March 2021

What do the Duck-billed Platypus (1) and the retail guru,Mary Portas (2) have in common, you may well ask. The answer is that both have defied the categories Normal/Abnormal that society routinely imposes.

Anyone seeing the title of Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic -The Feminine Mystique(1) for the first time – could be forgiven for thinking that she is actuallypromoting some kind of strategy of perfumed seduction… but far from it.

Beth G. (a pseudonym) had eight miscarriages before she and her partner considered in vitro fertilization (IVF). The couple also discussed adoption but ultimately opted for a surrogate in India.

At the end of 2015 China announced the end of its One Child Family policy , established some 35 years ago.

Curvology purports to take us on “a scientific journey into the evolution of women’s bodies and what that means for their brains”(2). Engagingly, David Bainbridge attempts to diffuse the unease or scepticism generated by the title by stating his credentials and limitations for this task upfront; ” I am a reproductive biologist and a vet, I have a zoology degree…I am a forty-something Caucasian male…I could be argued to be a dispassionate observer or a biased voyeur”. Each reader will judge for herself or himself where on this spectrum the Mr Bainbridge lies.

South African athlete, Caster Semenya, won the 800 meters at the 2009 Athletics World Championships in spectacular time, and immediately fell foul of the “gender” police at International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). After testing, not in fact for gender identity, but for “biological variables” they pronounced, with their usual finesse and sensitivity, that “She is a woman but maybe not 100%”. This was perhaps the first such incident to receive wide public notice.

Stephen Greenblatt, Pulitzer Prize winner and a specialist in early modern literature, explores in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve the enduring fascination of the Genesis story despite or because of the fact that different versions are open to a variety of interpretations.