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- Turn of the century: sex is alterable, organisms are "naturally bisexual", animal experiments serve as proof of concept for applications of this insight
- Interwar period began applying this to people thru nascent field of endocrinology
- This newly conceptualized pasticity was exciting but dangerous: it could resist masculine and feminine as exclusive categories. To avoid such destabilization, plasticity was located in children and situated as a stage of development
- So, this chapter is about The Child; however, it's not really about children, since their individuality is quite erased in the process
- The idea of The Child frequently overlays and determines the actual material life of the child. No wonder that it becomes a node for other concepts to stick to when they lack material reality themselves
- By pointing out that plasticity is a metaphor, I'm not saying that it's false. Metaphors are just how science works. Studying these metaphors gives us insight into the observer, not the object of study.
- So yes, sex and gender are metaphors. And the problem is that they're too broad. They "overdetermine the human form with poorly fitted meaning."
- The endocrine system itself is a metaphor, one that was constructed to distinguish the activity of "chemical messengers" from other nervous system activity.
- Other important metaphors at play for our topic: animality and child development.
- "Since the plasticity of living organisms cannot be isolated as a discrete physiological object, endocrinologists relied on metaphors from the inhuman constituents of the human to animate its coherence as an endocrine system that could be partially manipulated."
- Biological life isĀ *involved inĀ *the metaphors that science uses to engage with them
- Mechanist vs. vitalist debates de l'epoque
- Mechanists believed in "atomism, chemistry, and physics" to account for life, vitalists thought there must be a lil somethin extra that makes the difference between not-alive and alive
- The metaphor of the "organism" was made to split the difference
- Berthold's experiments on chickens: testes masculinize chickens even when implanted somewhere else, suggesting that their effect is felt through the bloodstream and not the nervous system. somehow
- "Chemical communication between ductless glands" forms the basis for endocrinology, and sex is the way to access the endocrine body
- Animal husbandry was a well established science and "sex changes" on animals had been performed, although undertheorized
- This mutability is brought to humans by analogy
- sometimes quite overtly. Darwin talks about latent bisexuality in birds, then drops "there's an analogous thing in humans."
- Important language embedded in this metaphor. Bisexuality isĀ *latentĀ *and can beĀ *reverted to,Ā *as if the change is backwards, or that it's a "stored primitive capacity only actually observed in 'lower' animals'.
- This "latent bisexuality" was later shifted from evolutionary time to developmental time. "Sex would become the form that could bind evolutionary time and individual life span together through a materialist concept of plasticity."
- Ernest Starling (coined "hormone") framed the endocrine system as what binds together the two senses of "sex" (dimorphism AND reproduction thereof)
- Starling names the hormone during experiments on dogs; if you use some special sauce, you can make the pancreas secrete even when there's no stomach acid
- Extrapolates this finding to other bodily functions, proposes it as more fundamental than nervous system (since some organisms have no nervous system but show complex systems anyway)
- Starling ventures to guess that these "hormones" have a lot to do with how sex works
- He doubles down on this as research continues and comes to think that sex is hugely important for the endocrine system in general
- He also posits that it's probably possible to change human sex thruĀ **early** hormonal intervention
- In the 19th century, there was talk of "protoplasm" that was the raw material of nucleogenesis and cell division
- Mechanists predicted that separating a two-cell embryo would lead to half-formed parts, but Hans Driesch showed that they actually formed into complete and separate embryos (albiet smaller ones).
- Some kind of secret sauce... an invisible potential... an undifferentiatedness...
- Ross Granville Harrison @ Johns Hopkins found that frog nerve fiber could grow in liquid even when separated from frog body. Plasticity must be a feature of life at all levels, not just of "organisms" or discrete bodies.
- But we still didn't know how it worked, just what it did. Was it a physical process we couldn't observe yet or was it a spooky metphysical force? We don't have a good metaphor for it yet!!!
- Proposal: our metaphor shall beĀ **child**
- G. Stanley Hall: coined the term "adolescence", noted racist
- He grounded psychic/spiritual development as parallel to physical dev
- Adolescence coded a "strict teleology of child development" where the open-endedness of possible developmental paths demanded intervention to get em On The Right Path
- Growth is unidirectional and parallel to phylogenesis; ascent to "higher" species, races
- Plasticity has agency of its own and might do wacky things if we don't properly cultivate it
- Big proponent of protoplasm via a kind of romantic vitalism
- So, for Hall, how do we do the "cultivation"?
- Do eugenics, first of all. Badness is hereditary.
- Timing is everything. You gotta discipline em young because they'll never be so receptive again.
- Early / Stalled / Late development are all "diseases" endemic to childhood
- These, apparently, lead to "juvenile crime and secret vice"
- Although the overall trend is plastic to fixed, there are specific points where plasticity spikes
- Puberty as a "second birth"
- During puberty, ordinarily hereditary traits can be acquired thru environment
- shout out to Lamarck
- Eugenicists: You're telling me we can give babies chemicals that changes the way they develop? Boy howdy we know EXACTLY what we're doing with this
- Eugen Steinach from Vienna says he can activate your latent manliness and make you younger (by giving you a vasectomy, but don't worry everyone says it's legit) (he made bank off this)
- Steinach: "A 100-percent man is as non-existent as a one-hundred-percent-woman"
- What we gotta do is judiciously steer the bisexual child into a properly monosexed adult
- Steinach and Kammerer's "Climate and Puberty" experiment. This one's wild
- Hypothesis: Sex "plays host to" the interplay of acquisition/heritage predicted by Lamarck
- Rats in warmer climates did puberty faster and had more pronounced secondary sex characteristics, and these characteristics turned out to be heritable, b/c those rats' descendants kept those features even when moved to a colder clime.
- So far so good right? The conclusion they draw from this is abominable and also bonkers: obviously, this effect in rats must explain why non-white people are so dang Sexual
- Plus, when white people go to the tropics, they get all these sexual neuroses. This is probably why
- So what's going on here: we're confirming a racist genetic hierarchy in the realm of endocrinology, and we're binding sex and race together thru plasticity
- Therefore, we can find the points of plasticity to make the working class Whiter and Better for Socialist Reasons
- Meanwhile in California, they were making kids Whiter and Better for non-socialist reasons
- Luther Burbank in Cali decides that the US is the perfect place for the birth of the master race because of all the gene mingling. He emphasizes that plastic periods are crucial for fresh air and sunshine and shit
- Oscar Riddle, uneasy compatriot of Charles Davenport, researches pigeon development hoping to find vectors for "improvement" via an endocrine model dominated by sex
- Successfully "sex-reverses" upon a pigeon using partially synthetic hormones. He wonders if "hermaphrodite" birds are actually just stuck in the middle of this process...
- This is all big news for trans medicine. You gotta understand that when TERFs say that sex is chromosomal and permanently determined from birth, even these eugenics guys 100+ years ago would disagree with them. Latent bisexuality was the basis of everything, and the potential for change is always present in greater or lesser degrees.
- In this time, a developmental timeline had been drawn up that leads sex to phenotype, but it's still problematic since that plasticity can take all kinds of non-normative forms
- Allen Ezra asks in the 20s "Is any human being completely sexed?" echoing Steinach
- "Normative bisexuality" has passed, along with its more overt eugenic baggage. Post-WWII, violent forms of race hygiene / eugenics are frowned upon, but its sneakiest forms persist for sure.
- "There is no meaningful difference between "positive and negative eugenics", andthe historical binding of race to reproduction remains largely unchallenged in science today"
- In the historiography of eugenics, the fact that practitioners used The Child as a guiding metaphor has been overlooked
- The child-metaphor, born in eugenics, persists into 20th century endocrinology and is what allows the actual material children to slip out of the picture
- The ideas we have *about* children have material impact on actual childrens' bodies
- /// ostentation
- "The Child" is a living figure, weirdly. "Children became the problem they represented."
- The Child as a structuring metaphor for plasticity developing into form proved unruly, since Actual Children Exist and can develop unpredictably and/or contest the metaphor from their own subjectivity
- As intersex and trans kids enter the medical literature in the 20th century, doctors find themselves a little baffled by the diversity they see, eugenicists panic about degeneracy
- Plasticity could not be tamed, and it provided patients with surprising kinds of agency