Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ be spotted by a smaller than usual comb on top of their heads and particularly droopy red wattles underneath their jaws.

      The question for Berthold was: why?

      He took the testes from normal cockerels and transplanted them into capons to see what happened. Remarkably, he found the capons started to look and sound like cocks again. The testes were surviving inside them, and growing. It was a startling result, but nobody at the time understood the reasons for it. What was it in the testes that was helping the capons seemingly come back from castration?

      Progress came slowly. In 1891 another unusual experiment, this time in France by university professor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, finally began to get to the root of the mystery. He suspected that male testes might contain some kind of unknown substance that influenced masculinity. Attempting to prove his hypothesis the hard way, he repeatedly injected himself with a concoction made out of blood, semen and juices from the crushed testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. He claimed (although his findings were never replicated) that this cocktail increased his strength, stamina and mental clarity.

      The British Medical Journal reported Brown-Séquard’s findings with excitement, describing the substance he had found as the ‘pentacle of rejuvenescence’. Later, researchers carrying out similar experiments using female juices from guinea pig ovaries claimed to see a parallel feminising effect. Over time, the secret juices inside all these male and female gonads were understood to be a specific set of chemicals, named ‘hormones’.

      We now know that sex hormones, found in the gonads, are just a handful of the fifty or more hormones produced across the human body. We can’t live without them. They are the grease to our wheels. They’ve been described as chemical messengers, delivering memos throughout the body to make sure it does the things it’s supposed to do, including growing and keeping a stable temperature. From insulin to thyroxine, they helpfully regulate the functions of all sorts of organs. The sex hormones regulate sexual development and reproduction. The two main female ones are oestrogen and progesterone. Oestrogen is what causes a woman’s breasts to develop, among other things, while progesterone helps her body prepare for pregnancy. Male sex hormones are known as androgens, of which the most well-known is testosterone.

      Even before birth, sex hormones play a crucial role in determining how male or female a person looks. In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all foetuses start out physically female. ‘The default blueprint is female,’ says Richard Quinton, consultant endocrinologist at hospitals in Newcastle upon Tyne. About seven weeks after the egg has been fertilised, testosterone produced by the testes begins physically turning the male foetuses into boys. ‘Testosterone says: “Make me externally male,”’ adds Quinton. Meanwhile another hormone stops this freshly male foetus from growing a uterus, fallopian tubes and other female parts. As we grow older, hormones again play a role in puberty and beyond.

      It’s not surprising, then, that the discovery of sex hormones was one of the most important milestones in understanding what it means to be a woman or a man.

      According to work done by social researcher Nelly Oudshoorn, now based at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, hormone research sent waves of excitement through the pharmaceutical industry in the 1920s. Suddenly, here was a way of scientifically understanding masculinity and femininity. With some effort, drug companies believed they could isolate and industrialise the production of sex hormones to make people more masculine or feminine.

      Endocrinology – the new and controversial study of hormones – was turning into big business. Tonnes of animal ovaries and testes were harvested, and thousands of litres of horse urine collected, as scientists desperately searched for the chemicals that defined what it meant to be male or female. The director of Dutch pharmaceutical company Organon described the process of isolating hormones as ‘finding gold in the urine of pregnant mares’.

      By the end of the decade, treatments based on sex hormones were becoming available, and there appeared to be no limit to what they promised. In the archives of London’s Wellcome Library, which keeps an enormous trove of historical medical documents, I find an advertising pamphlet from around 1929, produced by the Middlesex Laboratory of Glandular Research in London. It proudly announces that it’s finally possible to replenish the ‘fire of life’, to cure impotence, frigidity and sterility in men using ‘the therapeutic utilisation of the sex hormones of fresh glands removed from healthy animals, such as the bullock, ram, stallion, ape’. Treatments containing oestrogen made similar claims aimed at women, promising to cure irregular periods and symptoms of the menopause.

      Of course, hormone treatments couldn’t possibly live up to all this hype. But they weren’t just a fad either. They really did seem to work for certain symptoms, even if the evidence was only anecdotal. An article in the Lancet in 1930 reports a male patient who had been given testosterone saying that he thought ‘his muscles were firmer and he felt more pugnacious; he nearly had a fight with his workmate’. Another man, aged sixty, was able ‘to play thirty-six holes of golf in a day without undue fatigue’. Testosterone became associated with what were believed to be manly qualities, such as aggression, physical power, high intellect and virility.

      The same research was done on women using oestrogen. Another article in the Lancet in 1931, the researcher Jane Katherine Seymour has noted, connected the female hormones to femininity and childbearing. Under their influence, it also said, women ‘would tend to develop a more passive and emotional, and less rational, attitude towards life’.

      In the very early days of endocrinology, assumptions about what it meant to be masculine or feminine came from the Victorians. With the discovery of hormones, scientists had a new way to explain the stereotypes. According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University, Rhode Island, the prominent British gynaecologist William Blair-Bell, for instance, believed that a woman’s psychology depended on the ‘state of her internal secretions’ keeping her in ‘her normal sphere of action’. At that time, this meant being a wife and mother. If she stepped outside these social boundaries, scientists like him implied it must be because her hormone levels were out of whack.

      In other words, according to researchers, sex hormones were doing more than just affecting reproductive behaviour. They were responsible for making men manlier, by the standards of the time, and women more womanly, again by the standards of the time. Reasoning in this way, scientists assumed that the sex hormones belonged uniquely to each sex. Male hormones – androgens – could only be produced by men, and female hormones – oestrogen and progesterone – could only be produced by women. After all, if they were the key to manliness and womanliness, why would it be any other way?

      An interesting experiment in 1921 hinted at the possibility that all the assumptions scientists were making about sex hormones might be wrong.

      A Viennese gynaecologist revealed that treating a female rabbit with an extract from an animal’s testes changed the size of her ovaries. Later, to their shock, scientists began to realise that there were significant levels of androgens in women and of oestrogen in men. In 1934, the German-born gynaecologist Bernhard Zondek, while studying stallion urine, reported on ‘the paradox that the male sex is recognised by a high oestrogenic hormone content’. In fact, a horse’s testes turned out to be one of the richest sources of oestrogen ever found.

      Just when endocrinologists thought they were getting a grip on what sex hormones did, this threw everything into confusion. And it raised an interesting dilemma: if oestrogen and testosterone determined femaleness and maleness, why did both sexes naturally have both? What did it even mean to be born male or female?

      For a while, some scientists thought that female sex hormones might be turning up in men because they had eaten them. This bizarre ‘food hypothesis’ was ditched when it gradually became clear that male and female gonads can in fact produce СКАЧАТЬ