TED日本語 - アリス・ドレジャー: 性差は解剖学的宿命か?

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TED日本語 - アリス・ドレジャー: 性差は解剖学的宿命か?

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性差は解剖学的宿命か?

Is anatomy destiny?

アリス・ドレジャー

Alice Dreger

内容

アリス・ドレジャーは結合双生児や半陰陽者など身体に問題を抱える人たちに関わる仕事をしています。体にまつわる区別の中でも、男と女の区別はあいまいなものが多いと彼女は言います。そこから生じるのは、なぜ我々は解剖学的な特徴を宿命としてしまうのか、という大きな問題です。

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SCRIPT

Script

I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby -- okay? So two couples each conceiving one baby. Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, because if you spend all that time imagining that conception, you're not going to listen to me. So just imagine that for a moment. And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg. And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg. Both are viable; both take off. We'll come back to these people later.

So I wear two hats in most of what I do. As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy -- meaning human bodies, animal bodies -- how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate -- or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate -- for people who are patients of doctors. In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins -- two people within one body. Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism -- so people who are much shorter than typical. And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex -- so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. And as a general term, we can use the term intersex for this.

Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. And so in the fetal life the testes are pumping out testosterone. But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone. And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. When the child is born, she looks like a girl. She is a girl. She is raised as a girl. And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here. And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she actually has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome.

Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not. Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. They're in the back of our body. And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. Most females like me -- I believe myself to be a typical female -- I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up but I think I'm probably typical -- most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. So sex is really complicated; it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum -- in some ways, they can be all over the place.

Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinzed, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. And he was born looking like a boy -- nobody suspected anything. And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems actually from menstruating internally, that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female internally.

Okay, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. And we're not exactly sure why that happens.

So sex can come in lots of different varieties. The reason that children with these kinds of bodies -- whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type -- are often normalized by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories. Or system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, is to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. And when we're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different, it startles us in terms of those categorizations.

So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. Well you can imagine how startling then it is when you have children that are born who are two people inside of one body. Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year the South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?" And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test.

In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. And it's not just in terms of sex. It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed.

As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only really by a few nucleotides? And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic.

So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture today, in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. We have very difficult conversations nowadays -- probably not out in the open as much as within medicine -- about the question of when somebody's dead. In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead. At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. If it stopped twitching, you bury them. But today, we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings. And as a consequence, we're stuck with having to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before.

Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy. I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. And it makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you that I'm a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great. I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers.

The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why. What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright. They had a concept of blue blood. They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth. The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was all men are created equal. They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do.

Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together. And that was democracy growing up, but it was also science growing up at the same time. And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in a concept of a naturalistic world. They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright.

They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God. They don't talk about God and God's nature. They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights movement of the future. They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great.

So what happened years afterward? What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc., etc." And women successfully argued that. Next came the successful Civil Rights movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?" We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights movement saying, "I am a man." Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. We see the same thing with the disability rights movement.

The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. Now mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture. For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. I don't want to say five-year-olds should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them and do they have meaning.

So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1,1980. Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1,1980. Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does -- the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. Henry has to wait for all of that, not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, except in terms of when he was born.

We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male -- although I haven't told you that he's the XY one -- by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. Mary, meanwhile, can not in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry. Henry can marry in every state a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states a woman.

So we have these anatomical categories that persist that are in many ways problematic and questionable. And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart? I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time it kind of feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. So where do we go? It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "Well, we have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere." But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position.

So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you do have a Y chromosome. Now in practice they don't actually test people for their chromosomes. But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome.

If we look at one of the founding fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech. He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character," moving beyond anatomy. And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." But in practice, how do you do it? How do you judge people based on the content of character? I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know.

So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? It turns out to be really difficult. And part of me also wonders, what if content of character turns out to be something that's scannable in the future -- able to be seen with an fMRI? Do we really want to go there? I'm not sure where we go.

What I do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy. We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, and I think we would do a good job in the future. We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live.

We don't have that kind of situation. I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with -- a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he was going to do this surgery -- this was a very high-risk surgery -- his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?" The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. So I think we have to be in the lead.

Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the fathers. And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies, particularly when we have people thinking in groups. Now for years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex difference research. And one of the things that I've been really interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average -- not everyone, but on average -- are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are basically vulnerable within the group. And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation on our hands.

Years ago, when I was in graduate school,one of my graduate advisers who knew I was interested in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, as I still do -- asked a really strange question. He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism." And I thought, "Well that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism." But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable.

So whereas the fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of, not just how to protect, but how to care for each other. And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body, in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other.

Thank you.

(Applause)

二組のカップルが 1979年の中頃 まったく同じ日 同じ瞬間に 赤ちゃんを授かったとします 二組共 赤ちゃんができたのです 受胎した過程は あまり考えないでください 考えすぎると うわの空になりますから 想像を少しだけしてください 一組のカップルでは Y染色体をもつ精子が 卵子のX染色体と 出会うとします もう1つのカップルでは X染色体をもつ精子が 卵子のX染色体と出会います どちらも生存可能としましょう この話は また後ほど

わたしは二つの事柄に 携わっています 一つは 解剖学の歴史です 専門は歴史なので この場合は 今までの人間や動物の体の扱われ方を 研究しています 体液の扱い方や 体という概念 体に対する考え方などです もう一つは 患者の代弁をする 活動をしています 医者にかかる患者のために 尽力しています 今まで活動してきたのは 社会において逸脱するような 体型をもつ方々の活動です 例えば 結合双生児 二人の体が結合している人たちや 小人症の人たち つまり 極めて身長の低い人たちです 少数派の性別をもつ人たちの 取り組みをしてきました 標準的な男性 もしくは 女性の体型をもたない人たちです 半陰陽と呼ばれているもので

様々な状態があります 標準的な男性や 女性ではない例を いくつかあげてみましょう 例えば XY染色体をもつ人のY染色体上にある SRY遺伝子は 胎児のときに 性腺から 精巣をつくる指示を出します 精巣から男性ホルモンが分泌されますが この個人の場合は 男性ホルモン受容体が欠けているため 体が男性ホルモンを感知せず 反応しません これはアンドロゲン不応症と呼ばれています 男性ホルモンがどんどん出ても まったく感知しません その結果 体は女性の体のように 発達します 出生時は女児のようなので 女の子として育てられます 多くの場合 思春期になり 発育して 胸が大きくなっても 初潮がないために 何かがおかしいと気づきます 検査をすると 卵巣や子宮の代わりに 精巣があって Y染色体をもっていることがわかります

ここで重要なのは この人は本来男性だと思うかもしれませんが そうではないのです 女性も男性も 副腎という器官が 体の後ろ側にあります 副腎はアンドロゲン つまり 男性ホルモンを分泌します わたしの染色体構造は 標準的だと思いますが わたしを含むほとんどの女性は アンドロゲンの影響を受けています アンドロゲンを分泌し 反応する結果 わたしたちのような女性の脳は アンドロゲン不応症で 精巣をもって生まれた女性よりも より多くのアンドロゲンに さらされることになります 性別とは非常に複雑なので 半陰陽の人たちは性別の中間にいると 位置づけることはできません

他の事例です 数年前 19歳の男性から電話がありました 男児として生まれ 育てられ 彼女がいて その女の子と性交渉もあり 男性として生きてきたのに 卵巣と子宮があることがわかったのです 先天性副腎過形成と呼ばれるもので 彼は その極度のケースでした 彼はXX染色体をもち 子宮にいる間 彼の副腎はあまりに活発だったので 男性ホルモン環境をつくりあげてしまいました その結果 男性器が形成され 脳は より典型的な 男性ホルモン要素に反応していたのです 出生時はまるで男児で 誰も疑いはしませんでした それが19歳になったとき 医学的問題を抱え始めたのです 体内で月経がはじまり 内面的には女性だと医師がつきとめました

では 手短に 半陰陽の別の例を出します XX染色体をもつ人に 卵精巣が発達する人がいます 卵巣組織が精巣組織で 覆われているのです 理由は完全にはわからないものの

性別とは 多様なものになり得るのです このような体をもつ子どもたちが 小人症であっても 結合双生児であっても 半陰陽者であっても しばしば 外科的な 整形手術を行う理由は 健康が向上するからでは ありません 彼らは 極めて健康であることが多いのです 様々な手術をすることが多い理由は 社会的分類があることや 体の特徴で アイデンティティが決まるという 概念に基づいているためです 女性であるには 女性の特性がなくてはならない 黒人であるには 家系がアフリカ人の体でなければならない 我々は そんな概念をもっています その概念があまりにも単純すぎるため きわめて差異のある体を見ると そのような分類ができなくなり 戸惑ってしまうのです

アメリカは個人主義という 理想主義的な 概念のもとに築かれています 体ひとつで 二人の子どもが生まれた場合 どれだけ戸惑うのか 想像できるでしょう 最近の論争では去年 南アフリカのランナー キャスター・セメンヤが世界陸上で 性別を疑われました わたしはジャーナリストから電話で質問されました “キャスター・セメンヤの性別を 判別する検査は どの検査ですか?” そんな検査はないと答えました

性別とは複雑であると わかっている今 自然界は男女の区別や 男 半陰陽 女の区別をしないことを 我々は認めなくてはいけません 線を引いているのは私たちです 私たちには 科学が進歩すればするほど 認めなくてはいけないものがあります アイデンティティの分類として 位置づけられたものは 体の構造を分類する揺るぎないものだと 思われていたのに 予想以上に曖昧だったのです 性別だけではなく 人種に関しても 用語が意図する以上に ずっと複雑です

やっかいな問題は多々あります 例えば 人間とチンパンジーは DNAの少なくとも95%が 同じです 少ししか変わりがないという事実から 何を考えればいいのでしょうか 科学が より発達すればするほど より困惑する域へと近づき 単純な分類が あまりにも単純であることを 認めなくてはいけなくなります

これは あらゆる場面で見られます 例えば 我が国アメリカでは 命の始まりと終わりに関する 論争がおきています 胎児とは別の権利があるという点から どの時点で人が人間になるのかを決めるのか 難しい対話がなされています また 人はいつ死亡するのかという問題も 医学界ほど広がりは見せていませんが 難しい問題です 人がいつ死亡したのかという問題は 昔はこれほどまで難しくはありませんでした 鼻の下を羽根で触ったとき ぴくっと動けば 埋葬せず 動きが止まれば 埋葬したものですが 今は 生命をつかさどる器官を 取り出して 他者へと 移植するようになりました その結果 人の死にまつわる論争が 繰り広げられるのです これは 昔のような単純な分類では通用しない 非常に難しい状況をつくりあげます

細かく分類することで わたしのような人間が 喜ぶと思うかもしれません わたしたちは特異な体を持つ人々のために活動をしていますが このようなことは心配の種です このような分類が想像以上に 不安定であることが 民主主義の立場から見て 気がかりです 気がかりになることを説明しましょう わたしは アメリカ合衆国建国の父たちの大ファンです 彼らは人種差別や性差別をしました けれども 立派な人たちだったのです 彼らは とても勇敢で 行動も革新的でした わたしは彼らが題材のミュージカル「1776年」をよく見ています 音楽が好きなのではありません 建国の父たちがもたらした 1776年の出来事があるからです

建国の父たちは 体に対する 最初の活動家だと思います その理由に 彼らは体の構造の概念を捨て その後200年にわたって続いた 革新的なものに代えました ご存知のとおり 建国の父たちは君主制を受け付けませんでした 君主制は非常に単純な 体の概念に基づいていました 旧世界の君主たちに DNAの概念はありませんでしたが 生得権の概念はもっていました 貴族の血統です 彼らの考え方は 先祖から子孫へと 血統によって 政治の権力を 受け継ぐべき というものでした 建国の父たちは その概念を拒否し 体の概念と取り代えたのです それは 人間は皆 平等だというものでした 彼らが定めたものは 重要なのは 体の共通性であって 違いではないというものでした それは非常に革新的でした

当時は啓蒙時代だったことも 影響していました 啓蒙時代には民主主義と 科学の二つが 同時に発展していました 建国の父たちを見ると明らかですが 多くは科学に関心をもっており 自然主義的な世界の概念に 関心を寄せていました 彼らは超自然的解釈から遠のき 権力という超自然的な概念を拒絶しました 生得権という 曖昧な概念のために伝わっていた権力です

彼らは自然主義の概念に移行していきました アメリカ独立宣言では 自然法と 自然の神の法に触れています 神や神の自然ではありません 我々が誰なのか 自然の力を使って説明しています その中で 彼らは体の共通性に関する 概念をもたらしました そうすることで見事に 後の公民権活動を 確立していました その意図はなくても 結果的にそうなったのです

その後 どうなったかと言うと 選挙権を得ようとしていた 女性たちは 建国の父たちが掲げた 体の共通性は違いよりも重要だという 概念を用いて 言いました “子宮や卵巣があるという差は 選挙権や公民権や不動産の獲得を 妨げるには 十分な理由にはならない” 女性たちの抗議は 見事な成果を出しました 次に公民権活動に成果が出ました “わたしは女ではないのか?” と語った ソジャーナ・トゥルースなどが代表的です 公民権活動のデモ行進では “わたしは男だ”と言った 男性がいたり 体の違いではなく共通性を 訴えて 成果を出した 有色人種の人たちがいました 同じことが障害者権利の活動にも見られます

もちろん 問題があります 共通性に目を向け始めながら なぜ ある一定の区分を保つのか 問い始めなくてはいけません 解剖学的に区別が必要なものも 中にはあります 例えば 魚には 人間と同様の権利は与えたくありません 解剖学的見地を捨て去れと言っているのではありません 5歳の子どもが性交渉や 結婚を許可されるべきではないと思います 解剖学的な区別も 納得できるものは維持すべきでしょう でも それを選別し その理由と意味を 割り出すことが難しいのです

先ほどの 同時期に宿った 二人の話に戻りましょう 1979年中頃の 同じ日に宿った二人がいます その一人のメアリーは 予定日より3か月早く 1980年1月1日に生まれました もう一人のヘンリーは 1980年4月1日に生まれました 予定日よりも 3か月早く生まれたため メアリーは あらゆる権利を ヘンリーよりも3か月早く手に入れます 性交渉や選挙や 飲酒できる権利です ヘンリーは生物学的に 年齢は変わりありませんが 生まれた時期のために 待たなくてはいけません

他にも権利に関するおかしなことがあります 男であると推測されたヘンリーは XY染色体をもっていますが 男であると推測されるために 兵役に服することになります メアリーはその心配は要りません 一方で メアリーは ヘンリーが すべての州で得られる 結婚する権利が得られません ヘンリーは どの州でも女性と結婚できますが メアリーは幾つかの州でしか 女性と結婚できません

このように 体の構造による分類が さまざまな面で 問題を引き起こしています 問題は 体を観察する上で 科学が発展する中 体に基づいた民主主義が 崩れ始めるかもしれないと 認めざるを得ないとき どうするのか という点です 科学を手放しはしたくありませんが 科学の支えを失うような気が 時々するのです さて どうなるでしょうか 我々の文化では 実用的な姿勢が見られます “どこかで線引きをしなくてはいけないから 線引きをしているのだ” と でも おかしな状況に陥る人も多いのです

テキサスではあるとき 男と結婚する人は Y染色体がないことを意味し 女と結婚する人は Y染色体があることを意味すると決定づけました 実際に染色体を調べることはしませんが これも非常に変な話です なぜなら最初に紹介した話は アンドロゲン不応症についてだからです

近代民主主義の父の一人である マーティン・ルーサー・キングが スピーチの中で解決法を示しています 肌の色で人を判断せずに 体という枠を超えて 人格で判断するべきだ と 良い考えだと言いたいですが 実際には どうやるのでしょうか どのように 人格を基に判断できるのでしょうか また それが人間の権利を 与えるべき方法なのでしょうか なぜなら ある人間よりも社会福祉を受けるに値する犬を わたしは何匹か知っていると 認めざるを得ないからです また わたしが知っている ある40歳の人よりも 性交渉に関して知識があり 賢くて 慎重な判断ができる犬がいるだろうと言いたいです

さあ どうやって人格の問題を 操作できるでしょうか これは非常に難しいのですが わたしは こう思う事があります もしも未来に 人格がfMRI計測できると わかったら どうでしょう? そんなことを望むでしょうか? わたしにはわかりませんが

重要だと感じるのは 民主主義の問題を考えるとき アメリカが 先導するという考えです アメリカは民主主義の取り組みに成果をあげ 今後も貢献できると思います 私たちにイランが抱える状況はありません そこでは同性愛者の男性は 殺害される危険性がありますが 性転換をするならば 命は助かります

アメリカでは そのようなことはありません 数年前に話をした外科医がいた状況が アメリカにはなくて嬉しく思います 切断手術をするために結合双生児を連れて来た外科医は 自分を売り込むことが目的でもありました その医師と電話で話したときに リスクの高い手術だったので なぜ 手術をするのか尋ねました その国では その子どもが辛い目にあうので 手術をしなくてはいけない ということだったため 切断手術の代わりに 政治亡命を 検討したことはあるかと尋ねました 人々がありのままでいられるように アメリカは多大な可能性を 提供してきました 我々が先頭に立たなくてはいけません

最後に 提案をしたいと思います 建国の父たちの話題ばかりでしたが 母たちがもっと関与していた場合 民主主義はどのようなものだったのか 可能性を考えたいのです フェミニストの立場から 少し急進的なことを言うと 異なる体から生まれる 異なる洞察が あるかもしれません 特にグループで考える場合です 半陰陽に興味をもって何年も経ちますが 性別の違いの研究にも興味があります 興味あるものの一つに 考え方や影響の及ぼし方における 男女の違いがあります 異文化研究からわかっているのは 女性は皆ではありませんが 平均的に 複雑な社会関係に 注意を払い その中でも弱い立場の人たちの 面倒をみる傾向があります その点を考慮すると 手中に興味深い状況があるのです

何年も前 大学院にいた頃 フェミニズムに関心をよせる私に ある先生が 変な質問をしてきました “フェミニズムのどこが 女性的なのか 教えてくれないか” 馬鹿げた質問だと思いました フェミニズムとは性別に関する固定観念を打ち消していくことであり 女性的なものなど 一切ありません でも より考えていくうちに 女性的なものがあるかもしれないと 思いました 平均して女性の脳が男性の脳と違う点が あるかもしれません 複雑な社会関係や 弱い立場にいる人たちに より多くの気を使う何かです

建国の父たちが国から人々を守る方法を 模索するのに気を使ったことを見ると この概念に より多くの女性を送り込めば 人々を守る方法だけではなく お互いに世話をすることが 可能になるでしょう それが将来に必要なものかもしれません 体を超えた民主主義を考えるというのは アイデンティティの点では 個人の体は それほど重視せずに 関係性を重視するということです より完璧な国をつくろうとしながら お互いのためを考えるのです

ありがとう

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