Once upon a time, growing up male gave little boys a sense of certainty about the natural order of things. We had short hair, wore pants, and played baseball. Girls had long hair, wore skirts, and, no matter how hard they tried, always threw a baseball just like a girl. I grew up in the 1950s and never sensed that there might be exceptions to these rules. My parents, sticklers in matters of biological accuracy, made sure I knew that there was another difference too. A few things little boys had that little girls did not. Girls, I concluded, were nothing more than little boys who were missing a couple of parts here and there. They clearly deserved sympathy.
The idea of male completeness was reinforced in school. I still remember Mrs. Macak, my third-grade teacher, quelling a minirevolt among my female classmates. During a lesson on pronouns, she told us convention dictated that a person of unknown gender is always presumed to be male. It’s not fair! Kathy Peale (the best student in our grade) protested, to howls of delight from the other girls. You’re right, Kathy, said Mrs. Macak, smiling. But you’d better get used to it. It’s a man’s world, ladies. It’s a man’s world. In 1956 it sure was.
A few years later I began to think that my sense of male completeness had a scientific foundation: the Y chromosome.
Mr. Zong, my wonderful ninth-grade biology teacher, prided himself on being far more up-to-date than our textbook, and he made certain that his young charges understood the genetics of human sex determination. He explained that a human cell generally carries 46 chromosomes (not 48, as our outdated textbook claimed), two of which were the sex chromosomes. Females have two X chromosomes, and males have one X and one Y. If ever I needed scientific justification for the notion that males are complete and that females are missing a thing or two, there it was. Boys and girls both had the X, but only boys had a Y.
