Ilya Mechnikov, a scientist arguably quite ahead of his time, shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for his work on human immunity. His research interest was garnered by his (not arguable) horrid experiences with diseases caused by bacterial infection. After his first wife died from tuberculosis, he attempted to take his own life with an opium overdose, but managed to live. His misery didn’t end there however. When his second wife developed typhoid fever, he wanted to die with her, and inoculated himself with a tick-borne disease. They both survived, but it made him realize the salient significance of the body’s natural immune system.

In the wake of their bodies’ perseverance, Mechnikov grew dedicated—obsessed—with research in human immunity. During the cholera epidemic in France in 1892, as part of his self-experimentation, he drank a culture of Vibrio cholera, the bacteria responsible for the disease.

He didn’t get sick, so he gave the culture to a volunteer in his lab—who didn’t contract cholera either—but a second volunteer became stricken with the disease and subsequently died. In further lab experiments, he found that some microbes stimulated the growth of cholera bacteria and some hindered it.

He thought the human gut flora was responsible for this and hypothesized that if ingesting a pathogenic culture can make you sick, then surely a good one should promote health. “With the help of science man can correct the imperfections of his nature,” he wrote.

The use of fermented foods—which in essence and most cases are cultures of “good bacteria”—has been around for centuries. Research shows written records of the health benefits of fermented milk (yogurt) and fermented milk products date as far as back as 6000 BC in ancient Hindu scripts. The Greeks made written reference to fermented food products in 100 BC, and it is reputed that Genghis Khan fed his army fermented mare’s milk because he believed it instilled bravery in them. It was not until the 20th century, though, that a Bulgarian medical student—Stamen Grigorov—discovered a lactic acid bacteria (Bacillus bulgaricus) in yogurt cultures.

Bacterial fermented foods, thought to promote digestive health, are prevalent throughout history and ubiquitous in every corner of the globe, from Eastern European sauerkraut to Korean kimchi to Japanese natto.

In current times, a growing body of research shows that maintaining a healthy gut and microbiome with diet can have a significant impact on health and well being. Further, it is contended that the right balance of gut bacteria can help stave off disease.

The Second Brain In Our Gut

A microbiologist once told me, “You are over 90% bacteria and about 10% human.” What? Really? I then looked it up and found out it was indeed true. We have 10 times more bacterial cells cohabiting our bodies than human cells. The human microbiome is collectively the 10-100 trillion microorganisms, mainly bacteria, living in our gut weighing between one to three pounds; every microbiome is specific to a particular environment (all microorganisms interacting with each other in a particular area in the body, such as the gastrointestinal tract or gut) or body part.

The microbiome also refers to the combined genetic material of the microbiota in that environment or organ. These trillions of bacteria interact and communicate with the enteric nervous system or what scientists have labeled the “second brain.”

As Michael Gershon, Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University and “father of neurogastroenterology” writes, “Once dismissed as a simple collection of relay ganglia (a cluster of nerve cell bodies), the enteric nervous system is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.”

The enteric nervous system comprises about 500 million neurons or two-thirds the amount found in a cat. It is embedded in our gastrointestinal tract—starting at the esophagus and ending at the anus.

Together, the second brain in the gut and its microbiome have a significant effect on the brain, influencing mood, behavior, and disease. As such, the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the U.S. launched the Human Microbiome Project in order to identify and characterize the human microbiota.

The Great Brain-Gut-Microbiome Connection

Recent evidence shows that the brain interacts with the enteric system in the gut (second brain) and the gut microbiome in a bi-directional manner. It’s a three-way communication circuit called the Brain-Gut-Microbiome Axis and involves three systems—central nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune. A common example of a brain-gut interaction is that “butterflies in your stomach” feeling. Your palms are sweaty and trembling, your heart rate increases, your skin becomes pale or flushed, and you (maybe) feel like you want to throw up. This is part of the fight-or-flight physiological stress response and evidence of how our gut is related to how we feel.

So just how do the microbes in our gut influence mood? In truth, scientists are not 100% clear on how these microbes directly influence our brains, but they propose that it’s through multiple pathways. For example, it is well known that the four main chemicals associated with happiness and mood in human beings are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Research shows serotonin (although its function is complex as it is involved in many physiological processes) to be a mood regulator playing a major role in the treatment of depression and susceptibility to both depression and suicide.

The enteric nervous system in our gastrointestinal tract is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.
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And guess what? About 90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract; researchers at Caltech showed that gut microbes are integral in serotonin synthesis. Similarly, gut bacteria are implicated in the synthesis of other chemicals and neurotransmitters involved in mood regulation and disease. Further, scientific findings in the journal Behavioural Brain Works illustrated that some bacteria affect how these mood compounds are metabolized. Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that some microbes can activate the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body and a main line of bidirectional communication between the brain and gut.

90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract.
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Advancements in genome sequencing technology is enabling research into the impact of the gut microbiome on disease. By mapping the genome of the gut microbiome in diseased vs. healthy humans and animals, conclusions on the role of the gut microbes in disease proliferation can—and have been—deduced. And a very interesting way to glean this information is to analyze feces.

Your poop can be very informative. One study using genetic analysis of clinically depressive folks’ poop compared to those who aren’t, found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota (representative of gut microbiota) and depression. Although they report that their findings need to be further tested in larger cohorts, their results were specific for a particular strain (sub-type of microorganism) and genus (group or class of species):

 “The Oscillibacter type strain has valeric acid as its main metabolic end product, a homolog of neurotransmitter GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid), while Alistipes has previously been shown to associated with induced stress in mice.”

“Valeric acid structurally resembles GABA, and has been shown to bind the GABAa receptor. Therefore, it is possible that bacteria involved in valeric acid production and/or metabolism could also be associated with depression.”

The work of professor Bernhard Lüscher and colleagues at Penn State University shows that enhancing the activity of GABA in the brains of depressed mice has antidepressive effects, similar to that of antidepressive drugs, bringing mice back to “normal” behavior. Noteworthy is that GABA is implicated in mood disorders and its agonists have been shown to be antidepressive and antimanic.

This includes less of a certain type of bacteria in human fecal microbiota in depressed individuals compared to healthy ones.

Your poop can be *very* informative. Studies have found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota and depression.
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What is even more interesting is that researchers at the University College Cork in Ireland showed that if you transplant the microbiome from a depressed individual to animals, these animals will exhibit the same behavior of the depressed individual. These include anhedonia (not wanting to do the things you usually take pleasure in) and anxiety-like behavior.

This study also showed that depression is associated with decreased gut microbiota richness and diversity. Further, in humans, fecal microbiota transplants—introducing healthy feces into the microbiome of a diseased person—have been successful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disease and colitis and clostridium difficile infection with an efficacy rate of almost 90%.

Auxiliary Advances

Across the globe, the International Diabetes Federation report 425 million adults (or 1 in 11 adults) with diabetes while the CDC reports 30.3 million in the U.S. (with over 100 million living with diabetes or prediabetes) and 3.4 million in Canada, according to Diabetes Canada.

Diabetes and obesity are oftentimes linked as it is well-documented that obesity has a strong correlation between insulin resistance and diabetes. In a promising and growing area of research using humans, a small clinical trial in the Netherlands showed that a fecal transplant from a lean donor can temporarily improve insulin resistance in obese men.

In another growing area of research, large differences are seen in the gut microbiomes of people with Parkinson’s disease compared with healthy individuals. Further, a study published in the journal Cell show that when fecal microbes from persons with Parkinson’s disease was transferred to mice, they exhibited more severe symptoms of the disease and the aggregation of α-synuclein in the brain. (The formation of plaques in the brain via aggregation of α-synuclein is found in persons with neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia.) Meanwhile another study revealed that probiotic supplementation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease showed improved in cognitive function.

But Just How Did We Get Our Microbiome Anyway?

It has been shown that the vaginal and maternal gut microbiome changes significantly during pregnancy. Science journal PLOS|One as well as a Finnish study in Cell, respectively, showed that pregnant women exhibit lower vaginal bacteria than nonpregnant women as well as a lack of population diversity in gut microbiota.

In the International Journal of Obesity, researchers found that children exposed to prenatal antibiotics in the second or third trimester had an 84% higher risk of developing obesity compared to children who were not exposed. Further, Caesarians were linked to 46% higher risks of developing childhood obesity; your first microbe colonizers are acquired via exchanges with your mother largely during the birthing process, when you are—quite literally—slathered in vaginal bacteria.

In addition, as research shows, any disturbance to this microbe exchange such as delivery by C-section, perinatal antibiotics and formula feeding is linked to an increased risk in metabolic and immune disease. After birth, a child’s microbiome continues to grow and is changed by ingestion of the microbes in breast milk which stabilizes neonatal gut microbiome. As we grow older, our gut microbiomes can change throughout life depending on diet, environment and the drugs we may take, such as antibiotics.

So How Do We Promote A Healthy Microbiome?

There is still a lot of ongoing research on the brain-gut-microbiome connection, but it’s quite clear that the gut microbiota can have a significant impact on mood, health and disease. So here are a few ways—and foods!—that will keep your gut microbiome healthy and thriving:

1. Probiotics – research shows they can be used to maintain a healthy gut and restore the gut microbiota to health (after disruption as in the case of illness and the use of antibiotics).
2. Prebiotics foods – these cause the growth and stimulate the activity of beneficial microbes in the gut.
3. Whole grain foods/foods high in fiber – these have been shown to promote the growth of specific bacteria only digested by certain bacterial types. For example, apples and artichokes have been shown to increase Bifidobacteria (a good bacteria) in humans.
4. Fermented foods – people have been eating these foods for centuries. They have been shown to reduce the number of disease-causing bacteria in the gut and promote the growth of beneficial bacteria. It has been shown that people who eat a lot of yogurt have less of the bacteria linked to inflammation (Enterobacteriaceae).
5. Diversity in food – a diet comprising a diversity in food leads to a diverse microbiota which is considered healthy.
6. Polyphenols in red wine and grapes – these have been shown to improve specific beneficial microbiota.

Aphantasia is a little-known condition that affects the mind’s “inner eye.” While most people are able to close their eyes and have real-feeling sensory experiences (visual, aural, and otherwise), I am without this ability. When I close my eyes, I see only darkness. And while others dream in full color and hear sounds, I only dream in words and feelings.  

I used to think that my experience of darkness was like that of everyone else. We often use the same language to describe our thoughts and feelings, with there being no differentiation indicating our individual experiences like that in the mind’s eye. Once I learned about my difference of perception, I had vivid conversations with others who thought that my experience was foreign. For a while I felt broken and incomplete because I was missing out on something that was so basic for others, but these days, I do not feel so bad about it. It’s hard to miss what I have never had, and the idea of suddenly seeing pictures in my mind actually scares me.

Aphantasia exists on a broad spectrum. Although aphantasiacs experience a lack of sensory imagery in the mind, many with the condition still dream with full sensory imagery. Others experience face-blindness, struggling to recognize the most familiar of people. It is estimated that about 2% of the general populace are on the aphantasia spectrum. For me personally, I am 100% sensory-blind when both awake and asleep, but I do not have problems with recognizing faces.

It is widely accepted that aphantasia is a congenital condition, manifesting from birth onward. According to a study by Joel Pearson at the University of South Wales in Sydney, those without aphantasia have more activity in the prefrontal cortex in the brain. “The visual cortex is like a sketch pad; it’s where you create images,” said Pearson in New Scientist.

Given that the prefrontal cortex controls the visual cortex, this allows for what we call the mind’s eye, an ability to create visual images. Pearson’s same study found that electronic stimulation can enhance activity in the prefrontal cortex with technology called transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS), which can potentially allow for an aphantasiac to experience imagery instead of darkness. He posits that science’s ability to manipulate the mind’s eye—increasing or decreasing its strength—could affect everything from learning new ideas and making “moral decisions” to potentially decreasing image-based trauma or hallucinations among those who are schizophrenic.

I am definitely a sexual person, and desire sex in my life. However, due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex. I always have known that my approach to desire is different from others, but could never put my finger on it until discovering I have aphantasia.

In my teens, while my peers began discovering their own senses of their sexuality, I remained—quite literally—in the dark. I always wondered how people just “knew” they were gay, or “knew” what they liked sexually. When people talked of having fantasies, I could not relate because I had none of my own.

As a teen, I had my own crushes and senses of attraction as well—albeit in a unique way. I focused on intellectual capacity and creativity, and found people attractive in the way one would marvel at an excellent work of art. While I many pined after handsome faces, I fell in love with a British theater actor from “Topsy Turvy,” a film about the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, a Victorian librettist and composer duo who wrote famous operettas such as The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. For me, creative expression and artistry are the bedrock of my sense of romance and sexuality.

Due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex.
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Yet as years passed, I still felt extreme anxiety because I had no sexual fantasies. I started to fear that I was gay because I did not fantasize about men, but there were never any thoughts about women either. I felt tremendously insecure in pursuing any sort of serious relationship. What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?

Regarding my insecurities with sexuality, I have confided in close friends over the years, trying to gain perspective about what I really am. My friends always reassured me that whatever my sexuality is, it is a beautiful thing to celebrate and express. Yet it did not feel beautiful to me—it felt like a scary, gaping hole.

Beginning in 2015, I began browsing the online forums on the website of the Asexuality Visibility & Education Network (AVEN) to try and find answers for myself. It is a great place for me to visit when I have my questions about sexuality, where people are friendly and able to write without being under the influence of sexual excitement. It was not until 2018, at the age of 33, that someone mentioned that my lack of fantasies may be due to me having aphantasia. After briefly investigating the condition, I immediately realized that this was my experience and reality!

I inquired about aphantasia on AVEN, and some members professed having similar experiences to me. A casual poll in 2017 on AVEN asked members about having aphantasia, and 42.5% of 54 respondents said they were on the spectrum. This is far higher than the purported 2% in the general populace.

I then went on Facebook to join aphantasia groups for additional support, writing about how the condition gives me an experience similar to asexuality. Most people vehemently responded that they are absolutely not asexual, but that they experience sexuality in non-sensory ways. It appears there isn’t a reciprocal correlation—while asexuals may be more likely to have aphantasia, those with aphantasia are not more likely to be asexual.

What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?
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After discovering that I have aphantasia, I am now investigating ways for me to adapt and adjust. With my boyfriend—whom I find attractive both aesthetically and intellectually—I now keep my eyes open instead of closing them when we’re intimate. Seeing him visually helps me feel in the mood, and now I realize what my sexuality really is. I’m heterosexual, but also feel like I’m on the asexual spectrum by default. The term “demisexual” seems to suit me—I only experience attraction with someone I am profoundly emotionally connected to.

While my experiences are unusual, I do not believe my aphantasia is any sort of deficiency. Instead, I’ve grown to view it as something that makes me unique, and believe that my experience is just as valid as those of others. I also feel that my aphantasia allows for me to have heightened senses in other areas. I find joy in contemplating life and the people around me as philosophical fodder, all describable with florid language. I journal and write constantly, putting these feelings and observations down on paper. I like to imbibe my words with a rhythm and lilt that feels akin to music. I know that I approach writing in a unique way.

As I talk to people about my aphantasia, many people express intrigue about my condition. It can be a mind-bender for non-aphantasiacs to try and fathom my world of darkness, just as their vivid sensory imaginations are equally as foreign to me. Honest conversations allow for us to share our world views with one another, practice empathy, and celebrate our differences.

Imagine that.

This past June, the European Union and dozens of pharmaceutical companies—including AstraZeneca (which sells Movantik constipation tablets), Glaxosmithkline, and Pfizer—announced they’ve been awarded a $131 million research grant aimed at studying neurodevelopmental conditions. The aim of the grant is to “increase our understanding of autism and help to develop new therapies to improve health outcomes and quality of life for autistic people.”

But the research program has been heavily criticized by many of those in the autistic community, who describe the Autism Innovative Medical Studies-2-Trials as not only offensive—many neurodivergent people feel their differences should be celebrated, not “fixed”—but as potentially serving as an argument to stop autistic people being born altogether.

Panda Mery is a university researcher in London and a former journalist, lecturer, and software engineer. He’s also autistic, and when he found out that a huge U.S.-based charity called Autism Speaks was involved in the AIMS-2 project, he grew highly suspicious of what “solutions” this research was seeking out.

“[Autism Speaks] are basically a hate speech organization,” he told me in an interview. “They treat autism like a cancer. You want to get rid of the cancer. You want to get rid of the autism. But autism is part of your identity. It’s like, how can you get rid of the Britishness of someone? How can you get rid of the Jewishness of someone? How can you get rid of the autism of someone?”

Autism Speaks is also held in low esteem by the two other autistic people I interviewed. Dr. Damian Milton, a social scientist at England’s University of Kent, said the organization has a “very dubious reputation with the autistic community.” Cos Michael, an autism consultant, added, “They used to have a prize every year called the ‘curing autism’ hero. They hate autism.”

When these comments were put to Autism Speaks senior director of media strategy Aurelia Grayson, she replied:

“These comments completely mischaracterize Autism Speaks, which is dedicated to increasing understanding and acceptance of people with autism. Our national board and staff include adults with autism and parents of children on the spectrum, guiding every aspect of our mission–from research to family services and advocacy.

Research funded by Autism Speaks shows that autism affects each person differently. As you know, some people can live independently; others need assistance with certain aspects of their lives, such as education or employment; and others have significant medical and behavioral challenges requiring 24/7 care. Through research, we are gaining a better understanding of the many forms of autism, which will make it possible to tailor treatments, resources and supports to individual needs.”

With alarm bells ringing, Mery requested a copy of the AIMS-2 grant agreement under EU transparency rules. On receiving the 664-page document, the alarm bells’ decibels became deafening. One section in particular troubled him:

“Currently, there are no effective medical treatments for the core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Our overall goal is to address these shortcomings by adopting a precision-medicine approach to better target treatments to patients through the use of validated stratification biomarkers and by testing novel or repurposed drugs.”

For Mery, targeting the symptoms of autism sounds a lot like “curing autism”—but autism is not a disease, it does not need curing. Cos Michael also objects to this language of “core symptoms”:

“What are they? Are they good things? Bad things? Who decides? Because they keep changing. Through history, the ‘core symptoms’ of autism have changed. It’s about what other [non-autistic] people call them. And ‘targeting them’? Why? Because we want to take them out? It’s so full of…well, hate, frankly.”

While nobody I spoke to wanted to overstate the comparison, there are similarities with how homophobia views homosexuality—as something to be cured. The American Psychiatric Association viewed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1987 and still views autism as such. Panda hopes one day that will change.

AIMS-2 is poised as a threat to the very survival of the autistic community. The trials aim to identify “biomarkers”—genes which are linked to autism. There’s nothing inherently wrong with research like this, just like there was nothing wrong with Ernest Rutherford’s research into splitting the atom. Gaining knowledge is rarely a bad thing, but how that knowledge is subsequently used is another story altogether.

Targeting the symptoms of autism sounds a lot like curing autism—but autism is not a disease, it does not need curing.
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Rutherford’s research, of course, was ultimately used to create the nuclear bomb; autism biomarkers could be used to inform pregnant mothers that their babies are likely to be autistic. Given the social stigma of autism, the misconceptions around it, and the reality that raising autistic children can be difficult, this could potentially lead to mass abortion and a declining autistic population.

This might sound like dystopian fiction but, as both Michael and Mery pointed out, in Iceland this is already a reality for people with Down’s Syndrome. Icelandic doctors are required by law to tell pregnant women that there is a screening test available which can indicate (among other things) the presence of Down’s Syndrome in their fetus. According to CBS, nearly all the women whose tests indicate Down’s Syndrome, terminate the pregnancy.

“If you get the biomarker research that they’re aiming for, you’ll be able to eliminate a group of people based on the fact that you just don’t want that group of people around,” warned Michael. “It’s designer baby time. It’s eugenics.”

Dr. Milton agrees that the search for autistic biomarkers is “a bit eugenicist,” but he thinks the search will fail. “It’s a genuine concern, but it’s like the U2 song, they’re not going to find what they’re looking for,” he joked. “Autism is an umbrella term describing a way of being, a way of acting in the world which is part of the diversity of people. It’s a category which is social in nature. Trying to find a biomarker for autism is not going to happen as such. Even sub-types of autism is a bit of a lost cause.”

His concern is that millions of euros will be spent on developing drugs that don’t work and may have side effects, and that parents will be told inaccurately that their children have an increased likelihood of autism. All this will improve pharmaceutical company profits, but increase the stigma of autism.

With all this money wasted, what the autistic community itself actually wants to be researched remains largely ignored by AIMS-2. When autistic people were asked what they wanted researching, they answered with things like, “how to reduce anxiety” and “how to improve mental health, adult social care, and adult autism diagnoses.” But, as the answer to most of these problems are unlikely to be “new drugs,” pharmaceutical companies are not interested.

On one point however, the interests of big pharma and autistic people are, at least partly, aligned. Epilepsy is common in autistic people, and Mery, Michael, and Damian all said they would welcome research into drugs to treat it. Research into epilepsy is mentioned in the AIMS-2 grant agreement, but is not as core to the program as many would like it to be.

With all this money wasted, what the autistic community itself actually wants to be researched remains largely ignored by AIMS-2.
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And while the power may seem to be with the EU and the multi-billion dollar corporations, ordinary autistic people do have some leverage in fact. The tests will need what Michael calls “lab rats,” autistic volunteers. “It doesn’t matter how much money they can throw at it,” she said, “If they can’t get autistic people involved, then how can they carry out their trials?”

(One of the companies involved is the world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company—Roche. When contacted for this article, the company denied it was researching a cure for autism and claimed that AIMS-2 was transparent and was consulting with autistic people. Their answers did not satisfy the autistic people I spoke to.)

This September, GQ ran a piece on the topic of lowering sperm counts, with the rather foreboding title “Sperm Count Zero.” Throughout the piece the author, Daniel Noah Halpern, asks scientists to take study data about sperm counts, and extrapolate on what that means for men. He starts the piece with a basic premise, which is that men are by definition people who make sperm, and that gender essentialism infects everything about the piece.

Reading it reminded me that while understanding science is deeply and profoundly important, after our schooling is done most of us are getting our scientific knowledge not from scientists, but from science journalists. And Mr. Halpern over at GQ isn’t the only journalist filling his articles with gender essentialism. In fact, science media as a whole has a massive gender essentialism problem. This problem is just as prevalent in new media as it is in old, just as likely to show up in hip publications as it is anywhere else, and it has massive implications for how we understand sex and gender as a society.

The conflation of sex and gender, and the use of gender essentialism and straight up sexism in science writing, contribute to an overall culture in which it’s easy for people to assume that sperm is what makes a man, that vaginas are what make a woman, and that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Mixing gender essentialism with science seems to give gender essentialism more weight and credibility, allowing bigoted ideas about gender to be assumed factual without being challenged.

Gender essentialism is so ingrained in the way that we talk about science, that unless you are looking for it, it can be difficult to even notice. It shows up in nature documentaries, when narrators often use heavily gendered language to describe animal behavior (I love David Attenborough, but any time he narrates animal courtship it is cringeworthy). There’s also more going on here than mere sexism.

Mixing gender essentialism with science seems to give gender essentialism more weight and credibility
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To understand the sex and gender issues at play in science media, it’s important to understand the terms. In general, biological sex is defined by a combination of physical traits such as chromosomes, genitals, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics (this includes stuff like whether or not you have a beard). Those traits are used to lump a person or animal into a category such as male, female, or intersex. Gender is the social and cultural stuff which is often, but not always, tied to sex. The simplified version of sex and gender that most of us learn when we start to dig into gender issues is that sex is physical, but gender is a social construct, or “sex is what’s between your legs, gender is what’s in your heart.” The truth turns out to be a little more complicated than that. For years transgender activists have been pointing out that the way we define sex is also socially constructed, and as this twitter thread from a scientist so beautifully illustrated, the two primary categories of male and female are hardly the best way to classify people.

All of this is easy to mix up with the scientific concept of sexual reproduction, which is just a form of reproduction that uses two cells in order to make a new organism. Many organisms reproduce sexually in ways that look nothing like the “two sexes” system we’ve come to expect. For instance, many slugs all carry both male and female sex cells, and during mating both fertilize each other. However, when humans look at the animal world, we seem to have a tendency to interpret in a way that makes it a little more human, and therefore a little more gendered. I can’t overstate enough that this is humans adding our own cultural biases to data that doesn’t usually conform to them. Scientists themselves are not immune to this, but science writers, in their attempt to make the data relatable and interesting to the public, take it even further. As journalists, they have a responsibility to convey the information accurately, and to attempt to check their biases at the door, but often they conflate sex and gender, fall back on sexist assumptions about sex and gender, and simplify the concept of sex so much as to make it inaccurate.

When writers (and to some extent, scientists themselves) reach for metaphors to describe scientific information, they often rest on gendered assumptions. The way we talk about sperm is a classic example of that; we tend to see sperm as aggressive and masculine when they are, in fact, just tiny cells. We also tend to assume that sperm production is for men, when in fact not all men make sperm, and not all people who make sperm are men. The popular science blog IFL Science ran an article called “Why Do Men Exist” which, no surprise here, was specifically asking about cisgender sperm producing men. Other winning IFL headlines include things like “Suffering From Man-Flu Not Attractive, Science Confirms.” As a transgender man and a science nerd, reading these articles can be anything from mildly amusing to incredibly irritating, as most of the time, I am not included in their definition of “man.”

When humans look at the animal world, we seem to have a tendency to interpret in a way that makes it a little more human, and therefore a little more gendered
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This gender essentialism can be found at all levels of science reporting. The WNYC show Radiolab has won a National Academies Communication Award “for their investigative use of radio to make science accessible to broad audiences,” and its unique approach to sharing scientific knowledge has made it a great way for people, myself included, to get interested in science as adults. Given its position as a cool, weird science radio show and podcast, you might expect a deeper and more accurate look at issues of biological sex, and a more progressive look at gender issues. However, in their 2008 episode about sperm, called simply Sperm, co-host Robert Krulwich referred to spermatozoa as “the wiggly cells that, along with male pattern baldness, seems to describe everything you need to know about being a man.” One would think that equating a single cell with the entire concept of manhood would be offensive not only to trans men, but to everyone, but the theme persisted throughout the entire episode.

I was cautiously optimistic when Radiolab announced a new series of episodes about reproduction and the human body, all under the heading of “Gonads.” The six episodes promised in-depth reporting by producer Molly Webster, and the name suggested some acknowledgement of the ambiguity between the sexes. The first episode, sadly, offered more of the same simplification and essentialism I’d come to expect. When describing the primordial journey of the cells of the gonads themselves, there was never any indication that there was any possible outcome other than testicles, which would make the fetus a boy, or ovaries, which would make it a girl. Even though intersex conditions are about as common as red hair, and have everything to do with how a fetus develops, they were left out of the conversation of fetal development. Later in the series, when, in all fairness, a slightly more nuanced and complex take was given, sex was still presented as a binary, and it was still taken for granted that simply having ovaries would make one identify as a girl. One episode featured a lengthy interview with Dana Zzyym, who is intersex, and that interview was handled with sensitivity… but that didn’t undo the rampant gender essentialism of the series as a whole. In a separate episode, chromosomal variations outside of XX and XY were casually referred to as “aberrations.”

Science writers often have to simplify big complex issues like sex and gender in order to explain the science to the general public. The problem is that these omissions, sexist metaphors, and gender essentialist assumptions are everywhere and they add up. And they do not happen in a vacuum. Right now transgender people are more visible than possibly ever before, but with that visibility comes a very vocal and often dangerous opposition. Transphobes want to be able to point to science and say “look, there are only two sexes!” and “having a penis makes you a boy, that’s just how it works.” Science doesn’t actually back up their bigotry at all (in fact, it confirms that both gender and sex determination are extremely varied), but science writing sure makes it look as though it does. As we’ve seen with climate change and vaccine issues in this country, what the actual science says often has less of an impact than public opinion.

But don’t just take my word for it, there’s even been a study showing that bigotry against trans people is fed by “scientific” information that seems to support that men and women are somehow wired differently.

The problem is that these omissions, sexist metaphors, and gender essentialist assumptions are everywhere and they add up.
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So what can be done? Well, science writers can be careful about journalistic standards, and avoid extrapolating study data based on their own gendered assumptions, for one. We could also all stand to be a bit more direct and say what we mean when discussing things like reproduction. If we’re talking about people who have testicles, we can very easily say “people with testicles” rather than “men,” for example. We need science writing that isn’t afraid to dig into that complexity, because that’s where the real story is.

Back over at GQ, Halpern fell right into the standard essentialist assumptions, even referring to cisgender men with lower testosterone as “less male.” I read the whole article with my mouth opened in not to so much shock, but amazement that a single article could so perfectly encapsulate everything I had come to hate about science writing. Through all the hand wringing about falling sperm counts runs an endless commentary about men, and he doesn’t have to say it for me to know I’m not included. At the close of the article, he offers up a few potential scenarios for the species. Either sperm counts will drop so low we’ll go extinct, we’ll become completely reliant on fertility treatments to reproduce, or we’ll figure out how to get pregnant using stem cells that have been converted into sperm with “no need for any males.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty clear that Halpern thinks the final scenario would be worst of all.

By Jennifer Neal

When I hear the term “baby fever,” a certain image comes to mind. A baby — literally having a fever — which finds me in the emergency room in the middle of the night right before the deadline of a career-making article is due.

Another vision of “baby fever” is being vomited all over after my child has drunk a large blueberry milkshake. Other visions involve broken bones, infections, antibiotics and allergic reactions, sleepless nights, and living in the twilight stages of permanent anxiety, while my partner is sound asleep dreaming of solid food intake.

Basically, “baby fever” is anything except the desire to have a child.

The concept of motherhood is terrifying to me. Yet my social media feed is inundated with Twitter post after Facebook album after Instagram story of people who may have, once upon a time, tried to convince me to participate in a variety of threesomes — but who now seem to occupy their time with appeals to the public on the consistency of their kids’ bowel movements, and the incomprehensible joy they feel when being vomited all over after their kid has consumed a blueberry milkshake.

So I’ve concluded that, at the very least, the prerequisites to being a good parent have been somewhat sanitized in mass media — meaning, if I want to become a mother, not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later. It’s not an urge that needs to claw at my uterus. It can just be a decision.

In fact, there is one thing that gives me comfort in the road ahead to motherhood: Not a single one of us has a maternal instinct.

It simply, plainly does not exist. Just ask Dr. Gillian Ragsdale, a biological anthropologist who teaches psychology with the Open University in the United Kingdom. She says that the word “instinct” is being misused time and again in the context of parenting, because it’s often confused with a “drive.”

Not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later.
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“Instinct is hard wired. You don’t really think about it. A drive is motivating, it gives behavior direction, but it’s not an irresistible force,” she tells me during a Skype interview. In that sense, human beings have very few instincts — even the instinct to eat can be denied (just look at dangerous mainstream diets). If a woman chooses not to become a mother, then the biological changes that happen during motherhood won’t happen either, because there is no need for a maternal drive, something that Dr. Ragsdale attributes to hormones.

“The maternal drive can be hormonally influenced, for example by pregnancy. This is the same in other mammals. Once the offspring is there in front of them, that’s when the maternal drive generally kicks in — but not always even then.”

In fact, pregnancy itself is a common way to cultivate that “maternal drive.”

That’s what happened to my friend of the past 20 years, Amy Spears. We met on America Online when I was 14 and she was 18, and we’ve been internet stalking each other ever since. She says she never planned or wanted to be a mother, but it happened anyway. “I cried for three days when I found out I was pregnant, and another three once I decided to keep him.”

Like most of the women I spoke to, she was worried about how having a child would impact her autonomy and her social life. But unlike others, she walked into the decision knowing that she would be a single mom, because the father had begged her to have an abortion, something which at first, she wanted too. Everything changed when she went to the clinic with her old roommate.

“I saw the ultrasound and something just clicked. It was like, ‘We’re having a baby.’”

Amy says that her maternal drive didn’t really kick in until a year after her baby son was born. “I remember crying while he was crying for no reason one night, and I actually said ‘Who let me bring this baby home? They gave it to me and let me just leave the hospital?’”

Undoubtedly a wonderful mother, Amy nonetheless couldn’t help from scrutinizing herself to the point of exhaustion — constantly comparing her experience with pre-conceived notions surrounding motherhood.

“I never questioned having him. I just remember thinking that something must be wrong with me for not having that overwhelming ‘motherly’ feeling.”

It was through what she calls “going through the motions” (what Dr. Ragsdale calls “grooming”) that this eventually changed, but it still took time. “I did all the things I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was an imposter sometimes. I didn’t get the full on ‘mom love’ until months after.”

The “maternal instinct” casts women as natural care givers, when in fact mothering is not something that comes very naturally for a lot of people. As a result, stories like Amy’s are often excluded from the narrative. There is, of course, a distinctly gendered component to this; for both women and men, parenting requires a lot of work, but society feels more comfortable imposing a standard of innate parental ability onto women — perpetuating gender roles that ultimately support a patriarchal society.

According to the 2012 research paper Emotional Regulation of Fertility Decision Making: What Is the Nature and Structure of “Baby Fever”? by Gary L. Brase and Sandra L. Brase, “Feelings about babies and decisions about fertility could be based on the extent to which people have (or have not) internalized general gender norms of their ambient society.”

In that sense, “baby fever” is an effective marketing tool for baby showers, and a popular (albeit trite) plot for Hollywood rom-coms, but little more. “The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children,” says Dr. Ragsdale. “We have a problem with patriarchy. It’s advantageous to portray women as natural caregivers so that they feel it’s a duty.”

According to the 2012 paper Fertility Preference Inversely Related to ‘Legacy Drive’ in Women, But Not in Men: Interpreting the Evolutionary Roots, and Future, of the ‘Childfree’ Culture by Lonnie W. Aarssen and Stephanie T. Altman, that’s exactly what it was.

They posit that most of reproductive psychology throughout history has revolved around the idea that “men had children because they wanted to have sex or leave a legacy, but that women had sex because men wanted to have sex or leave a legacy (regardless of whether or not it was indeed what women wanted).”

The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children.
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Very little has changed. Western societies may support the idea of parenting in theory, but often fall short in practice when it comes to supporting women during and after pregnancy. In places like the U.S., where motherhood is often a career death sentence, categorizing women into those who are “maternal” and those who are not hinders a society from looking at ways to make motherhood more attractive, while also punishing women for becoming mothers by stripping them of financial income, and reducing them to antiquated roles that were never a proper fit to begin with.

Contradictions like these are difficult to navigate when a woman decides that she wants both children and a career, and compounds with fears of being unable to meet unrealistic expectations of motherhood.

“Women who preferred to be ‘childfree’ could rarely exercise that choice throughout countless generations of patriarchal dominance over the course of human evolution,” say Aarssen and Altman. There was simply no significant historical precedent for women to develop a “strong parenting drive,” because they were not afforded a choice in the matter.

Dr. Ragsdale believes that, in combination with these strong historical precedents, motherhood has become less attractive because society has replaced supportive, nurturing communities with the internet — an endless list of URLs offering conflicting advice, evangelical mommy blogs, and all the judgment that money can buy. She explains:

“The social isolation of mothers is a relatively new development in human evolution — where women live in small nuclear families and raise their children alone. If you look at other places around the world, children are raised in communities and you’ll find lower levels of depression and anxiety after childbirth as a result.”

By comparison, being at the mercy of the World Wide Web is a nightmare for new parents. Amara White knows this feeling all too well. She had her first baby in Canada with her husband, far away from their homes in New Zealand and Australia.

“There is so much information on the internet about parenting…if you read parenting blogs and forums before having a baby, it is truly enough to put you off the idea,” Ragsdale says.

Not surprisingly, what helped was surrounding herself with the right people during pregnancy, which she spent worrying about everything from sudden infant death syndrome to her daughter one day developing an eating disorder.

“I overcame these irrational fears by steadfastly building my community…building a community of mothers and fathers who parented similarly to me,” says Amara.

How Parenting Became A Full-Time Job, And Why That’s Bad For Women

“Those same women I surrounded myself with were there for me when my daughter was sick, when I just needed some adult ‘before we were moms’ alcohol time…they made life so much easier to deal with, especially as I had zero family around for support.”

Amara was nurturing the maternal drive by consciously seeking out the kind of environment that was most conducive to raising a child — something without which she believes would have made motherhood agonizing.

“Cultivating a maternal drive is bit like learning language,” posits Ragsdale. “Children are exposed to that early on and learn language from the people who are speaking it. If children were conditioned to be more ‘maternal’ from an early age then the drive might be stronger as adults.”

While some women appear to have a stronger maternal drive, it’s often because they’ve been cultivating that behavior from a very early age, from toy dolls and games to babysitting for neighbors, a job rarely asked of or imposed upon boys. But for many women, like an ex-colleague of mine, it’s okay if the first question that pops into your mind during pregnancy is “Can I ever have wine again?!”

“Maternal drive can definitely be cultivated in women, but I’d like to see it cultivated more in men,” says Ragsdale. “I think we should be introducing the idea to men at an early age. We have sex education, but no parenting education.”

Perhaps that’s why I have more confidence that motherhood can be a logical decision and still be a beautiful, unique experience where my “maternal drive” can be a journey rather than a destination. But I’ll have to reserve my judgment until, as Dr. Ragsdale would say, my offspring is sitting right in front of me, begging to be held. I will do this — until she starts to regurgitate that blueberry milkshake, and I hand her over to her father.