The stories that genes tell

Almost a decade ago, I gave myself a gift. I paid to have my Y chromosome analyzed as a part of a global study: "The Genographic Project was launched in 2005 as a research project in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration."

It was about the old story of migration out of Africa, and not about uncovering any mysteries in my heritage.  There isn't any mystery about my people.  I was glad to help researchers figure out the migratory paths our ancestors took while moving out of Africa into the different corners of the planet that we now inhabit.  And, incidentally, find out the geography of my own genes.

Only a man, who has the XY chromosomes can pass the Y chromosome on to a new generation.  I opted to get this Y chromosome mapped.  Back then, the technology was expensive and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this in order to map the X chromosome too.

The result did not surprise me.  My people have lived in the Subcontinent for a long time.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today. ...

Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

The man who gave rise to marker M20 was born in India or the Middle East. Your ancestors arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan.

But--and this is important--my ancestral father who came to India about 30,000 years ago was not among the first people to come to the Subcontinent.

Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.

By the time he arrived in India, he was an immigrant in a land that was already populated, and this was about 30,000 years ago!

When we take such a long view of where we come from, we will lead humbled lives.  We won't care to think about whether we are different from others, and whether there are some who are inferior or superior to us.  We will recognize our shared past and work together as one.

In this big story, there are millions and millions of subplots.  One of those is told in this fascinating essay in The New Yorker.  It is about skeletons in a high altitude Himalayan lake, Roopkund, that is frozen for most of the year.  Who were those people?

In the process of describing how genetics is helping uncover the mystery, the essay discusses how science helped piece together a story of Europeans by looking at the Y chromosome evidence of the Yamnaya.  The "power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events":

In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover.

I was born into a family of Brahmins whose Vedic beliefs was orally transmitted and later written down in Sanskrit, which was derived from the language spoken by the Yamnaya.  How did this happen, and when did this happen?  What happened to my ancestral people who arrived in the Subcontinent more than 20,000 years before the Indo-Europeans arrived from the Caucasus?  How do all these stories square with the civilized human being that I am?

Some day, we will understand many such mysteries of how we came about. 

Divide and rule!

It has been clear for a while that in the US, there is one major political party that is all about expanding the tent and including people.  And then there is another major political party that is always on a mission to win by excluding people.

But then this country as we understand it was founded on excluding people.  The politics of exclusion is, thus, not anything new by any means.  However, it does not mean that I, like tens of millions of my fellow Americans, am no longer shocked by the rhetoric and politics of exclusion.  It is simply revolting!

The Democratic Party welcomes into its big tent transgender people.  Something like this video now in a trump era feels like it never happened, or that it happened in our dreams, right?

trump and the Republicans, on the other hand, want to erase their existence by redefining the sex of people in America.

for transgender and intersex people, having rights taken away is just not a return to a time before those rights were gained. It is worse. It is traumatic. It can have the effect of leaving people exposed because they don’t have a closet to return to. It can create absurd legal situations—if, for example, state-issued identity documents are not recognized by the federal government. The revocation of rights feels violent because it is violent, in part because the effort is aimed at preventing the rights from being reclaimed. It is probably for this purpose that draft changes to the law include a proposal for genetic testing to determine sex, according to the Times. James Hamblin, a writer for The Atlantic, interpreted this provision as “proposing widespread genetic testing and keeping records of citizens’ genitals.”

Awful. Atrocious. Inhumane!

But, again, not really new to the party loyalists.

But the Republican Party has been telling us all along that it would rather trans people did not exist. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is trying to erase us altogether.

In every thing that trump says or does, you can pretty much trace the line back to the same or similar things that the GOP has always been trying to say or do. The real difference is that trump does that crudely,while back in the pre-trump days, the GOP did that less crudely.

Even after Trump announced a total ban on transgender people serving in the military, they did not recognize the conservative push to erase our identities altogether, to outlaw a legal transition from one gender to another. The news of Trump’s legal redefinition of sex proves just how wrongheaded that assumption always was. Conservatives are now saying, loud and clear, that they will not be content as long as transgender people exist.

You recall that old line?  First they came for the gays ...

It’s a difficult time to be a progressive. The fundamental American values we’ve long used to measure progress are suddenly under attack. Trump and the GOP have shown that they do not believe in human rights at home or abroad. The rights of asylum seekers and children of migrants have been illegally done away with. Our rhetorical commitment to supporting human rights abroad no longer obtains. In light of this dramatic shift away from upholding human rights, the rights of transgender people may feel secondary, dispensable.
But whenever the left agrees to a compromise on basic principles, whenever we accept that some groups’ rights are more equal than others, the message we’re sending is that human rights are ultimately negotiable. The GOP didn’t stop with demonizing Muslims or Hispanics. It won’t stop with trans people, either.

63 million people wanted such exclusion, and they proudly support it!

Not fifty, but a thousand shades of gray

"Can you explain to me this gay thing?" she asked.

"It is complicated," I replied.

In the first place, I am not sure if I have enough expertise to talk about this. On top of that, the usual complaint is that my responses are always way longer than what the questioner had in mind.  I suppose I don't like to merely give the bottom-line, consistent with my philosophical approach to life that it is never merely about the destination but also about the journey itself.

So, without any expertise I launched into a lengthy explanation.

"It is not as if things are black-and-white when it comes to being gay.  Most researchers now talk in terms of sexual fluidity" I started.

I keenly watched out for any glazed expression. Or the eyeball disappearing after having been rolled way up. No signs.  There was an attentive posture.  I got encouraged.

"The this-or-that approach is modern.  In olden times, it seems like people might have been way less rigid about this than we are now."  I went on and on and on.  Interestingly enough, there were even questions posed and it became an interactive session!

A few days later, I read this awesome essay by Siddhartha Mukherjee, on sex, gender, and gender identity.  Yes, the same Mukherjee whose book on cancer won him a Pulitzer.  This essay is an excerpt from another book of his: The Gene: an Intimate History.

Mukherjee writes:

The distinction between the three words is relevant to this discussion. By sex, I mean the anatomic and physiological aspects of male versus female bodies. By gender, I am referring to a more complex idea: the psychic, social, and cultural roles that an individual assumes. By gender identity, I mean an individual’s sense of self (as female versus male, as neither, or as something in between).

Across the world, as we begin to move away from the old collective arrangements that denied an individual's sense of self, we are beginning to see even the supposedly conservative societies having to face the complexity of sex, gender, and gender identity.

Strictly from a genetic perspective:

Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness. Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: We barely made it.

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you know about the geographic migratory path of my maleness that came from the African Savannah.

Anyway, even from a genotype/phenotype perspective--without the cultural/socialization aspects--the story is complex:

In 1955, Gerald Swyer, an English endocrinologist investigating female infertility, had discovered a rare syndrome that made humans biologically female but chromosomally male. “Women” born with “Swyer syndrome” were anatomically and physiologically female throughout childhood, but did not achieve female sexual maturity in early adulthood. When their cells were examined, geneticists discovered that these “women” had XY chromosomes in all their cells. Every cell was chromosomally male—yet the person built from these cells was anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically female. A “woman” with Swyer syndrome had been born with the male chromosomal pattern (i.e., XY chromosomes) in all of her cells, but had somehow failed to signal “maleness” to her body.

Imagine that!  What a complication, right?  In the extended family, we have had at least two cases of girls who were biologically girls but who never reached that sexual maturity in their teens.  I wonder if they too could have been chromosomally male?

But do not jump to conclusions about this chromosomal aspects:

Women with Swyer syndrome are not “women trapped in men’s bodies.” They are women trapped in women’s bodies that are chromosomally male (except for just one gene).

Pause for a second and think about this: "women trapped in women’s bodies that are chromosomally male (except for just one gene)" Head-spinning, right?

How can we reconcile this idea—of a single genetic switch that dominates one of the most profound dichotomies in human identity—with the fact that human gender identity in the real world appears in a continuous spectrum? Virtually every culture has recognized that gender does not exist in discrete half-moons of black and white, but in a thousand shades of gray.

Every single fucked up homophobe, condemning people to hell-on-earth based on some fucked up religious interpretation, should be locked up in a room until they read and understand all these complex issues.

At the top of the cascade, nature works forcefully and unilaterally. Up top, gender is quite simple—just one master gene flicking on and off. If we learned to toggle that switch—by genetic means or with a drug—we could control the production of men or women, and they would emerge with male versus female identity (and even large parts of anatomy) quite intact. At the bottom of the network, in contrast, a purely genetic view fails to perform; it does not provide a particularly sophisticated understanding of gender or its identity. Here, in the estuarine plains of crisscrossing information, history, society, and culture collide and intersect with genetics, like tides. Some waves cancel each other, while others reinforce each other. No force is particularly strong—but their combined effect produces the unique and rippled landscape that we call an individual’s identity.

Like I said, it is complicated.

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