The existence of the Platypus, Categories, and Gender

A good friend recently lent me a book, “Why Fish Don’t Exist”, by Lulu Miller. My friend chose the book out of his scholarly interest in animals as religious and philosophical figures. He offered it to me because of my historical interest in odd murder cases. I often rip through books in a day or two, even during a busy work season. This book isn’t a quick read, however. It is a deep work worthy of long pauses and reflection. It’s been over a week, and I’m only halfway done with it.

The book concerns the life and struggles of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist hellbent on uncovering or even imposing order on a chaotic world. Part of Lulu Miller’s journey through the sources of the man’s life takes her to the philosophy of Trenton Merricks, a scholar who refuses to accept human-created names for things as concrete or real in any meaningful way. His own family teases him for insisting that there’s no such thing as a “chair” and he hesitates to try to explain his work to others. It does seem to be a bit of a reach. But Miller allows Merrick to unpack his reasoning, and it all starts to make sense: humans are generally bad at naming things because the thing we name then becomes the name in our minds and we are too stubborn to see when we were wrong and need to start over. One example he gave was the word “slave.” That label makes us believe the person who is a slave is some kind of object, different from or less-than a human. It makes a person into a trade good. That’s why a better term to use is “enslaved person”, to keep straight in our minds that we are referring to a person. A great many people, though, refuse to update their language and act like folks who use “enslaved person” are simply being too sensitive.

The whole topic reminded me of the platypus. You see, by the late eighteenth century, enlightened Europeans were certain they had dutifully categorized everything on the planet. Relying heavily on the work of Carl Linnaues, a Swedish biologist, scholars placed all animals into six classes: mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects, and worms. (Ignore the absence of reptiles for the moment.) The characteristics of the first two classes are quite clear. Mammals have hair and lactate to feed their offspring. Birds have feathers, lay eggs, and can fly.

In 1798, when Europeans received their first platypus specimen, they immediately assumed it was a hoax. Clearly, someone had sewn a duck bill onto a beaver pelt. It took a couple of years for Europeans to accept it was a real animal. It took decades more to convince them that the platypus also lays eggs, as was confirmed in 1884. To top it all off, the platypus is venomous! Clearly, Linnaeus and those who built off his work were incorrect. The Linnaean classes are no longer useful. Time to go back to the drawing board. . .

In the words of the kind soul who wrote Wikipedia entry (“Linnaean Taxonomy”), “The Linnaean system has proven robust.” No one wants to give up a series of classifications once they’ve been established. No one. We tend to cling to those concepts and regularly adapt, update, or expand them, no matter how clunky they become.

I think this is one possible explanation for why so many people can’t wrap their minds around the existence of trans and intersex people. I, like most people, grew up comfortable in the knowledge that all humans were either male or female and that this was established at conception. You might encounter a “tomboy” or a “sissy”, but most people were absolutely one sex or the other.

At some point in my high school years, in the 1980s, I saw a newspaper reference to a person seeking a sex-change operation because the doctors had “made a mistake” at her birth. Curious, I asked my mom what that could mean. My sweet, down-to-earth, very Catholic mom said casually, “Oh, sometimes a baby is born somewhere in between being a boy or a girl and the doctors have to make a choice. Sometimes they get it wrong.” She said this like it was common knowledge, and no big deal.

So . . . we have known for decades that this happens, and instead of rethinking our categories, we doubled down on them. I don’t recall being the least bit traumatized when I learned that sometimes a baby is somewhere in-between boy and girl. And, back then, we were only talking about external and visible gender markers. Furthermore, it means that we have understood for decades that someone might be told their whole lives that they are one thing, but they knew deep down that they were something different. Somehow, many people were ok with that forty years ago. Now, our data is so sophisticated that we are able to discern down to the chromosome how complex a person’s gender is. We can map the neurobiology of a trans person and see the evidence of their being. And yet, with all this medical knowledge that we have, many are publicly outraged and completely confused at the suggestion that maybe humans aren’t as simple as “male” and “female”. They can’t even begin to wonder if maybe we had it wrong before, and that they still have it wrong now. They’re clinging to an outmoded categorization in the face of mounting evidence of its shortcomings.

They simply refuse to acknowledge the platypus.