGBTQ+ high schoolers! Wanna learn about LGBTQ+ scientists, build STEM skills, and meet other students this summer? Check out the new Pathways in STEM summer outreach program at CU Boulder! All events are online over summer 2020.
Info and registration at http://bit.ly/pathwaysstem
BSCS Presentation - April 15, 2020
Video: Are There "Male" and "Female" Brains?
This SciShow video reviews data concerning differences in the brains of biological males and biological females. The writers are careful to mention that research on this topic does not account for transgender or intersex individuals, and that neuroscience research as a whole is heavily focused on studying the brains of male humans and animals. You may also wish to discuss with students about the definition of “biological sex” and how that definition has changed throughout history.
Glossary resources, sports access, and new podcast appearances [Apr]
Hello, educators! You are in our thoughts during this challenging time. Here is our newsletter for April 2020.
Hi, everyone!
You are in our thoughts during this challenging time. Though we are physically isolated from our students and each other, the Gender-Inclusive Biology team would like to share gender-inclusive resources for remote learning and support.
Please email us if you have other suggestions or are seeking help.
Check the end for an invitation to the first of a series of informal social hours on Zoom.
Useful gender-inclusive resources for teaching remotely: Here are a few assets that we think will be useful for teachers distributing lessons remotely during this time. Please email us if you have other suggestions to add to this list!
Activity: Sex verification in athletes This activity guides students through analyzing data and the history of how sex verification in athletes has changed over time. When using with students, you can emphasize the idea that "biological sex" is an ambiguous, non-scientific term with a definition that has changed over time.
Video: There are more than two human sexes This engaging video (mostly geared towards the high school level) is a great introduction to diversity of sex characteristics and distinguishes the differences between sex and gender identity.
Video: Secrets of the X Chromosome This video and lesson addresses the differences between sex chromosomes and autosomes, including high-engagement topics like colorblindness, identical twins, and cats, all while approaching sex and gender using more accurate language than most online resources.
Gender-inclusive Biology Talkspace/Social hour: We will be hosting our first informal check-in space for educators interested in Gender-Inclusive Biology on Thursday, April 16th at 3 PM Pacific/6 PM Eastern via Zoom. If you are interested in joining us, please email Lewis (fishyteaching@gmail.com) for the link to join in!
Upcoming appearances:
Many in-person conferences have been canceled in the coming months. However, there are some exciting opportunities to connect with Gender-Inclusive Biology Education and related work in online and remote settings.
Sam gave a 30-minute webinar about Gender-Inclusive Biology on the STEM Village on Monday, April 6th - you can check out the video recording here!
Jamie Kubiak, a chemistry teacher in New York City, gave a recent webinar on creating LGBTQ-inclusive classrooms. You can view the recording and see the slide deck here.
Sam has been doing a Twitter series focused on dispelling common stereotypes and misconceptions about Asian-Americans by sharing his own stories and the stories of Asian-American heroes in STEM and beyond. You can check the project out using the hashtag #ExpectAsianVsReality
Sincerely,
Lewis, Sam, and River
The Gender-Inclusive Biology Team
What We Wish Our Teachers Knew - Brochure from InterACT Advocates
This brochure gives best practices for educators addressing the topic of intersex in classrooms, sex education classes, and school health centers. This resource was created by InterACT Youth and informed by their personal experiences.
Jamie Kubiak's Queer Your Classroom Webinar
Jamie Kubiak, a chemistry teacher in New York City, hosted a webinar in April 2020 in lieu of his cancelled NSTA conference presentation. The webinar video and slide deck are available below.
Jamie Kubiak's Queer Your Classroom Resources
Jamie Kubiak, a chemistry teacher in New York City, hosts a crowdsourced database of teaching resources for a diverse range of content areas.
STEM Village Webinar
Join Sam Long for a 30-minute webinar on Gender-Inclusive Biology on Monday, April 6th. The time is 4 pm BST or 9 am Mountain time. Thank you to STEM Village for hosting. DM @TheStemVillage for the meeting password.
Gender-Inclusive Biology Curriculums Sam Long takes us through an enlightening and insightful journey of how to build gender-inclusive curriculums, in a way ...
interACT Letter of Concern for Chromosome/Barr Body Staining Lab
Some schools do a lab exercise where students stain their own cells and determine their sex chromosomes (X and Y). This is a letter from the Executive Director of interACT that can be used to advocate for not doing this exercise due to the potential harm it can cause for intersex individuals.
Doctor's Rec: WPATH Standards of Care for “Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People”
The overall goal of the SOC is to provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming people with safe and effective pathways to achieving lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, in order to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment. This assistance may include primary care, gynecologic and urologic care, reproductive options, voice and communication therapy, mental health services (e.g., assessment, counseling, psychotherapy), and hormonal and surgical treatments.
While this is primarily a document for health professionals, the SOC may also be used by individuals, their families, and social institutions to understand how they can assist with promoting optimal health for members of this diverse population.
Kaiser Permanente Transgender Care follows the WPATH standards of care and the 2009 Endocrine Society Guidelines, as well as a companion document for voice and communication change. Click through to access this file in 18 different languages.
Research documents school staff tend to blame victim of anti-LGBT harassment, incl. removing from school, when perpetrators face minor consequences. (Bochenek & Brown 2001)
Many people experiencing discrimination have encountered “victim-blaming” where the solution to the hate crime is to remove the identity being persecuted. Suppose a woman might have been told her attire “invited” sexual assault or even rape. Suppose a gay teen is told to stop “flaunting” their lifestyle choice, often by teachers and administrators in positions of trust and protection, when they report violence and daily harassment in the classroom. Suppose a recent immigrant is told that once they “learn English”, classmates will stop stealing his things and urinating on his book bag.
Only when teachers and administrators take risks to establish honest conversations that proactively support inclusion and affirm the expressive diversity of all people on campus (including students who feel the need to bully and abuse others) can we create genuinely safe spaces.
In addition to highlighting the inaction of teachers and other school staff, Daniel’s story illustrates the tendency among some school staff to ‘blame the victim’ in cases of anti-LGBT harassment, as other researchers have noted.
In Hatred in the Hallways, authors Michael Bochenek and A. Widney Brown cite situations in which LGBT students were removed from classrooms and even schools as a '“solution” to their having been harassed (while the perpetrators faced minor consequences), as well as one in which an assistant principal reportedly said of a student who had been harassed, “If he didn’t walk around telling people that he’s gay, there wouldn’t be any problems.”
Reference
Michael Bochenek and A. Widney Brown, Hatred in the Hallways: Violence and Discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students in US Schools (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001), 83.
Michael Sadowski, ed., Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2015), 125.
Diverse Reproductive Strategies Gallery Walk
In this lesson, students do a reading about R- and K-selection and then a gallery walk of four more unique reproductive strategies in animals. Students use the notes taken during the gallery walk to write a paragraph response comparing two different strategies.
The examples chosen include sequential hermaphroditism in clownfish and unisexual populations of all-female salamanders. However, they are limited in that all the example species are described to have binary sex. This lesson could be supplemented with examples of species where there are more than two sexes - see Scientific Evidence for examples.
Editor’s note: The term "hermaphrodite" is appropriate for referring to non-human animals with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. For humans, “intersex” is the appropriate term—learn more here!
For a longer and more inquiry-based lesson, the gallery walk information could be shortened to remove the explanation for why each species has a unique reproductive strategy. Students could be tasked with hypothesizing the relationship between reproductive strategy and social structure or environment of the animal.
All XX Spanish Moles have ovotestes (both ovarian & testicular tissue) and make Eggs & Testosterone, but XY moles only have testes & Make Sperm. (Gender Showcase, 9-12)
Talpa occidentalis (mole, Iberian peninsula)
All females have ovotestes (ovotestes are gonads containing both ovarian & testicular tissue) XX have ovotestes & make eggs and testosterone only, XY have testes only and make sperm only.
Image caption: A Spanish blind mole emerges from underneath a rock. Photo credit (C) Tiago Magalhães.
Most gender-gene committees, with or without the presence of SRY, pass a resolution creating only a testis in males and only an ovary in females. In some species, though, even this most elemental aspect of bodily gender has been given a different configuration.
Among Talpa occidentalis—another burrowing mammal, an old world mole from the Iberian peninsula—all females have ovotestes, gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue. The ovotestes occur at the site in the body where simple ovaries are found in other species.
Talpa XX individuals have ovotestes and make eggs in the ovarian part of their ovotests. They don’t make sperm, but they do have both sperm-related and egg-related ducts. The testicular part of these ovotestes secretes testosterone. XY individuals have testes only and make sperm.
References
R. Jiménez, M. Burgos, A. Sánchez, A. Sinclair, F. Alarcón, J. Marin, E. Ortega, and R.D. de la Guardia, 1993, Fertile females of the mole Talpa occidentalis are phynotypic intersexes with ovotestes, Development 118:1303-11.
Roughgarden p. 202
Discovery of Intersex honeybee complicates current model stating unfertilized bee eggs become haploid males, fertilized bee eggs become diploid females. (Gender Showcase, 9-12)
Honeybee eggs start out male by default!
Most of the time, unfertilized bee eggs develop into males and fertilized bee eggs develop into females.
In their haplodiploidy sex determination system, males have 1/2 the chromosomes that females do, so the males are haploid and females are diploid.
Double-diploid bees are automatically cannibalized by the nurse bees.
The total number of chromosome sets determines whether bees become male, female, or a mix. This haplodiploidy system means all male bees are haploid and all females are diploid (see above). Male bees have half the number of chromosomes that female bees do.
Distinguish this from XO sex determination, where only the number of sex chromosomes are halved, not the autosomes. For example, males and females both receive the same number of autosomal chromosomes, but males only get O for their sex chromosome (1 chromosome) and females get XX for their sex chromosome set (2 chromosomes).
Fertilized eggs are either homozygous at the Sex Determination Locus (SDL) and differentiate into diploid males or are heterozygous and develop into females. The diploid males, however, don't survive in a bee colony as they are eaten by worker bees shortly after hatching from the egg. Fertile males are produced by the queen's unfertilized, haploid eggs that are hemizygous at SDL. (Gempe et al. 2009)
Image credit: Ian Alexander
Gempe et al. (2009) tested areas in the Apis mellifera sequence and manipulated the complementary sex determiner gene (csd in excerpt below) and the feminizer gene (fem in excerpt below). They tried different ways of suppressing and adding the influence of these genes. They discovered that female bee development requires fem activity and csd activity processes the heterozygous (female) state and not the homozygous or hemizygous (male) states.
We show that heterozygous csd is only required to induce the female pathway, while the feminizer (fem) gene maintains this decision throughout development. By RNAi induced knockdown we show that the fem gene is essential for entire female development and that the csd gene exclusively processes the heterozygous state. Fem activity is also required to maintain the female determined pathway throughout development, which we show by mosaic structures in fem-repressed intersexuals. We use expression of Fem protein in males to demonstrate that the female maintenance mechanism is controlled by a positive feedback splicing loop in which Fem proteins mediate their own synthesis by directing female fem mRNA splicing. The csd gene is only necessary to induce this positive feedback loop in early embryogenesis by directing splicing of fem mRNAs. Finally, fem also controls the splicing of Am-doublesex transcripts encoding conserved male- and female-specific transcription factors involved in sexual differentiation.
This means that fatal mutations automatically kill their haploid males, and double-diploid bees automatically get cannibalized by nurse bees when they hatch! But recently, researchers discovered an unusual intersex honeybee, shown below.
Researchers discovered an orchid bee that had a blend of male and female body parts and genetics, though genetic analysis allowed them to conclude this bee is mostly feminine.
Suzuki et al. (2015) report:
Findings obtained through both morphological and genetic analyses of a gynander orchid bee (Euglossa melanotricha). For the genetic analysis, microsatellite markers were used to genotype the gynander bee. The morphological analysis revealed that the individual studied had a sting, and most parts of the insect body showed female phenotype, except for the three left legs. As in other reports on gynanders of orchid bees, the specimen of E. melanotricha analyzed herein was included in the category of mixed (or mosaic). From the seven microsatellite loci amplified, five were heterozygous for both male and female tissues, indicating that the organism analyzed is compatible with a diploid organism and not with a hemizygous or haploid one. Both the morphological and genetic characteristics of the gynander of E. melanotricha analyzed reveal that this specimen shows predominantly female characteristics.
Yet, Suzuki and colleagues suggest that this female-male labeling is not as clarifying as directly studying the mechanisms would be, and urge other researchers to look further into csd gene regulation:
In parallel, when considering the genetic uniformity of phenotypically different tissues (male and female) of this individual, the gynandromorph of E. melanotricha would be, in fact, an intersex bee.
In the current literature, there are over 100 reports of anomalous bees, showing both female and male phenotypes in the same individual, usually named gynander or gynadromorph (Wcislo et al. 2004; Michez et al. 2009). In light of the above scenario [of possible sampling bias discussed in omitted text], we suggest that future studies on gynander and intersex bees should give more emphasis to the understanding of the mechanisms involved in the csd gene regulation in an attempt to better elucidate how these anomalous organisms are generated.
Interested in haplodiploidy?
This sex determination system exists in all insects, Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps) and Thysanoptera (thrips), rotifers, Hemiptera (cicadas, aphids, leafhoppers), and Coeoptera (bark beetles).
References
Gempe, T., Hasselmann, M., Schiøtt, M., Hause, G., Otte, M., & Beye, M. 2009. Sex Determination in Honeybees: Two Separate Mechanisms Induce and Maintain the Female Pathway. PLoS Biol. 2009 Oct; 7(10): e1000222. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000222. PMID: 19841734.
Hoff, M. 2009. Male or Female? For Honeybees, a Single Gene Makes All the Difference. PLoS Biol. 2009 Oct; 7(10): e1000186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000186. PMID: 20076733.
“The origin of the gynandromorphs has been attributed to genetic problems, and although different hypotheses have been raised to explain genetically the origin of the gynandromorphism in bees, the mechanisms that generate these abnormal individuals have not been elucidated.” Michez, D., Rasmont, P., Terzo, M., Vereecken, N.J. (2009) “A synthesis of gynandromorphy among wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), with an annotated description of several new cases.” Ann. Soc. Entomol. Fr. 45, 365–375
Michez, D., Rasmont, P., Terzo, M., Vereecken, N.J. (2009) A synthesis of gynandromorphy among wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), with an annotated description of several new cases. Ann. Soc. Entomol. Fr. 45, 365–375
Suzuki, K.M., Giangarelli, D.C., Ferreira, D.G. et al. (2015) “A scientific note on an anomalous diploid individual of Euglossa melanotricha (Apidae, Euglossini) with both female and male phenotypes”. Apidologie (2015) 46: 495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-014-0339-5.
Wcislo, W.T., Gonzalez, V.H., Arneson, L. (2004) A review of deviant phenotypes in bees in relation to brood parasitism, and a gynandromorph of Megalopta genalis (Hymenoptera: Halictidae). J. Nat. Hist. 38, 1443–1457.
For more about intersexuality in bees, see this comprehensive review papeR
Narita, S., Pereira, R.A.S., Kjellberg, F., Kageyama, D. (2010) Gynandromorphs and intersexes: potential to understand the mechanism of sex determination in arthropods. Terr. Arthropod Rev. 3, 63–96.
Why does Homosexuality Evolve?
This video by Soliloquy outlines several hypotheses for why same-sex sexual behavior has persisted rather than becoming extinct in human and nonhuman species. Although not all of these hypotheses are supported by data, the video demonstrates how a behavior that appears deleterious to an individual can actually be neutral or beneficial when considering the complex social interactions within a population.